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Volunteering is how Graham, a Raleigh native who studied electrical engineering at N.C. State but didn't graduate, worked his way up to a full-time job in radio.

Graham had "dabbled" in radio engineering at WRAL radio while he was a college student.

"That's where I learned radio, really," he says. "You don't go to school for that, per se."

After working as a National Guard supply sergeant, Graham began a three-decade career selling industrial parts.

One night in 1993, he was listening to WCPE and heard an ad for an engineering volunteer. Proctor had a set of old-time engineers on hand to wire the station's new studio building, and Graham thought it would be fun to join them. He helped lay cable one afternoon a week with the late Forest "Frosty" Clark, engineering director John Taffee and retired IBM employee Dick Shirk, who still volunteers there today.

After their task was completed, Graham volunteered for seven more years.

But entering the 21st century, both sides of his industrial supply business migrated to China, Graham says. Left with nothing to sell and no one to buy, he went looking for work. He asked Proctor to be a job reference, but she had other ideas.

"She said, 'Golly, I need your talent here,'" Graham recalls.

Dial-up to satellite

WCPE prophetically got into Internet streaming in 1998. During those clunky dial-up days, classical stations were disappearing from the dial. From 1989 to 1999, their numbers dropped from 354 to 146. (Numbers from the trade publication Inside Radio show a rebound, with 182 classical stations in its April format count.) It made sense to reach out to listeners who lost their stations, so WCPE burrowed into the Web and got a satellite uplink.

Before long, listeners in the Detroit suburbs and Casper, Wyo., had joined the WCPE faithful.

If technology could power the station's growth, it could also tax the operating system. By the time Graham went to work at WCPE in 2000, the transmitter setup needed to be revised. The old studio was being converted into the transmitter building.

But for all the high-tech engineering, a lot of Graham's job is good old-fashioned tinkering, making sure that nothing goes to waste. Some of the equipment that Proctor built by hand in 1978 is still in use today.

"We don't go out and buy new speakers," Graham says. "We use everything to the max."

Most of the old analog stereo playback equipment, computer work stations and furniture comes from North Carolina donors. If an old item from a donor arrives in seemingly unusable condition, Graham is the man who makes it work.

That old '90s computer station is shot? No problem. Graham can convert it into a perfectly good fax machine.

In the interest of saving money, the 11 full-time and 12 part-time employees don't turn on the lights unless absolutely necessary. Proctor prefers using the rays from the scenic backyard, which is adequate to half-light the front room off the main studio.

Brothers says they've actually figured out that it costs six cents per second to run the place. Proctor posts cost-per-kilowatt-hour decals over light switches as reminders to be frugal.

Graham respects the Proctor principle. Even at lunch. At Wake Forest's Bagels & More Cafe, when Graham decides he's too full to eat the bagel chips that came with his sandwich, he offers them to his companion -- and doesn't want to take no for an answer. Nothing goes to waste.

Back at the station, he's looking forward to saving the life of a "very high-class audio amplifier" with burned-out transistors that was donated by a listener. He figures it would be worth $800 new.

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