Did you babysit the sister station ?

[Groove1670]

When I worked at several stations, I always had to watch the sister station. At the time most ran on a Harris 90 automation system. You waited for the flashing strobe to go off if you had dead air. Anybody worked at stations with a similar experience. I remember one station where I would cart up all my bits for the hour on the FM (WFYN FM) While CBS news was running at the top of the hour on the AM (WKIZ) We had six minutes to get it done, or had to put on a long record on if you messed up (plus you had to start all overr again..hey it was all on one cart). Any goood stories.

 

[Mike Sheridan]

I got into radio as a "Babysitter" at WAXY-FM 105.9 in Fort Lauderdale. The gig was from the time the daytimer AM (WEXY 1520) signed off till it signed on the next morning. There was a cott next to the automation, you could sleep there and management would deny knowing anything about it if the FCC said anything. The pay was $2 an hour they knew you had to have another job! The station was in the process of being sold to RKO General (the broadcast arm of General Tire). I did some carted up newscasts. I also worked on my audition tape in the production room. There was a high pitched sonalert that went off whenever their was dead air.

As for stories one of them was when there was a power failure in the bank building where the station was located. It was the First Federal Bank building at 301 East Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale. The generator came on but for some reason there was still no power. Power came back on in the area but for some reason the generator is still running and it won't let commercial power back in the building! So that means there is a tower that's unlighted at the top of the building. The security guard went home at midnight. His home number was on the wall but it was dark so I couldn't read it. No flashlight! Walked down something like 7 or 8 flights of stairs in the dark to get to the street and tried to flag down the police. Finally got someone to come and we searched the building floor by floor going everywhere my key would allow. We got to the top and heard bang, bang. I thought they caught someone but it was just the generator backfiring. After the search I got the officer to go inside the station and with his flashlight we found the number for the security guard. We called him and he came over to reset the generator. Not much sleep that night!

Just one of the many stories from WAXY 106!

 

[John FL]

Mike, I was always curious about the early days (early 80s) of WAXY 106 and automation. WAXY was apparently on a very tight budget and they just didn't have a lot of on-air personalities. Rick Shaw, in particular, worked 3-8 weekdays and he did shows on both Saturday and Sunday.

My understanding was that he was "on tape" 6-8 PM and on weekends, particularly on Sunday. How was that done? This may be Radio 101 for folks like me but I can surely understand how it is done today with computer technology but I just can't figure how it was done years ago unless someone was actually in the studio in real time just hitting a botton playing back the DJs voice when necessary. Don't laugh, I'm just clueless how it worked back then.

 

[otterk9]

At some point after RKO purchased WAXY (and it may have been before they moved to their E. Sunrise Blvd. palatial facility), they installed an enormous cart-based automation system called "Cuerac". It was one of only a handful of such systems worldwide; constructed in Australia, I was told.

The Cuerac consisted of three ceiling-high units, each containing a rack of hundreds of carts of music, commercials and disc jockey voice tracks. Chain-driven robot arms, programmed by a rudimentary computer system, would grab carts and insert them into one of about a dozen cart players. Most of the time.

Much like Musiconradio's experience in Key West, the WAXY jocks would record a show's worth of talk content -- song talkups, raps into commercial breaks -- cut by cut, onto an 8.5-minute cart. Screw up one rap -- and you had to start over.

Most WAXY veterans remember the Cuerac for its repeated malfunctions -- firing the wrong songs, jamming the carts into the players, missing the players entirely. Cuerac was ultimately abandoned in the early 1980s, and gave way to a staff of human board-operators 24/7.

Weekday airshifts finally went live -- though Rick Shaw continued to voicetrack at least a portion of his afternoon show on reel-to-reel, fired manually by the board-ops. Cuerac still occupied the WAXY master control room, serving as a very expensive cart rack until dismantled by Metroplex when they bought the station from Ackerley in 1992.

Weekends remained voice-tracked (but with live operators -- and a live overnight newscaster!) until September 1987; I may have been the first regularly-scheduled live weekend talent on WAXY. Eventually most of the weekend went live as well, with part-timers; Dick Bartley via satellite and a taped Sunday night oldies show with Rick Shaw were the only non-live dayparts by 1990.

 

[Groove1670]

The harris 90 system we used consisted of 4 reel to reels (some might remember scullys) In our case two reels had gold music, one with recurrents, one with currents, there were threee circular units called carosels, each with 30 carts that would rotate and place the cart in the chamber and play when the primitive computer brain told them too. There were two cart machines in the rack one for jingles, one that would play the recorded voice segments. there was a silent tone you would insert on the tapes to fire the next source. Some times it would jam up, snap tape, and yes the jocks would forget to put new tapes on or just rewind the old tape I remember someone rewound a tape the wrong way...oops. But it was fun, I miss the old technology. :

 

[Jeffrey_T_Mason]

Early in my career, I did late nights (10p-3a) at WLAN-FM "FM97" in Lancaster, PA. Our automated oldies AM was one floor below, run by an automation system consisting of maybe 10 reel-to-reels in a rack, and a couple cart carousels. We had a bright blue light that would illuminate in the FM studio to let us know there was a "problem" with the AM. Of course, there was ALWAYS a problem. We called them "blue light specials." Because they were the norm, they were getting lower and lower on the FM jock's priority scale.

One night, that blue light had been on for about a half hour when I finally made my way downstairs to check it out. I walked into a vortex of tape particles that COVERED the entire floor of the room! Three of those 10" reels had come to the end, slipped off the play/record heads, and were spinning so fast that the end of the tape was whipping against the heads and breaking tiny particles off every rotation. That happened on all 3 reels until more than half the tape was gone, and it wasn't long enough to reach the heads to break off.

The problem here wasn't that the station was off the air (nobody listened to 1390 anyway), but that I had NO way of A) repairing/recovering these three essential broadcast reels; and B) cleaning up the mess! We had no broom or vacuum available. So, there I was for about an hour after my shift gathering up the 3 or 4 inch deep roomfull pile of tape particles BY HAND! Then, I had to take the trashbag with the tape and drag it to an outside dumpster, so nobody would find it!!! There was a memo...I kept a poker face.

Ahh, the old days..........


- Jeffro

 

[John FL]

Now at least to me, these last few posts were pretty informative as to how things used to be. Apparently WAXY 106 was more interested in technology back then instead of investing in more on-air talent.
Looking back, I think they could have done better if they had more live personality in their sound especially given the tremendous efforts of the 3 CHRs South Florida eventually had.

I suppose nowadays it's not necessary to have babysitters. Technology has come along way but in many ways it has positioned radio to a place that personally disgusts me.

 

[Mike Sheridan]

Mike, I was always curious about the early days (early 80s) of WAXY 106 and automation. WAXY was apparently on a very tight budget and they just didn't have a lot of on-air personalities. Rick Shaw, in particular, worked 3-8 weekdays and he did shows on both Saturday and Sunday.

My understanding was that he was "on tape" 6-8 PM and on weekends, particularly on Sunday. How was that done? This may be Radio 101 for folks like me but I can surely understand how it is done today with computer technology but I just can't figure how it was done years ago unless someone was actually in the studio in real time just hitting a botton playing back the DJs voice when necessary. Don't laugh, I'm just clueless how it worked back then.

Sorry it has taken me awhile to see your post. Indeed RKO bought WAXY many years before moving it to Sunrise Blvd. I worked at WAXY-106 long before Rick Shaw got there. I think he got there around 1976 or 1977 at the earliest and I was there from 1972-1974.

While I was there the WAXY-106 automation system was a Broadcast Products AR-2000 with the music on 4 Scully reel to reel playback decks using 10" reels, commercials in several carosels and some single play cart machines for jingles, news, and the station ID. The computer which did all the switching of sources was very primitive by todays standards. Every source had a number and there were event numbers with a numaric keyboard you put in the source number next to the event number to program it. You could branch to other event numbers with the right command so you could repeat the music rotation or even switch to another rotation. There was a programmed clock that would also send the system to a branch at certain times that contained the commercial rotations. You would see all 4 carosels tray out and go to the proper commercials. Amazingly it always did this in plenty of time to play the first commercial! We ran all the public service tapes live because they didn't have the cue tones that were needed for the system. The live studio was a source number in the system, everything went through the automation even the live studio!

The cart system automation came when they moved the Sunrise Blvd. It was very advanced from what I have been told. I have also heard that for some reason RKO had agreed that WAXY would remain automated. It was thought this had something to do with the RKO/ General Tire anti-turst violations which occoured before RKO bought WAXY (indeed it led to the FCC taking almost a year to approve the sale) and led to the forced sale of the station. I don't know how that fits in.

The Clear Channel stations have babysitters. They are often fully automated late nights and most weekends. The babysitters are there looking over several stations. This was done because a malfunction caused the loss of about 60,000 dollars in revenue and they didn't like that much!

 

[Mike Sheridan]

I also babysat automated beautiful music WGLO 106.7 while on WFTL 1400 in Fort Lauderdale 1974-1978. I had to change the tapes when they ran out. Since there was quite a bit of separation of the two stations I did a lot of running back and forth!

There was one of the less technical veteran jocks who sometimes didn't bother to change the tapes on the WGLO automation. It would keep going until it played the remaining reels that still had songs on them! I came in and in horror saw there was nothing left, all 4 tapes had run out! I guess there was a lot of dead air, it probably still played the commercials! For those who worked with these systems, that one was a Shaffer 903e. The music rotations were in the format file and the commercials were in the time file. When entering the commercals you had to make sure the events in the time file were linked otherwise if the time didn't match up correctly it could insert a song in between the commercials. I never heard this happen though!

The beautiful music tapes were made in house and were announced. There were two reel machines with the time on them "odd time" and "even time". they would advance every minute unless they were played on the air. The time announce tapes would auto reverse at each end so they (almost) never needed to be touched. This kept the time current and correct, at least within a minute. The time announce was done in a very conversational style. Someone might think it was actually live.

 

[954]

WAXY's move

Does anyone remember the interesting story about how and why
they moved from South Andrews to East Sunrise Blvd.?

I remember just enough details to write a short paragraph.

Maybe Mike or someone else would be interested in writing
this interesting tale for Radio History.

73s

 

[Mike Sheridan]

I left way before that move. The Andrews Avenue location was nothing to brag about. The place had no windows and lots of cheesy looking wood paneling. They had some nice cork walls treatment in the studio but it started coming off. It would kinda crumble after awhile.

Sunrise Blvd was a palace. I had a chance to visit when Greg Budell and Dave Ryder were doing mornings.

 

[Dan Duffy]

Too many to mention . lol!! Was in a large market working overnights (live..I know ..unheard of ) Our station was live 24-7 ...the other 5 stations were VT'd after 6p. Nice facility too..control rooms all immaculate . A row of lights in front of the console would indicate which station might be in need of assistance...whether it be off air ..logs running behind..you know ..the usual stuff. Kinda creepy being the only dude in the building all night... ;D

Duff