The morgue. In the radio news biz, that’s the place where you save all the raw tape, the typed copy and the actualities that contributed to each daily newscast. At the end of each year, news departments would cull the highlights for a special broadcast retrospective of the year that was.

From 1965 through 1970, WKNR News went a step beyond putting the program on the air. At the station’s expense hundreds of albums were pressed each year with a commercial-free 45 minute summary of the people, places, events and attitudes that contributed to our history as seen from the newsroom at 15001 Michigan Avenue in Dearborn.

Anchored by WKNR News Director Philip Nye, these LPs are now collectors items and have been utilized by current day broadcasters and historians?to look back at what Detroit was like in the 60s.

WKNR Newsman John Maher (Meagher) collected most of them and sent us rips of the 1965 through 1968 LPs which can be heard here.

In the summer of 1967 chaos broke out in the streets of Detroit. After five days of violence 43 were dead, thousands were injured and over 4000 people had been arrested. WKNR Contact News covered it all and chronicled the events in an album of news highlights released early in 1968. This summer, forty years later, Michigan Radio takes an in-depth look at the deadliest riot of the 1960s. Why did the riots begin? What fueled them? And, have we ever really recovered? Ashes to Hope: Overcoming the Detroit Riots will explore how the riots affected people, neighborhoods and even music. And will address questions such as: Whether it was truly a riot? Or, a rebellion? Is the white-flight that we see today in Detroit a consequence of the riots? Did the riots cripple the relationship between the state of Michigan and Detroit? And, could rioting happen again? In addition to Michigan Radio reporters, WKNR’s News Director Philip Nye contributes context to the story, along with Contact News air checks from the center of the storm. The program begins Tuesday evening, July 17th at 9:00 PM with an encore July 23rd at 3:00 PM. For more information, visit MichiganRadio.org