The Armenian Nightingale Written April 27, 2006   It was April 13, 1967.  Oberlin College was scheduled to play baseball at Kenyon College. As sports director of Oberlin's student radio station WOBC, I had recently acquired a portable cassette tape recorder.  My colleague Lee Beckett suggested traveling with the team to Kenyon, describing the game on tape, then airing portions of it on my weekly Oberlin Digest the following night.  So I loaned him my recorder. Well, the ball game was rained out, which was hardly surprising.  In northern Ohio's cold, rainy springs, it seemed that half the scheduled college baseball games had to be canceled. But when I got the recorder back, I discovered that Lee and his friends had been practicing with it.  There was some fake baseball play-by-play, and there was also some music.  These denizens of North Hall seemed to be involved.  The main singer was Jim Gertmenian, who incidentally was of Armenian heritage. Lee Beckett Jim Gertmenian Jeff Hanna Jon Williams Craig Witty I held onto the tape for nearly two years before I found a use for it.  During the college's first Winter Term in January of 1969, regular classes were replaced by individual study projects, so we at WOBC replaced our usual format with what we called "Experimental Radio."  That seemed an appropriate venue to introduce Oberlin listeners to the Armenian Nightingale. AUDIO 1:37   "Turn Around." I found other fragments of songs and even an interview on the cassette. AUDIO 1:27   "Dream" and the art of vehicle maintenance; "Very Last Day." And I couldn't resist editing some of the good and bad takes together like this example, in which Jim finally gets it right with a little help from his friends. AUDIO 1:40   "Mary Was Pretty."