• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

LANCASTER COUNTY'S WPDC 50 IS YEARS OLD

T

tube man

Guest
I have heard announcements on air that WPDC, Elizabethtown, Lancaster County is celebrating 50 years of service. Apparently, the station signed on in May of 1958.

Is there anyone out there that worked at the station in the past 50 years, especially in the early days, that can shed some light on the history of the place? I understand that Lowell Williams, Dick Berg, Art Greiner and Will Groff are all gone. Anyone know the original line-up? Or staff members at any other time?
 
Yup, it WAS May of '58 when WEZN signed-on as a 500 watt, two-tower directional daytimer. Singing jingle proclaimed: "You are never more than TWENTY FIVE MINUTES AWAY from music, news and weather, too on WEZN. 16 hundred, 16 hundred at the top of your dial". First board ops were Bill Sharpless, Gil Fryer, Buck Jones (high school play y play on Saturday afternoons and George Morgan (who, by 1963 was the state capitol guy who fed government soundbites to stations across he state. For a guy who use 2 canes and heavy braces on both feet he was sure good-natured and animated. WEZN's Pres. Lowell Williams, GM Dick Berg and PD Will Groff left their similar positions at WNOW. Shortly thereafter, the new WNOW owner (William F. Rust) promptly took WNOW-TV, Channel 49 off the air that same month. Rust had no one there who knew how to run a television station. True, they still had engineer Glenn Winter (who may have helped build WEZN, as well as WNOW-TV only 5 years earlier. WEZN had an engineer named Charlie who got himself fired the first month they were on the air.
He was suspected, but never proved to be the culprit who cut the hot wires from the transmitter to one of WEZN's 2 directional towers. I think WEZN got some engineering help from Len Savage,
who had recently built and signed WCOY on the air in Columbia. Savage (who built WLBR-TV, Channel 15 in 1953 ultimately electrocuted himself..stepping into the back of his WCOY transmitter with the interlock disabled. An odd demise for a smart engineer who got WLBR-TV dried out and fired up again after Hurricane Hazel filled that Mt. Gretna
xmtr and studio building with several feet of water.
Lowell Williams must have been bored running little
WEZN after ten years of running WNOW AM & FM
since 1948 (and WNOW Television from '53 to '58.
Note: Art Greiner (as WEZN sales manager) regaled
us with no end of stories about raising and butherin cattle. They included one featuring "cow cleaning" (placenta sandwiches)..to which farmers treated themselves after helping birth calves. Art
went on to own his own station in as did engineer
Glenn Winter in Shippensburg. Does Art have an interest in a Lebanon station even today? I enjoyed
Will Groff the tongue-in-cheek intellectual and crafter of the station's commercials. He had been very erudite as an on-camera WNOW-TV announcer..and it was he who told me a week ahead of time that WNOW-TV would sign off at 8pm the evening of May 31, 1958. I watched that with sadness. I am amazed at how many different incarnations that little station I helped start (as an announcer/board op) went through after Messrs. Williams, Berg and Groff departed. Oh, yes, there was this one announcer who kept saying "Kinder Gleaners" instead of "Ginder Cleaners" until we could get that spot on (reel to reel) tape. The station didn't have cart machines when it signed on. One part time WEZN engineer had the greenest teeth I haver ever seen on a human being. And I was the greenest novice any radio station in Lancaster county had ever seen. I went on to do the
10pm to Midnight "All Star Concert Series" classical
program on WGAL 1490 in Lancaster later in 1958 while still a Senior at Manheim Township High School. Thank you, WEZN for my first on the air gig. Psssssst: I didn't have a first class FCC license, but they STILL had me fire up the plates and filaments and sign the station on every Sunday morning. What good memories. Thanks, Lowell, Dick, Will and Art.
 
One interesting tidbit in that station's history is that what was then WEPN AM 1600 & FM 106.7 were this area's first stations to play free-form progressive rock on a daily basis. Some local Top 40s like WFEC, WLAN and WSBA had prog rock shows on Saturday nights but the little E-town station played prog rock all night from 6 or 7pm til 6am for a while there, around the spring and summer of 1969. A company called East Penn Broadcasting bought the stations from Herco and did an MOR format in the morning and midday, which shifted to Top 40 in the afternoon, and free-form rock at night. It was great. The two jocks I remember were Rick Rebert and JJ Hildebrand, who I think were college students. The whole thing didn't work and eventually the stations went dark in the summer of 1970. I don't know if Dave Cannon from WGTY ever looks at this board, but he has more in-depth, in-the-building knowledge of WEPN. I was only a devoted listener. Dave, are you there and can you add to the story?
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom