In Tune with Community: The Swidler Family and Radio Carlisle

Eric Swidler is proud to oversee the group of radio stations that his father has maintained in Carlisle for over fifty years. Radio Carlisle under Swidler leadership will celebrate sixty plus years in 2025. In 1960, Eric’s father, Harold Z. Swidler, enjoyed listening to radio as much as anyone. That year Sony introduced its first transistor radio. Only two years before, Harold was in ROTC uniform, straight off the track at NYU. Music kept the twirl in youthful feet as Harold visited near his alma mater, William Penn High School (Harrisburg), stopping at Carlisle’s Army War College (1958). Census takers recognized how popular radio had become in the thirty years since its’ presence in private homes was first noted in the 1930 census.

Radio began a slow trek to popularity in the US during the 1920’s.
Victor Records released “Turkey in the Straw” in 1923.
Radio news broadcasts were initially in Morse Code.

The radio was still a fledgling invention when the 1930 census was taken but it was catching on with increasing reliance and pleasure during the Great Depression and the years of WWII. It was common place by the time Harold Swidler was pitching in to help a friend and became co-owner, with his brother Norman (1938-2020), in 1965 of what would become known as Radio Carlisle. Singer Charley Pride had begun his rise up the charts the year before. This was not Harold and Norman’s first venture in Cumberland County: the brothers had already provided the community with their Swid Brothers retail business in Carlisle, Shippensburg, and in Harrisburg, a possibility that Harold foresaw when he noticed a vacant building while visiting the Army War College.¹

Families throughout the area have for many years enjoyed Harold’s creation of what is now known as the Carlisle Sports Emporium.² Harold’s 5k Swidler Invitational offered local runners competition events during the rhythms of the 1960s - 1980s. It was open to students at all levels of their education, supporting the interest of a wide variety of age groups in local and regional high schools and colleges. Both Harold and Norman had themselves run track during high school. Harold won several local, state and Division III championships during junior and high school, later participating in NYU’s nationally recognized 1956 NCAA Championship Cross Country Team.

While US census takers were making their first record of privately owned radio sets in 1930, Harold’s parents, Henry and Reva (Aronovitc) Swidler, were young people in then culturally vibrant Vilna, Poland (later, Lithuania) who were about start raising their family there.³ The town was decimated during the war. Harold and Reva’s son Norman (1938-2020), who would eventually settle in Shippensburg, was nine years old when the family became immigrant survivors of the Holocaust, arriving on American shores in about 1948. NATO was formed in 1949.

The Swidler surname is actually first found here at an even earlier date. As a result, a distant relative within Harold’s family tree is the distinguished attorney Joseph Charles Swidler (1907 Illinois -1997 Maryland), former chairman, as of 1961, of the Federal Power Commission (FPC) during Kennedy’s administration. During Roosevelt’s early days in office, Joseph C. Swidler was with the Dept. of Interior (1930s). He served as general counsel and secretary to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a New Deal agency. Joseph’s father, Abraham Swidler, was born, some family researchers suggest, on August 15, 1878 in Vilna, the same town in which had been born the father of his cousins, Harold and Norman and their sister Linda. Harold and Norman would go into several ventures together, including radio. The news they listened to would likely sometimes have made references to attorney Swidler and his achievements.⁴

Carlisle’s oldest radio station, WLXW (later WHYL), enjoyed its first full year of broadcasts in 1949.
During that year, RCA introduced 7” vinyl records; 45 rpm records were also introduced.
WERD, the first black-owned radio station, began broadcasting in Atlanta, GA.
Joe DiMaggio led the NY Yankees to win their 12^th World Series.

Harold Swidler was also, in his own way, a groundbreaker. He brought FM radio to Carlisle and he broadcast local football games, in addition to national baseball games and the more common community news. The Swidler family and its descendants were to make cultural and intellectual contributions to each of the communities they came to call home, including by helping to bring facemasks to Pennsylvania during the early days of COVID. In 1962, the same year his son was born, Harold contemplated his relationship to the world of radio. Meanwhile, Dolly Parton recorded her first single on a major label. Johnny Cash debuted “Ring of Fire” during the following year.

In a few years, Pierson K. Miller offered Harold “a little office in one of his buildings” where he would broadcast WIOO, which he and his younger brother Norman now owned.⁵ Now on North Hanover Street near Sunnyside Restaurant, the office started on the second floor of the Odd Fellows building at 33 W. High Street. Eventually, Harold would succeed in bringing FM broadcasting to Carlisle.

If you cannot imagine a world without news and traffic reports, neither can Harold Swindler or his son Eric. In affiliation with ABC News Radio Pennsylvania their stations air the news hourly, a rare occurrence in the radio business. Radio Carlisle broadcasts Country Gold Classics on WIOO (Wioo) RED 102.3 / WRDD 1480 (formerly WEEO) FM & AM (designed for a Shippensburg audience), as well as broadcasting on WHYL 102.9 FM, the latter first airing in December 1948 as WLXW.

Eric is a graduate of Carlisle High School (1980) and Towson University (1984). He and his wife, Monica, raised their son in Carlisle. Since Eric got into Carlisle Radio, he has and continues to serve as CEO, Vice President, and Operations Manager.  His father, Harold Swidler, continues as President. While Eric was a youngster enjoying visits to his father’s radio station, the US 1970 census became the last to note ownership of radio sets in private homes.

During that year the Original Carter Family were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Johnny Cash and June Carpenter debuted “If I Were a Carpenter”. Dolly Parton’s version of Jimmy “the Singing Brakeman” Rodgers’ song “Mule Skinner Bones” climbed to no. 3 on Billboard Country Music Charts. About ten years later, her “9 to 5” would be at the top of the charts (1980).

The 1980’s heard Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream”, Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive”. Dolly had been just three years old when, in 1949, Country Western Music changed its title to Country Music. When Dolly started climbing the charts it was with a song by the Father of Country Music: Jimmy Rodgers had already performed on WWNC Radio (Asheville, NC) by the time of his 1931 tour with Will Rogers (no “d”) on the heels of the initial census noting private ownership of radio sets.

The first radio station in Pennsylvania was KDKA in Pittsburgh, an outgrowth of Westinghouse
which survived the 1917-1919 federal ban on civilian radio during WWI
by receiving permission to operate research radio transmitters for wireless radiotelegraphy.
It was one of the first two commercially licensed radio stations in the world,
broadcasting presidential election results in November 1920,
just a few months after Detroit’s WWJ gave its initial news broadcast in August.
Wisconsin’s WHA had already been delivering the weather in Morse Code for four years (1916).⁶

Thanks to the Swidlers, listeners can hear or stream Radio Carlisle whether they’re in Cumberland, Perry, Dauphin, Adams, or York County. The broadcasts offer variations of traditional country music from the ‘50s to the ‘90s keep up the foot stomping on two of the three stations. The third station, WHYL is devoted to the “Oldies” of the ‘60s and to another kind of foot work - the running of bases in baseball, through the Baltimore Orioles Radio Network. The evolution of radio and computers meant that they would become intertwined and one no longer needs a radio set, just internet access.

The upbeat atmosphere among the thirteen employees at Radio Carlisle’s offices on North Hanover Street is refreshing. For one WIOO (Wiio) broadcaster, Ray Thomas, working at Radio Carlisle as he has for over four decades, fulfills one of his greatest desires. Ray taught himself ham radio as a boy and began to perfect his broadcasting voice while in college at Shippensburg University. He started with WIOO in 1975.

Free Space is the term that early defined radio and a term particularly poignant when considering the Swindler family.⁷ Television, or “radio broadcast pictures”, was just part of what was to evolve from the initial development of radio. When inventor Lee de Forest, one of the founding fathers of the Electronic Age, succeeded in transmitting the music of a telharmonium electric organ from his laboratory station in NYC in early 1907 he could not have imagined the sounds yet to come. The world had to wait another twelve years for the first clear transmission of human speech (station 9XM) in 1919. This feat was to allow for the convenient transmission of the popular songs and monologues heard from Radio Carlisle today.

As Eric Swidler said, speaking of Wioo,
“You know a country song is a classic when you can sing almost every word …
Well, we’re the radio station you can sing along with.”⁸

The Cumberland Valley Football Hall of Fame honored his father, Harold Z. Swidler, with their 2018 Special Recognition Award in gratitude for airing CV football games on WHYL and “spearheading a return to radio for the Carlisle Thundering Herd and Shippensburg Greyhounds football teams too.” A devoted sports fan, Harold personally funded his 5K Swidler Invitational during the 1980s. “It all starts with … Radio Carlisle and the Swidler family at the helm.”⁹