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I REMEMBER THE OLD WCAS!

blackgold

blackgold

I remember the old WCAS at 740, when it was a folk and roots radio station. It was the most fun radio station of them all. I used to like to listen to it going to and from Spear School in Newton(then Belmont, then Framingham). It was a great place to be exposed to folk artists like Holly Near, Phil Ochs, Paul Young and more. And I enjoyed their very snappy sign-offs that they played at the end of the day. Case in point:

Drinking wine can make you queasy!
Drinking porter makes it worse!
Only thing that keeps me sober!
Seven-Forty Kilohertz!'
HEY!
Kick the dog and pass the bottle!
Eat potatoes! Wear a dress!
Quote Jim Joyce and kiss your mother!
Tune your dial to 'CAS!

Or how about this:

"Today! Children everywhere are preparing for an event of world shattering significance!"
"Vat?! Vat, Grimsley? Ze milk? Ze Daily Paper?"
"WCAS is going!"
"Where?! Where?!"

Or how about this:

"I am FCC man, and I have authority to strip you of all powers until sunrise tomorrow morning!"
"Oh, no! I'm losing all my powers! I can feel them fade!"

Oh, I loved WCAS!
 
They had one sign off that took some clips from Santa Claus is Coming to Town, or something, and made:

"And then the big bad--"
"FCC"
"told them to go far, far away...to return again..."
"Christmas Eve?"
"Christmas Eve."
"You put one foot in front of the other and soon you'll be walkin' out that door!"

"THIS CAR RUNS ON CAS". "You Can't Hear It In The Dark"
http://740wcas.com/

The Wonderful World of WCAS: Do you have hair on your big toe? WCAS Brings you...silence..."
http://740wcas.com/smp3/daily-signoff.m3u
 
blackgold said:
"I am FCC man, and I have authority to strip you of all powers until sunrise tomorrow morning!"
"Oh, no! I'm losing all my powers! I can feel them fade!"
Click to expand...

FCC Man didn't have authority, he had LICENSITE!

Great station, amazing variety of music and an enthusiastic, involved DJ staff -- Rick Starr, Frank Dudgeon, Moe Shore, Lisa Karlin (before she moved on to WCOZ), etc. I used to have my dad send me reel-to-reel tapes of 'CAS programming when I was off at college! It was never a dead-serious 100 percent "folk" station, which made it a lot more fun than WADN or WUMB during its folk purist days. WUMB's current sound actually comes the closest to WCAS in its heyday.
 
Heck, I remember when it was WTAO...hehe. And then WXHR. WXHR used to put an ad in the papers

WXHR​
740 AM/96.9 FM​
Clear Channel/50,000 watts​

Not exactly a lie (the AM is on a clear channel, and the FM did have an ERP of 50,000 watts) but perhaps a tad misleading
 
WTAO 740AM 250 Watts Daytime. Ed Penney on Sunday afternoons in the late 1950's. We lived so close to the tower (it's still there), we picked it up on two poles and a long wire suspended from the second floor porch of our house.
 
The had another great sign off in early 1974...when they were in the process of being sold to religious broadcasters too...

"The adventures of super station!!!! More powerful than an electric toaster!!! Able to change formats in a single sale!!!!!"

However...in 1974...a citizens group was infuriated over the proposed sale...and it eventually fell through. A similar thing happened to them in ealy 1976 too. Imagine that...today....No...I can't either...

From 1970-1976...1550-WNTN was also a great station! Free form progressive rock!!! "WNTN-Your AM Alternative".....
 
When it was announced that the Boston Globe/Kaiser Broadcasting were buying AM 740, FM 96.9 and Channel 56, the article in the paper indicated that the TV station would be known as WKBG-TV. For weeks, however, the Globe's little "radio dial" that used to appear on the TV page (listing local stations' call letters and frequencies) indicated the 740 as WKBG and the 96.9 as WKBG-FM. This continued even after they became WCAS and WJIB.
 
Wasn't it WKGB for Kaiser Globe Broadcasting?

When I was around 12 or 13 I used to spend some Saturdays dropping in on radio stations. Mostly College stations like HRB, MFO and TBS. But I used to get into EEI FM and BOS I would just sit there and watch the DJ for hours.

One of my favorite places to visit was CAS on Mass Ave in Central Sq. Even at age 12 I knew that place was way cool.
 
It was KBG--Kaiser Boston-Globe, not KGB as in the Russian agency or a famous station out west.
Ch 56 of course for years was on Morrissey Blvd next to the paper. (Believe it or not I wonder if they
considered using the "KGB" calls but perhaps didn't want the same letters as the Russian agency
given the Cold War times--similarly, baseball's Cincinnati Reds were known for a time as the
"Redlegs")*

>>In 1965, the WXHR combo was purchased by a partnership of Kaiser Broadcasting and the Boston Globe, and one year later, in October of 1966, channel 56 was reactivated with color facilities as WKBG-TV...
In May of 1974, the call letters were changed to WLVI (LVI being fifty-six in Roman numerals)

http://www.bostonradio.org/stations/73238

*--trivia: In effect, you have two baseball teams in MLB with the same nickname. The Cincy team,
the first one ever, is technically the Red Stockings so you have Red Stockings and, basically the
same thing, Bos. Red Sox. ;D Jane Morgan's song "Baseball, Baseball" mentions the "Redlegs",
as well as pronouncing the full name of the A's: Athletics
 
You are right it was WKBG. I don't think WKGB wouldn't have gone over to well during the cold war. But was the company called Kaiser Globe Broadcasting?

And does anyone remember the Uncle Benny kids show that ran in the afternoon?
 
mgpt6 said:
JIBGUY, if you had bought 740AM in the 1970s would you have kept the format?
Click to expand...
Depends upon which format it was, that you are referring to. If it was the very-Cambridge folk format, I would not have changed it. (When I bought 740 twenty years ago, and for a time after, "WCAS" was taken by some station in North or South Carolina).
 
It was just damm good in the Cambridge folk days. Both WCAS and WBCN in there heydays. Today closest would be UMB, daytime ERS and then River 92.5
 
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