First U.S. Stations not to stress call letters?

[OhioMediaWatch]

Just down the road from WIXY/1260 Cleveland:

WSLR/1350 Akron, a long-running country station known as "Whistler".

It's sports WARF today (and no, they have yet to call that "Warf").

 

[Icangelp]

WLW was "The Nation's Station" from very early on.

 

[BSteve]

Even small town stations got in on it. In the late 50s and on into the 2000s WYTH in Madison, GA used "1250 WITH Radio". I never knew exactly what it was "with", but it stuck for a long time.

 

[KyDXIn]

I think it could also be argued that Gordon McLendon's flip in San Francisco from KROW to "Cable" was the opposite of pronouncable call letters. Gordon began by wanting to name the station after the classic feature of San Francisco, and then got calls to match... Except for the required legal IDs, they called it "Cable." The IDs would say "Cable"... k-a-b-l oakland in the air over San Francisco" or something similar, with the legal part done fairly qickly...

That was some time in mid 1959... in a major surprise as competitors expected Top 40 and Gordon gave them Beautiful Music in its slickest presentation at that time.

McLendon also had WAKY in Louisville. He changed the calls from WGRC in June 1958 and began broadcasting Rock n Roll.
Probably no call letters for a Top 40 station were as descriptive as those given the McLendon Station in Louisville. The station's original call letters were WGRC -- the GRC in honor of Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark. When WGRC became a McLendon Station, though, an effort was made to create a "ziggy call sign that people remember and that kids relate to," said Don Keyes (1989). Gordon's secretary, Billie Odom, suggested WAKY (pronounced "wacky"), call letters that Don Keyes declared were "a natural" (Keyes, 1989).

"We were there to come in and invade Louisville, Kentucky. And that was...probably the biggest success story of the whole chain. We went from zero to a 60 percent Hooper Rating in two months. Absolutely destroyed people. When we went in, there was an old-timer called WINN. They were the music station for Louisville, Kentucky. They were playing fifteen minute segments of a given artist. That was the state of Louisville radio 1957 or 1958. Fifteen minutes of Kaye Starr, fifteen minutes of Frank Sinatra, fifteen minutes of Mantovani. That was it....And we went on the air with the usual flying circus. It was devastating, just devastating." (Keyes, 1989)

[Excerpts from Gordon McLendon: The Maverick of Radio by Ronald Garay]

More information is available at the tribute site: http://www.79waky.com/

 

[Bob1370]

Buffalo's legendary WKBW often used its full call letters but also frequently referred to itself as "KB", or "KB Radio 15", starting with the beginnings of its rock/top 40 life in the summer of 1958.

 

[ChrisInMI]

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I thought of some more Michigan examples...

Someone mentioned WSB Atlanta calling itself "Wisby." WHSB in Alpena, MI was "WhisBee" for a number of years - perhaps they were inspired by WSB. The format is Hot AC and has been such for decades.

WHNN in Saginaw/Bay City, MI was "Super Win" during its Top 40 days in the '70s.

Speaking of McLendon using memorable call signs for his stations, the only station he ever owned in metro Detroit featured another memorable set of calls - WWWW. "W4" featured beautiful music in the late '60s, then went on to oldies-based Top 40, AOR and country formats. The country format continues on a different frequency based in Ann Arbor, which also is known as W4. As far as I can tell the original W4 was probably the first Detroit station to emphasize a nickname with little or no emphasis on actual call sign (WWJ and WXYZ, two previously mentioned examples, didn't emphasize a nickname at the exclusion of call letters).

Then of course there was WWWE as 3WE in nearby Cleveland, Ohio.

Didn't WLYF Miami and WLIF Baltimore both refer to themselves as "Life" during their beautiful music days?

 

[cd637299]

^ Definitely yes on WLYF Miami. I remember the signs on back of county buses when the call letters changed from WWPB....the sign read "LYFE BEGINS AT 101.5." That was circa 1970.

cd

 

[Bongwater]

Seattle has many of these KOMO (1926), KIRO (1936) and KING (1947). All one word names made of their call letters. KOMO might have even been the first.

 

[davideduardo]

1962: WFAB Miami "La Fabulosa."
1964 or 1965: WQBA Miami "La Cubanísima"
1962 San Juan WUNO "Radio Uno"
1950's San Juan "Radio El Imparcial"
1960's Carolina, PR, "Radio Voz"
1969 San Juan, WCAD "La Familia"
1960's Bayamón WLUZ Radio Luz
1960's Bayamón WRAI Radio Aeropuerto
1960's Bayamón WRSJ Radio San Juan
1970 San Juan WJIT Radio Hit
1969 San Juan WVOZ-FM La Nueva Ola

 

[firepoint525]

Most of the previous examples have been of large and middle market stations, so for a small market example, WENK of Union City, TN, was "K-radio" as far back as the '70s. Sometimes, they were just "the K" or "the super K." They didn't come up with the more obvious phonetical pronunciation of their calls ("wink") until sometime later, probably the '80s. When they added an FM station in the early '80s, they wanted to call it WENK-FM, but apparently the FCC wasn't allowing that at the time, so they went with WWKF, aka "KF-99." The WKF apparently stood for "west Kentucky, Fulton," for their COL. Their legal ID for that first year or so was also sort of confusing: "WENK-FM of Union City, Inc., presents WWKF, Fulton, KF-99." It gave the impression that their nickname was derived from "WENK-FM," even though the legal ID clearly gave their calls as "WWKF."

A competing FM station in Union City has called itself "KYTN" for many years, even though those have never been their actual call letters, and being east of the Mississippi, they probably couldn't legally adopt those calls, anyway. Their actual calls (at least during the time that they were nicknaming themselves KYTN) were WKWT (west Kentucky, west Tennessee) and now WYVY. They were calling themselves "Y-105" after adopting the WYVY calls, but under new ownership, reverted back to KYTN, although keeping the WYVY calls.