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CALL LETTER MEANINGS

A few off the top of my head from Connecticut:

WTIC - Traveler's Insurance Company
WSUB - SUBmarine (based out of Groton, the submarine capitol of the world)
WELI - ELI Whitney was from New Haven
WEZN - EZ Listening.... WEZN was an elevator music station way back when
WGCH - GreenwiCH, CT
WATR - WATeRbury, CT
WRCH - Only RiCH people listen to this station (ok... I made that up)
 
JIBGUY said:
WDLW.... supposedly the owner's girlfriend's initials, DLW. Terrible call letters... makes it seem .... dull.
Click to expand...

The WDLW calls always made me think of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, which I think used to call itself either the DL&W or the Lackawanna Road or both. There was also a DL&W Coal Co, which. IIRC, the railroad owned. A coal company was a very synergistic business for a railroad. since railroads both burn a lot of coal and haul even more of it. Since the DL&W Railroad probably ran through West Virginia, which is the kind of place where Country music ought to be extremely popular (think Appalachia), there was also a kind of accidental tie-in between the station's format and its call sign.

As for WDLW being dull, I don't think it really hit its stride on that score. A few years earlier, the same station had been WHET playing big band/adult standards. (I never learned whether WHET stood for anything.) The AM drive guy was Johnny Towne, who seemed to be a really nice person, but even though I liked the music he played, Towne managed to run the dullest morning show I have ever heard before or since.
 
4CX1000A said:
DanStrassberg said:
WARE- WARE
Click to expand...

This was said to be one of only two stations in the country whose call letters spell out its city of license in full (the other was WACO).
Click to expand...

There is a Waco other than in TX?

Cause a station in Waco, TX would start with a K.
 
>>Cause a station in Waco, TX would start with a K.

Exceptions to the K/W rule (west of Miss is K, east is W though there may be variations in
Louisiana and Minnesota):
KQV Pittsburgh
KDKA Philadelphia
KYW Philadelphia
WACO Waco, TX

and some others maybe

Not sure if mentioned yet but:
WNSH: North Shore. Previous calls WMLO (mellow?); WBVD (BeVerly-Danvers. T-shirts they
put out once read, "BVD: The First Thing You Put On In The Morning"

My own station, at the soon to be renamed Salem State University (the gov. is set to sign
a bill; may not take effect tech for 90 days) was originally WSSC for Salem State College.
The choice of WMWM may have been just a random assignment by the FCC or maybe it
had some kind of meaning (we have kidded around saying it was Where Music Was
Murdered)...somewhere I have something written by former WMWM DJ/general manager (IIRC)
Jim Murphy that may have explained the choice of calls, if we had a choice.

Allegedly WPLM stood for not just PLyMouth but also We Play Lovely Music (though the joke
indeed is "Lousy" music)

For WKLB, it was "Country CLub". Remember they started as WCLB but WCRB (and/or WCVB
TV 5?) put up an objection so it was changed to WKLB. This led to promos saying
"Boston spells country with a K". Yeah, and so does that KARS-4-KIDS spot... :)
 
WCGY = Curt Gowdy Youth ...having spent some memorable (ugh!) time in the City of Sirens !

...And, exceptions to the W and K rule... WHB-AM, Kansas City, MO = World's Happiest Broadcasters or
so the liner cards read !
 
Hey Raccoon, remember WBCN was none to happy when WBCS ( Boston's Country Station) showed up and BCN was screaming it was screwing up their diaries.



I remember in my early days of radio, we used to get notified by the FCC on requests for call letter changes, and a station could actually file an objection to the new calls being issued.
 
raccoonradio said:
>>Cause a station in Waco, TX would start with a K.

Exceptions to the K/W rule (west of Miss is K, east is W though there may be variations in
Louisiana and Minnesota):
KQV Pittsburgh
KDKA Philadelphia
KYW Philadelphia
WACO Waco, TX

and some others maybe
Click to expand...

W calls west of the Mississippi are plentiful. I doubt that I can get from memory more than a small fraction of them even if I intentionally exclude the Minneapolis-St Paul, New Orleans, and St Louis markets, which together probably account for more than a dozen K calls east of the Mississippi and W calls west of the Mississippi.

WFAA- Dallas
WRR- Dallas (I believe those calls are still in use, though no longer on AM)
WBAP- Fort Worth
WOAI- San Antonio
WJAG- Norfolk NE
WNAX- Yankton SD
WWLS- Moore OK
WTAW- College Station TX (if those calls are still in use)
WREN- In or near Kansas City KS, I believe
WOW-Omaha (Are those still in use? Don't think they are on AM any longer.)

As I said, those are only a relatively small fraction of W calls west of the Mississippi and I have intentionally excluded stations in the Minneapolis-St Paul, New Orleans, and St Louis markets.
 
WMWM ---- This is nothing but a guess, but I always thought some wiseguy picked these letters because they're the same right side up as they are upside down. It makes installing a mic flag so much easier.
 
Could be. We would mark up records and you'd see that effect as they played
HSN upside down: NSH

Remember when we'd use calculators and spell out 710.77345 (Shell Oil upside down)?
My first name in numbers, if you write em a certain way:
13 0 13 (BOB)
 
Trivia: this is really for a station in Albany NY but how about a station whose call letters stood for a format it never did run? WGNA-FM 107.7 in Albany was due to launch in Dec of 1973
and the calls stood for Good News Albany--gospel. However the owner suddenly died a few
weeks prior to the scheduled launch. The owner's kids managed to get the station on,
but with a country format --one they still hold to this day (according to Wikipedia)

So...WGNA stands for "Good News Albany" though it never actually did run a gospel format.

(Casey Kasem voice): "Now...back to the countdown!" :)
 
KingOfAllHalibuts said:
WCGY = Curt Gowdy Youth ...having spent some memorable (ugh!) time in the City of Sirens !

...And, exceptions to the W and K rule... WHB-AM, Kansas City, MO = World's Happiest Broadcasters or
so the liner cards read !
Click to expand...

Now I thought that it stood for "we change formats every year." ;D

Here are a couple from Providence

WPRO - Pro-Fm, although I am sure it original was from the AM station and Providence

WWKX - Originally Kix 106

Back here:

WEGQ - The Eagle

WNRB - National Religious Broadcasters
 
radiopromoguy said:
A few off the top of my head from Connecticut:

WTIC - Traveler's Insurance Company
WSUB - SUBmarine (based out of Groton, the submarine capitol of the world)
WELI - ELI Whitney was from New Haven
WEZN - EZ Listening.... WEZN was an elevator music station way back when
WGCH - GreenwiCH, CT
WATR - WATeRbury, CT
WRCH - Only RiCH people listen to this station (ok... I made that up)
Click to expand...

WDRC - Doolittle Radio Corp.
WHCN - Hartford Concert Network (from its days as a sister station of then-classical WBCN)
 
raccoonradio said:
Trivia: this is really for a station in Albany NY but how about a station whose call letters stood for a format it never did run? WGNA-FM 107.7 in Albany was due to launch in Dec of 1973
and the calls stood for Good News Albany--gospel. However the owner suddenly died a few
weeks prior to the scheduled launch. The owner's kids managed to get the station on,
but with a country format --one they still hold to this day (according to Wikipedia)

So...WGNA stands for "Good News Albany" though it never actually did run a gospel format.

(Casey Kasem voice): "Now...back to the countdown!" :)
Click to expand...
I recall hearing WGNA in its early years while going to and from college. They were using something like "great country music for Great Northeast America" for a liner for a while.
 
And in Providence,we had some more:

WLKW-L being the Roman numeral for 50, for 990's 50 kW power.
WDOM-Providence College's FM; the college run by a DOMinican order.
WICE-studios were once in the old R.I. Auditorium, home of the AHL's R.I. Reds.
WKFD-with studios and transmitter in the WicKForD section of North Kingstown.
 
This was said to be one of only two stations in the country whose call letters spell out its city of license in full (the other was WACO).
Click to expand...
There is a Waco other than in TX? Cause a station in Waco, TX would start with a K.
Click to expand...

Oddly enough, there's quite a few exceptions to the W/K callsigns assigned to stations east/west of the Mississippi. Some are way up north where the Mississippi doesn't really run in a north/south manner anymore. Some are holdovers from the early days of radio (KDKA in Pittsburgh comes to mind). Some where just cases where the station asked the FCC for the calls and the FCC allowed it for whatever reason...I think WACO in Waco, TX is one of those but I'm not 100% positive.

FWIW, currently WARE and WACO are only two stations in the US where the callsign matches the COL exactly. There are a few more where the callsign matches some of the COL (WITH Ithaca, for example) or where the COL is two or more words and the callsign matches one word. But WACO and WARE stand alone.

However, a few years ago, a third of these rare birds was spotted. Anyone know what it was? I'll give you a hint: it was an FM station and it was east of the Mississippi.
 
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