Memories of Local Radio

[LizzieMaine]

I mean *local* radio. The little 250 or 1000-watt peanut whistle of a hometown station that you always listened to for no-school announcements on snow days, that broadcast all the local high school baseball and football and basketball games, the station that always seemed to have one of its hapless DJ's "broadcasting live from the new Western Auto at 14th and Oak."

The station you always took for granted -- until it was gone.

I worked in stations like this for many years -- spinning records, covering meetings of the Board of Selectmen, plugging station ID's into Red Sox broadcasts, writing commercials for used car lots and mom-and-pop beer-and-pizza stores and locally-owned-and-managed banks, reading the 530 AM work announcements for the fish canneries. And then one day, a little over ten years ago, it was all over, and now there's nothing like that left around here at all. Sure, we've got a low-power FM "community station," but it's not the same at all. It's all very ersatz, they're all very hipsterish and ironic about their localism. The sincerity of smalltown local radio, the honesty of it, is gone forever.

But those of us who grew up with it, those of who were lucky enough to be a part of it, will always have our memories. What are some of *yours?*

 

[J. M. Stovall]

I just wanted to not let this thread slip by without saying I appreciate your sentiment. I wouldn't mind at all to hear more anecdotes from your radio days. Have you ever written any up as either fiction or non-fiction?

 

[dhermann1]

WJTN Jamestown NY

When I was a kid in western New York State, WJTN was the main local radio station, along with its sister station, WDOE in Dunkirk. Thankfully, they are both still in business. In the 50's WJTN broadcast from the Hotel Jamestown, in downtown Jamestown. The population at that times was over 45,000, now it's down below 33,000. On Saturday mornings good old George Fleeger (it was George something, I think Fleeger . . .) used to host the Saturday Morning Breakfast Club, from the Mezzanine (it's always the Mezzanine!) of the Hotel. You know exactly what kind of show that was. The little old local ladies got such a charge out of being interviewed on the radio by George! You could always hear the tinkle of the cups and plates in the background.
My main moment of glory in High School was when I was on our High School Bowl team. WJTN sponsored a county wide competition just like GE's College Bowl, that was on TV at the time, and Chautauqua High had a really good team. We won the county my senior year, 1964. I remember being at the Hotel one day when George Jessel was there for some kind benefit, and I saw him in the lobby. Whoopeedoo!
WDOE was always the station for the Yankee games, good old Mel Allen.
WJTN is still going strong. Their stalwart star is Jim Roselle. The man must be nearly 100 by now, he's been there at least since Lee DeForrest was a pup (actually, over 50 years!). He does great interviews, and in the summer he broadcasts from Bester Plaza at Chautauqua Institution, so he always has plenty of interesting people to talk to.
I used to listen to WJTN on my mom's old 1937 GE model 203 5 tube radio. It's still around somewhere. And boy, oh boy, did we listen intently for those snow announcements! Only a person who grew up in snow country can appreciate what that meant to a kid!
EDIT: I just did a little more research. WJTN started out as WOCL in 1924, mighty ancient for a radio station!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Anecdotes from my radio days -- let's see...

There was the time Ross Perot came to town to campaign and flew into a high dudgeon because the Rockland District High School Band didn't play his theme song, "Crazy For You", when he came onto the stage. When I interviewed him after the speech, that was all he could talk about.

There was the time our nighttime DJ went outside to have a smoke and locked himself out of the building -- and then tried to climb up the fire escape to climb in the window, only to be nabbed by the cops on suspicion of breaking and entering. Ever after he was known as "The Cat Burglar."

There was the morning I arrived at work to find that the type bars on the UPI teletype machine -- a real teletype, not a computer printer -- had jammed overnight, mangling the ribbon and the paper into a greasy blue-black mess and leaving me with no copy for the morning newscast. So I went out, swiped a copy of the morning paper off the stoop in front of the barber shop down the street, typed out quick summaries of the wire stories, rewrapped the newspaper and put it back where I found it, all before 5 AM.

There was Hurricane Bob in 1992, where the Governor ordered an evacuation of towns along the coast and three of us stayed on the air for 24 continuous hours broadcasting emergency information and trying to think of ways to keep ourselves awake.

There was Vinny, one of the best morning men I ever worked with, who dropped dead on his bar stool one night at a "poetry slam," minutes after reading a poem entitled "Suicide Hotline, Please Hold." I had to break the news of his passing on the air the next morning, and was immediately deluged with calls from listeners saying that *this time,* Vinny's jokes had gone too far.

There were all those live remotes we used to do over payphone lines by unscrewing the mouthpiece and connecting the field mixer to the terminals with alligator clips.

There was the night a fire broke out in the transmitter, and the nitwit kid we had working the board tried to put it out by throwing a coke into the flames. Our engineer spent two weeks rewiring the thing with help over the phone from a retired RCA engineer who had no idea any transmitters that old were still working.

There are plenty more, but you get the idea....

 

[scotrace]

WJER Dover-New Philadelphia was founded in 1950 by the daughter of the town's steel magnate; she gave the station his initials. I worked there from 1983-92. A sort of Big Time for radio. By then we were an AM & FM, and we went to all the local functions, the station owner sat on every board and committee in the county, and we were awfully proud to be a part of it. I started plugging the spots into Casey Casem's show on Sunday nights (while setting up the FM automation system to kick off in the morning at sign-on Monday). When I left, I oversaw the integration of the two stations, a small cable outlet and a weekly newspaper all owned by the same guy. In the meantime, I did on-air shifts, a few newscasts, ad sales, and wrote and voiced all the station's best stuff, if I do say so. Some of the promotions and slogans I cooked up are still in use.
Then the weekly went bust, the TV thing started bleeding, and I escaped before it all went bad. About three years ago, the owner sold the FM off to Clear Channel, and now it's a stand-alone AM that hardly shows in Arbitron books (do they still do "books?")
I remember the day one of the DJ's wandered out to the tower while taking a long smoke break one winter day and noticed that the porcelain insulator (on which the tower was seated and insulated from the earth) had shattered - the tower could easily fall at any moment. The new engineer had not been doing the visual checks. I got to help fire him the same day.
There was the day I dreamed up an ad campaign for a car dealer in the shower one morning, wrote the spot in my head on the way to the station, recorded it by 10 AM, and by lunch time had locked up a one week buy worth $6000 - huge money for us (at 8.70 a spot) and a record.
The morning guy used to have frequent dead air. The news guy back in the "news kitchen" (where newscasts were done, which was also the break room) would wrap up the weather and send it back to the DJ who didn't respond. He knew to leap up and run to the front of the building to get the DJ off the floor where he had passed out, still drunk from the night before. In those days we just shook our heads and smiled. Today there'd be a new Everybody Pees In A Cup policy and rehab.
We had a crusty old engineer who kept all the old stuff patched together and working long past its useful life. I remember him standing behind us, waiting for us to close the mic. He'd say in the word's most nasal voice "Quit pinnin' that damned meter!"

When the weather got really bad, many of us used to just get in the car and drive to the station to help with the calls. The owner was always there too.

I'm SO glad I was a part of it. We spun actual 45's. I remember when the first CD came in the mail. We passed it all around, marveling at it. "It's called a 'compact disk.'"

All gone now. But I met my wife there.

 

[Flivver]

I grew up in Worcester MA...by some counts, the second largest city in New England (if you count only city-proper, not metro area). But, for whatever reason, Worcester never had any major radio stations. All our stations were small and very locally focused when I was a kid.

The best of them was WTAG AM580. This station is still on the air and actually dates back to 1924 when it was owned by the long gone C T Shearer department store. Its first call letters,WDBH, stood for "We Do Business Honestly". In 1925, the call letters were changed to WCTS (for C T Shearer) then later in the year, the station was sold to the local newspaper (Worcester Telegram & Gazette) and the call letters were changed to WTAG.

The station has a power of 5KW day and 1KW night and uses five antennas to create a truncated pattern that resembles a figure eight!

It was just the kind of station Lizzie described with an emphasis on local coverage. Why, in the 1950s, they even read funeral announcements on the air!

At that time, they had a veteran news announcer, with a voice like Lurch from the Munsters TV show. His style was slow, deliberate and deadpan. The lead up to the 6PM news was quite memorable. It went something like this:

"W-T-A-G...Woos-ter"

"The radio station of the Telegram and Gazette"

"NBC for central New England"

"The time at the tone will be 6 o'clock"

"Time for Fran Shea with the news"

Then a very memorable time signal..."BUNG"!

"Good Evening"

We kids used to mimic this station ID, lamenting the fact that Worcester was stuck in the past and didn't have any "cool" stations like those in Boston. And we *did* refer to WTAG as a "peanut whistle"!

But secretly, I always liked WTAG's comforting, stuck in the 1930s sound.

 

[Kishtu]

In the UK the local BBC radio stations are still very much in that vein - my parents love BBC Hereford & Worcester when they go on holiday, for that very reason....

Here in Cornwall we have the splendid BBC Radio Cornwall, which seems to be exclusively staffed by elderly gentlemen who ring up their friends, play male voice choir records (usually singing hymns) and generally have a ball on Sunday afternoons. It's wonderfully amateurish, and I mean that in the best and kindest way - staffed by people doing it for the love of doing it.

Favourite show to date was one of aforesaid old chaps interviewing the head of the 18-Wheelers Truck Association (I didn't know there was such a body!) and asking him what the biggest truck he'd ever driven was. 18 wheels, says this poor chap, sounding thoroughly bemused. Further discussion about what the association does, including its charity work... it's made two and a half guide dogs, you know!

You couldn't make it up....

 

[KY Gentleman]

While I was growing up we listened to WCLU, "BIG CLU COUNTRY!" out of Covington, KY.
All I had in my first two cars was an AM radio so I took WCLU everywhere I went! My uncle was a DJ at WCPM in Cumberland, KY. Whenever we would visit we would "dial him in" and listen to his show as we got closer to my mom's old hometown. If anyone out there used to "boogie with Ed on CPM",
that was my uncle!lol

 

[Fletch]

"W-T-A-G...Woos-ter"

"The radio station of the Telegram and Gazette"

"NBC for central New England"

"The time at the tone will be 6 o'clock"

"Time for Fran Shea with the news"

Then a very memorable time signal..."BUNG"!

A few years ago I got about a half dozen dance band stock arrangements off eBay, all dated circa 1940, and all stamped "WTAG Music Library." Obviously they weren't that small a station if they had their own house band.

 

[Flivver]

A few years ago I got about a half dozen dance band stock arrangements off eBay, all dated circa 1940, and all stamped "WTAG Music Library." Obviously they weren't that small a station if they had their own house band.

Actually, in the golden era (1920s-1940s) WTAG *was* a fairly major regional station and a member of the NBC Red Network. I have a souvenir book they published just after WWII showing pictures of the band you mention, as well as a rather large selection of on-air talent.

But, they didn't make a good transition to a DJ-based music format in the late 1950s when much of the network programming disappeared. They played MOR music, didn't use jingles and had a rather stiff presentation style. This was my parents' favorite station!

As a kid, I preferred the tight professional sound of stations like WBZ in Boston, and the wonderful CRC jingle package they were using at the time:

"Awake in the morning, swingin' all day and alive at night...
It's the bright, exciting sound of tomorrow...on W-BZ!

 

[Obob]

Local Stuff

Hmmm, I've been thinking about these stations around this area; a lot of that "local" color seems to have been pretty much gone, even by the early 70's. Actually our local TV station, WHIS, could maybe have still laid claim to the things you're writing about here, more than the radio.

Still, the local radio had stuff on that you certainly don't get now. I remember one winter ('76?) when WHIS-AM ran Lum and Abner weekday afternoons at 4pm. I guess they did that for most of a year. They ran the 15 min serial versions, and had local businesses for sponsors. I was into old-time radio, maybe a couple of years; that sure got my interest up!

There was another station in town, WKOY; my eight grade English teacher did a 15 min poetry reading on Sunday mornings. There were no commericals; I think she bought the time herself. She read her own poems. I wasn't too interested in that, because I thought she was pretty weird. Still we got along, and she offered me the chance to write a story and do it, one time. Nobody else in the school would go along, so I got the whole 15 minutes! We recorded it, on tape, on Saturday. They turned on the tape and turned it off again, 15 min later; no editing, as far as I knew.

She introduced me, and left the studio. I read a story I'd written about crooks trying to throw the World Series, but I only had 7 minutes. I found one of those reproduced "Liberty" magazines that were around in the mid-70's, and found something that would fill the rest of the time Liberty was great because they noted the reading time of the articles. I got my pages mixed up at one point, even though I really had tried to get them in order before I got there.

When I was done, it was right at 14:30. She came back in and said into the mic "thank you very much", and that was it. It ran the next morning; like an idiot, I didn't tape it:eusa_doh: . The next day, a couple of the kids at school said they heard me, and that I sounded like myself. So I guess it was a success!

I wish I could write that this experience fired my ambitions to go into broadcasting; actually the opposite occured. I was falling in love with old time radio, and thought it'd be great to run a station that ran nothing but Fibber and Molly, Amos and Andy, The Shadow, ect. But this teacher, she wasn't really wrapped too tight, frankly, and I didn't like being called a teacher's pet anyway, so I didn't get back into it again.

Still, looking back on it, I don't know too many other 13 year olds who got a shot at broadcasting like that, even once. WKOY I think ran at 250 watts; WHIS at 5000. So, it wasn't bad; it was actually pretty good!

Obob-who, like Lizzie's Gosden and Correll, did manage to save his script, too

 

[carter]

I have a lot of radio memories but, for those in or near Dallas, 770 KAAM has been broadcasting for decades and is the best, prhaps only, oldies station in Dallas. Whenever I am listening and someone drops by, they invariably ask, "What station is that ?". They always love the music. Check it out if you live in the area or happen to be passing through.