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Old 590 AM in Atlanta

A

Art Sutton

Guest
WTFI Radio went on the air in 1927 in Toccoa licensed to Toccoa Falls Institute now Toccoa Falls College.

The station moved to Athens in the 1930s and then to Atlanta where it ended up on 590 and the call sign WAGA later to become WPLO.

Does anyone have a day and maybe nighttime coverage map of 590 when it operated inside the perimeter? I understand it was 5KW day and night with three tower pattern at night. I am curious what the nighttime pattern looked like.

I saw an ad placed in an old Broadcasting Magazine where 590 WAGA was trying to demonstrate how their 5000 watts was almost as good as WSB's 50KW. The ad showed several females with hoop dresses and WAGA was claiming their hoops were bigger than the other stations. Interesting the things ads could get away with back then.

Then you hear the story told by old timers of how Bob Rounsaville who made 790 WQXI into a powerhouse used to go around Atlanta selling against WSB. I'm told he would ask the prospective advertiser... "how many towers does WSB have?" One the advertiser would respond. Bob would say..."that's right. I have four towers for my station so which one do you think is the bigger station?" He'd usually make the sale. It's interesting to hear the stories of stations which sold against WSB which had like a 60 share back in those days. One guy told me that when he was deciding where to buy a radio station, he told the broker that he didn't care where it was as long as you couldn't hear WSB there. He had spent his entire career selling against them and looked forward to no longer fighting that battle.
 
My first visit to Atlanta was in the mid-70's. I remember picking up WPLO way northeast of Atlanta, not far south of Greenville.

When I came to Atlanta to live in 1994, I thought the station must have been having technical problems. I was working at McCann-Erickson and found out the name of our Kicks sales rep. I called her and asked if something at the 590 transmitter was broken, and she said, no, they'd moved the tower about 5 years prior, and it had diminished the signal.
 
I have the maps somewhere. I will try to dig them up over the weekend or early next week.

Best I can remember days were non-directional and nights were directional with a pattern that looked like a butterfly with its body over the city of Atlanta and its wings open to the east and west.

It was a great signal then and would have been a great signal now if so many mistakes would not have been made during the relocation. They purchased the wrong land, towers were laid out on the wrong azimuth, bad RMS/RSS relation makes IBOC impossible and on and on and on.

It is not a swamp anymore but water still hangs around for a few days after a big rain.

I had wanted to fix that after we moved WYAY but the Disney Magic has sailed without me.
 
taylorengineer said:
I've actually heard that sales pitch before! My station has three towers and theirs only has one.........he he!
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Well, this is more ignorant than dishonest, but I recently asked a Channel 34 (Univision) salesperson why buying them was better than Hispanic radio.

He said if you add the watts of all the Hispanic radio stations, Channel 34 still has far more watts than the radio stations combined.
 
Sidney Daniel, long time engineer at 590, is still around. I will try to get him to get on the board and spin a few tales. As you can inagine....he has some good ones.
 
OldSchoolWoman said:
Was WPLO ever a top 40 station
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Yes, in the early 60's. It was one of the Plough, Incorporated stations, WPLO, WJJD Chicago, WMPS Memphis (the flagship), WCAO Baltimore and WCOP Boston. They all sounded pretty much alike. I believe WPLO was the first one to exit the top-40 format and go country. WJJD did the same in the mid-sixties, WCAO in the 80's.
 
I believe WPLO's morning man, John Fox, was the only one of the air staff to survive the transition from Top 40 to country. We lived in the northern fringes of Marietta in the 60s and the only stations we could pick up after sundown were WPLO, WSB and if the wind was blowing right, we could also here WGST from time to time.
 
I remember growing up back in the early 50s listening to WAGA some 60 miles south of Atlanta in Jasper County. They had a very strong signal...almost as good as WSB in the daytime. We'd listen to Atlanta Cracker ballgames when they were daytime games. I believe the pbp announcer was Jim Woods. I can't remember who worked with him but seems he got into the radio sales business. Because of their affiliation with CBS back then, I assume, they would switch the games over to WATL-FM when they ran past time for the CBS shows to begin around 8PM.
I remember another of their announcers from that era was Jon Farmer.

WCON, the Atlanta Constitution station, also had a strong signal when they were on back then on 550KC. I remember Les Hendrickson worked there. Didn't he have the distiction of being the first and last voice heard on that short lived station?
 
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