Ohio 60s/70s Top 40 roll call

[BobOnTheJob]

How about 15 WinW and WQIO in Canton, WFAH in Alliance and WMOH in Hamilton.

WMOH...Rodger K Senior ruled the roost at night there...of course, his son, Rodger K Junior is carrying the torch as one of the head honchos at Oldies 1160 WDJO.

 

[Inventor989]

Not a mention of Q-102 or WSAI????

As I remember, the only AM Top 40 ever to knock off its FM competitor in Arbitron back in the 70s was WSAI.

Another station I did not see here is the great Q-10 in Canton, programmed by Ron Foster.

 

[schmave]

Brief history of WMER...it was Celina's first radio station (a stand-alone FM in 1960) owned by the owner of the Celina Music Store (the studios of now WKKI are there to this day). WMER was sold to guys named Lee Rutherford and Ron Rumley who later bought WDRK in Greenville. For awhile the automation equipment was located in the very back of the Music Store..my first peek at broadcast automation. They ran Drake-Chenault's Hit Parade (68, 69 and 70). I'm not clear who owned WMER during it's brief CHR era, the Scott you were thinking of went by Scott Allen on the air (whenever he acually did his 7-9am morning show.) The late Ralph Guineri also did middays and later afternoon drive (4-6pm). The homebrew automation reels sounded terrible. The recievership could have been any number of factors from low sales to bad management, and 740 watts ERP on a very low tower. I'm sure FM penetration wasn't 100% then. After WMER Inc. went bankrupt, former WCSM personalities Keith and Jackie Balfour bought the station and tried to rebuild the WCSM of the late 60s, complete with big bands from the stuttering Lonesome Ralph (NOT Guaneri). Mid-America Radio, which had stations in Michigan were the next owners, changing the calls to WKKI and flipping to Country, later a mix of A/C days and AOR nights, then straight up chainsaw rock, before Chris Cage bought it and promptly installed Transtar.

There's a little building on Rt. 703 right in front of the WSU Lake Campus that was to have been the new home of WMER in the 70s but that didn't materialize.

So Big Ralph bought K94 from Mid-America Radio? I remember seeing the news when he and his wife bought the place back in the mid-1990s (maybe around 1993?). I believe he still owned the station when he died.

 

[kirkiefan]

Not a mention of Q-102 or WSAI????

As I remember, the only AM Top 40 ever to knock off its FM competitor in Arbitron back in the 70s was WSAI.

Wasn't it Q-102 that blew away WSAI in the late 70s prompting 'SAI to switch to country? I remember seeing billboards in downtown Cincy promoting the switch along with 'SAI-FM being the new Q-102 competitor at that time. If WSAI blew away Q-102,it was early on before people wanted to hear the hits on FM instead.

Remember the 1978 movie "FM" and the Steely Dan theme song?
"no static at all!"

Remember those fictional call letters QSKY "Q-Sky" (almost sounds like a reference to 'SAI in a way!)

Michael Brandon was Jeff Dugan the morning DJ with Martin Mull as the narcissist night jock Eric Swan. Linda Ronstadt was herself in concert.

Great film...have it on VHS.

 

[gr8oldies]

Chris Cage bought WKKI from Mid America in 1982. Im not sure who might have been between him and the Guaneris

 

[Goldilocks94941]

Another early 80's was 88.7 FM, CHOM("Ohm Radio")...came in crystal clear in Northern Ohio but tower is in Windsor.

Actually, it was called CJOM when it started in the 1970s. CJOM = Ontario and Michigan, with the CJ as part of the limited call letter prefixes available to Canadian stations. It was a true "underground" FM radio station, playing a wide variety of the era's progressive rock with free-form DJs and, being Canadian, it was able to air comedy cuts with language that the US stations could not broadcast. Like George Carlins' "Seven Dirty Words." In other words, a real find for teenagers across the border. It was, and remains, 100kw, same as 89.9 and 93.9 from Windsor. While 93.9 used to broadcast from a now-removed tower on the Detroit River at the old CKLW-TV studios on Riverside Dr., I think all three of the full powered Windsor stations now use a site or two in rural MacGregor, which is a few miles inland from Grosse Isle Michigan, and only about 40 miles or so from most of Toledo.

And, to follow up with a little historical correction from another poster:
AM1520 WTTO did cover most of Toledo day and night - it just had its main coverage area for both transmitters centered in the Old West End, which contributed to eventually changing the format to soul gospel. Listening to it along Alexis Road on the way back and forth to Whitmer High School from Point Place, the 6-tower daytime transmitter site just across the state line in Temperance added in a lot of phasing. which actually sounded kinda cool on some of the music. It was 1kw and had a nice clean sound, especiall from the more targeted nighttime TX site near Perrysburg, and I think they used a slight echo to enhance it a bit. Cool jingle package for the time, and if CKLW wasn't there to provide a stronger signal without the phasing for another 200 miles past Toledo, as opposed to the 20 miles you'd get WTTO before it had to fade away, it might have survived a bit longer. But WOHO 1470 was really the big pop station for Toledo, with tight personalities, news once in a while, and an authoritative sound as the dominant top 40 in the market, and was the main local competitor to CKLW. Anobody remember the "John John John" weekends, when they featured songs from Elton John, Olivia Newton John and John Denver heavily? And their Memorial Day oldies weekends, with the old jingle package from the 1950s, I suppose, was classic in the true sense of the word. Lew Dickey Sr's flagship station sounded great. (And I'm astounded nobody has brought back the WOHO call letters - "Woe-Hoe" was a solid brand, and probably still has a lot of cache.)

The directional arrays and comparatively low power (1kw) of both WOHO and WTTO meant you couldn't get a good signal in the growing southwest part of town around Southwyck, and coverage didn't make it far outside the immediate metro area, tho' you could hear them OK for a bit north and south in Monroe and Bowling Green (not quite so good at night, however).

I wonder if Ken R monitors these boards and has any links to old airchecks of these stations that we could hear, for old time's sake?

I would also love to hear if anyone still living has airchecks of 730 WMGS in any of its pre-Jimmy Swaggart incarnations, country-politan (I think Ken R had a hand in that for about a year in 1973), bankrupt country, country-western, and, in its earliest days as WWBG as a hot early 1960s top 40 that I'm told came in loud and clear as far south as Dayton (as opposed to the weak and fuzzy mega signal it has now).

I've got an old reel to reel of some of their non-singing jingles somewhere in a box. Anyone know of a place around Seattle that might be able to salvage the audio, assuming the tape is intact?

 

[KevinFodor]

Not a mention of Q-102 or WSAI????

As I remember, the only AM Top 40 ever to knock off its FM competitor in Arbitron back in the 70s was WSAI.

Wasn't it Q-102 that blew away WSAI in the late 70s prompting 'SAI to switch to country? I remember seeing billboards in downtown Cincy promoting the switch along with 'SAI-FM being the new Q-102 competitor at that time. If WSAI blew away Q-102,it was early on before people wanted to hear the hits on FM instead.

Remember the 1978 movie "FM" and the Steely Dan theme song?
"no static at all!"

Remember those fictional call letters QSKY "Q-Sky" (almost sounds like a reference to 'SAI in a way!)

Michael Brandon was Jeff Dugan the morning DJ with Martin Mull as the narcissist night jock Eric Swan. Linda Ronstadt was herself in concert.

Great film...have it on VHS.

It is a good film...I use it in my later semester classes at the school to show, in an exaggerated way, the combination of egos that have to be managed by a good PD.

I have it on DVD, but paid $75 bucks for it because it's out of print. Arrggghhhh!

 

[HarrytheK1]

Several more....and WWOW 1360 Conneaut, which launched as Top 40 in 1959 and remained thus until well into the '70s.

Do you remember who any of the WWOW DJ's were?

 

[captbob]

WNRR FM , 92.1 the hits, in Bellevue was top forty from 1973 until 75 when it went beautiful music then country and back to top forty about 78 and stayed that way until the sale in 2003 and a change to Classic rock and now oldies. Some of the WOHO jocks ended up there. Bob Ladd who worked WAWR as the Wizard when it was album rock and WOHO and WTTO owned the station and did mornings for 25 years. Mike Shay from WOHO and even J R Nelson, before G98, did shifts on the station complete with Pams jingles, reverb etc.

105.3 Y105 Mansfield still sports top forty last I heard as did WQIO in Mt Vernon off and on over the last few years. Another old top forty operation was WWIZ 1360 in Lorain in the early 60's when they were a daytimer until they lost the license sometime around 1964. Bob Lee did afternoons and Jim Allen was on middays.

 

[gr8oldies]

Longtime WOWO personality Chris Roberts would occasionally speak about having worked at the very similar call letterred WWOW in Conneat before coming to WOWO. Roberts still owns stations in Van Wert, OH