1370 in Charlestown gets very familiar call letters

[DG02816]

Scott Fybush is reporting in this week's NorthEast Radio Watch that the 1370 in Charlestown has applied for WKFD as its call. Brings back memories for yours truly...I was Chief Engineer there in the '80's when Wickford's call was WMYD(We Make Your Day)and came back in the late '80's when Ben McGowan bought it, putting the back the WKFD call as the Radio Air Force. I remember listening to Dal Dearman, Steve Bousquet(news director), and Ron Hickman, from whose initials ,RLH, came the Radio Lighthouse sobriquet.....

Dave Gardiner

WVCH 740/WNWR 1540

Philadelphia

 

[AKLes]

Purely an aside....

The original WKFD tower, in the swamp by the bridge in Wickford, was the "risen from the dead" tower once used by WPAW before it moved to 550 and became WXTR. The tower was taken down from the original location when a boat slammed into it during a hurricane, putting a pretty good bend in one leg. When I saw the tower, not long after it was re-erected in Wickford, it still had the bend! I would imagine it's long gone.....

 

[DG02816]

Les,

There's still at least a piece of the tower left at the old site by the Hussey bridge in Wickford.
You can still see the base sticking up thru the mud, pretty much where it fell when a guy wire finally let go. I'd had a very heated discussion with Ben McGowan the week before on checking it out. He just brushed me off. I left not too soon after that. Of course, the upshot of all this was that Ben tried staying on the air temporarily with a 110' wire held up by a weather balloon. The balloon was tethered to keep it in place, but a wind gust broke the tether, wrapping the wire around a Narragansett Electric feedline , blowing the the final amplifier modules in the Harris MW1A and knocking out power to North Kingstown. That pretty much was the end of 1370 in Wickford; it briefly resurfaced some years later at a new site in Quonset Point. The guy who bought it then used the callsign WEGM; I'm not sure if he ever actually APPLIED for the call...


Dave Gardiner

WVCH 740/WNWR 1540

Philadelphia

 

[bloodshot56]

wkfd-1st gig i ever had-1979. hired by Bambi Lynn. station got sold to Acton Corp later that year. i may have been the 1st to talk on wmyd when we switched it over. can't rember. might have been 2nd

 

[PaulBWalkerJr]

1370 was never actually legally WEGM, as I understand it from a friend..... WEGM-FM was in Puerto Rico at the time and they never gave permission for 1370 to take the WEGM calls.

I also had this same friend tell me about a tije the old owner climbed the trees to saw off tree branches and limbs to clear a pth for the satelitte.

It'll be nice to see how this 2.5 KW Day and 5KW night faciltiy gets used. I have one or two ideas myself..

 

[rapski]

Hi Les,

Was the old WPAW tower in Pawtucket near Rumford, a single stick along the Seekonk River? When did the twin towers go up along the Blackstone? As far back as WFCI? My memory fails.

Bob

 

[AKLes]

Hi Les,

Was the old WPAW tower in Pawtucket near Rumford, a single stick along the Seekonk River? When did the twin towers go up along the Blackstone? As far back as WFCI? My memory fails.

Bob

I believe you have the site right. It was dismantled right after they got the shift to 550 around 1957. I can't be sure about the year; it was before I did any work for the Hysko family. It may have been a little later. The 1kW RCA transmitters at the John Street site were the first to be used on the new frequency and I vaguely remember either 1958 or 1959 on the manufacturer's plate. I believe the current Disney operation still keeps one of them as a backup, so maybe their engineer (who used to post here...may still do so...could check that out and let us know).

I believe the original WPAW transmitter was bought cheap by Johnny Costa and Dave Britt who got licensed for WNRI (Woonsocket). While I'm pretty sure the original WPAW tower went to Wickford, it is not impossible that Johnny and Dave got it for WNRI.

WFCI was on 1420 and was sold to The Providence Journal which had operated FM only up to then; one of the very earliest FMs (WPJB-FM) in Rhode Island (I can't helping their original antenna was on Jerimoth Hill). They bought out Frank Crook (or his estate) and ran it for a while as "WPJB". I used to be able to receive it, though poorly, over in Swansea. Then The Shepard Company threw WEAN on the market and The Journal bought it, surrendering the 1420 fequency which fetched up with Joe Deschene (spelling?), owner of The My Bread Baking Company (Sunbeam Bread) in New Bedford.

The original WFCI/WPJB site was across The Blackstone River from the WPAW (now Disney) site. I vaguely recall there were two self-supporting towers though I never saw the actual towers, just the bases. That could be misleading, the bases, that is. Take a good look at the WPRO towers; they're guyed but are placed on the bases from the original self-supporters that fell in 1938. I'm not sure what happened with the (then) WJAR towers just down the street. The ones I most recently saw were square cross-section, looking like something Blaw-Knox built in their later years. Not the cone-on-a-cone type; just square like the ones WSAR had at their Taunton River site. The WSAR towers, though, were top-loaded with the uppermost section of the guys cross-linked.

I'm reasonably sure the old WFCI/WPJB concrete is still there though the weeds may have it concealed. Anyone who cared to park on the downstream side of The John Street Bridge should be able to look toward the Lincoln side and see them.

Aside: I was in Fall River several months back and thought to go looking for the old WSAR tower bases but spent more time visiting at the station than I had intended and it got too late. I've poked at "Google Earth" quite a bit looking for them but it seems that even the bases were removed when New England Power bought the site for a proposed nuclear power plant -- which was never even started.

 

[DG02816]

Les,
When I left Wickford to become Chief Engineer of WBSM, I found in the station's files a plot
of the old WFCI/WPJB pattern.Seems it was a 2 tower figure-8 with the waist(nulls)NW-SE.
Proabaly why it didn't do well in Swansea.

Dave Gardiner

WVCH 740/WNWR 1540

Philadelphia

 

[AKLes]

Dave,

Given that I was about 10 years old at the time, I had no awareness of directional patterns...either you could get a station or you couldn't. I worked at receiving WPJB because it was the Mutual affilliate (WALE, Fall River, later picked it up) and carried kids programming between about 4 and 6 pm. "Bobby Benson and The B-bar-B Riders" plus some few others. Two radios worked well for it. One was an ancient Philco cabinet model with a huge built-in antenna and the other was a Firestone AC/DC portable with a good sized silk-insulated flat coil antenna in the back cover. I'm guessing the firestone was very old even then. It worked best on batteries (A, B, and C); now I know that the hum when running on AC was almost surely bad filter caps but, at 10 years most people believe the warnings glued to the back that suggest you'll die instantly if you remove the cover to anything but the battery compartment!

Before I forget....do you recall the power levels for WFCI/WPJB? There may have been day and night differences and perhaps the DA was night only but I haven't found anything on the web.

If memory serves, WEAN (under Shepard ownership) was exclusively Yankee Network. When Shepard sold out of radio Yankee continued out of WNAC but the Yankee phone lines were also used to distribute The Mutual Broadcasting System and when the Journal bought WEAN, silenced WPJB (the AM side), they brought Mutual along with to WEAN.

Wasn't too much later than Lincoln W.N. Pratt, who had managed WSAR for decades, moved over to WPJB-FM which was then a classical music station.

 

[DG02816]

Les,
Something prompts me to say 5 kW-DA-1, but more likely 5 kW-D, 1 kW-N, still DA-1.


Dave Gardiner

WVCH 740/WNWR 1540

Philadelphia