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a grand scale. The key, he felt, was to create an FM radio for the car, which he developed with Raytheon engineer Ed Brooks and marketed to listeners on the handful of FM stations around the country. Hastings became somewhat famous for this, and after a few further developments and inventions (including a pocket FM transistor radio) he decided to jump into the world of radio station ownership himself.
    Pouring his own funds into the project and obtaining additional money from several financial backers, Hastings formed the General Broadcasting Corporation, later to be known as Concert Network Inc. The company expanded rapidly, acquiring a handful of powerful FM radio stations up and down the East Coast. According to Ron Della Chiesa, “His dream was to create a network of stations that would program classical music all over the country on FM . Up to that point, classical music was on AM ; you couldn’t get the full frequency of it. [But] when FM came in, it was like a third dimension; you really got the depth and sound.” Hastings acquired and then changed the call letters of each station, putting a “ CN ” in each to designate Concert Network. “So, beginning his dream were these stations: WNCN in New York City, WHCN in Hartford, WXCN in Providence and [for a time] he had one on Mount Washington, WMTW .” Added to this list was an additional property in Riverside, Long Island, renamed WRCN and, of course, WBCN in Boston.

    Mitch Hastings struggled to keep classical music WBCN afloat. Photo by Sam Kopper.
    WBCN began broadcasting classical music on T. Mitchell Hastings’s birthday in 1958; and so his dream took flight. The idea was, as Hastings told Alan Wolmark twenty years later in Record World Magazine , “to go forward and develop FM broadcasting into the great public service it should be.” Hastings organized his network of stations into what he termed the “Golden Chain.” In effect, he could nearly pull off systemwide live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony and other classical programming by originating the transmissions on WBCN , which would then be picked up by high-gain antennas at ’ XCN in Providence and rebroadcast to its own audience. In turn, that transmission would be relayed further down the chain to the stations in Long Island, Hartford, and New York. Although Boston was the originator in most cases, programs could also be sent back up the network in the reverse direction. In an age before satellites blanketed the skies and routinely linked broadcast stations around the globe, T. Mitchell Hastings was able to bypass the high costs of using phone lines to achieve this same purpose.
    T. Mitchell Hastings possessed another side to his personality, quirks and oddities that often challenged those around him. “[He] was a whack job, and I don’t mean that meanly; but he was just a very strange guy,” future WBCN program director Sam Kopper pointed out. “In addition to his sort of visionary eccentricities, he was a religious and spiritual seeker.” Not secretive about his beliefs in the supernatural, spiritual, and paranormal realms, Hastings and his wife Margot were regular acquaintances of Edgar Cayce, perhaps the most famous clairvoyant of the time. The couple sat with the seer on a number of occasions to seek advice and gain glimpses into a future that Cayce would reveal during his legendary and well-documented trances. Some of these predictions formed the basis of Hastings’s critical business decisions. “[He] was a wildly eccentric guy,” Chiesa agreed; “he believed in Atlantis, Cayce and mystics. [Hastings] lived in another world; he could have been an extra-terrestrial. But, he also believed in the power of classical music to awaken the spirit and the mind. He was a purist; there was a depth to what he wanted.”
    Ray Riepen, who would soon lobby to introduce rock music to WBCN ,understood that Hastings was deeply