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Poking at the roots of the BBC

I'm quite certain that Jim is correct about WGR's original 1 kW, two-tower Big Tree night configuration - it was made up of the WGR day tower and the easternmost of the WKBW DA-1 towers. At least that's always how I've understood it.

As for the "extra" land south and east of the array, I'm stumped. Maybe it came along with the land originally?
 
In all likelihood Scott's assumption is correct. In most Western New York towns zoning codes have been adopted gradually over the decades and the trend has always been towards regulating subdivision of existing parcels. If the old BBC wanted to spin off the unwanted woodsy section, for example, they would have to propose subdivision and appear before the Hamburg Town Board formally to accomplish this. Unless there was a good reason - such as a developer who really wanted the land - BBC wouldn't bother with the legal expense.

The southern end of the WYSL property (we own 13.65 acres) consisting of at least 2 or 3 acres is similarly unused. I thought I had it sold to a guy who wanted to build a warehouse and a mini-storage building, but he backed out. So we just get to continue mowing it and paying taxes on it.

Until we add the southern two towers and go 50kw, that is.

(The preceding was for Bob1370's enjoyment.) ;) :D
 
Savage said:
In all likelihood Scott's assumption is correct. In most Western New York towns zoning codes have been adopted gradually over the decades and the trend has always been towards regulating subdivision of existing parcels. If the old BBC wanted to spin off the unwanted woodsy section, for example, they would have to propose subdivision and appear before the Hamburg Town Board formally to accomplish this. Unless there was a good reason - such as a developer who really wanted the land - BBC wouldn't bother with the legal expense.
Click to expand...

The 107.7 FM transmitter facility in Wethersfield is also situated on a parcel larger than necessary for the tower and building.

Back in the '60s, when Ivy Broadcasting owned the station, there was an engineer living on site (it would have been a long drive from Ithaca to replace a blown tube in the GE rig, so this probably made sense) and legend has it that he did a lot of "farming the land" in his spare time growing a lucrative cash crop, and I'm not talking about corn or soybeans.
 
Play Freebird said:
This is what's called an "image"; it was a result of overload, and I suspect you heard it at 610, rather than 640.

The local oscillator of most AM receivers normally operates 455 kHz (450 in some recent designs) above the desired frequency and mixes with the incoming signal to convert it to the intermediate frequency (IF), where it is then amplified, filtered, and demodulated. For example, when you listen to KB with the dial tuned to 1520, the LO runs at 1975 kHz.

However, when the LO is set 455 kHz below a strong signal, undesired mixing can also take place, although most good receivers incorporate front-end filtering in an effort to reduce this problem.

So when you tuned down to 610, the LO was operating at 1065 kHz. 1065 + 455 = 1520, and there's the image.

A related problem near that site is intermodulation; on some receivers, 1520 will mix with 550 to generate a difference product which falls directly on another local station's frequency -- but I'll let you finish the calculation.
Click to expand...

Yes 610 would be close enough, those trash-sistor radios didn't have digital tuning.

My calculation says 970 which wasn't far away.

Not to beat a dead horse but has anyone here (since some of you guys worked at GR and/or KB) ever had to grab some 45's and go jock at the transmitter for either station?

In the old days before remote control I wonder if Cap Cities and Taft ever shared a transmitter engineer? After all why would you need 2 transmitter engineers at one site?
 
"Not to beat a dead horse but has anyone here (since some of you guys worked at GR and/or KB) ever had to grab some 45's and go jock at the transmitter for either station?'

When I worked at WKBW in 1977 I got a tour of the transmitter plant they shared with WGR. KB couildn'r readily operate from the transmitter with the equipment they had on site, but GR could.

KB didn't have any emergency studio facilities there. Maybe they do now. Don't know what the backup plan would have been if they'd lost the ability to feed from Main Street...maybe they'd have grabbed the remote gear they used to program from events like the Fun Affair and lash it together to feed the 50 kilowatt beast.

WGR did have an emergency control room at Big Tree Rd., a glassed-in announce booth that overlooked the big transmitter room with a small board, a couple cart machines and a couple reel-to-reel decks as well as an EV 666 mike (the one so heavy you can hit someone over the head with it knowing it'll do damage). Don't remember a turntable there but I'm sure it had one. For all I know that booth may still be there (although the setup they had which could keep a music station going would have to have been altered to support a sports-talker). They had an emergency tape cued up on the top deck ready to go, I was told it was an hour long and consisted of recent recurrents hosted by then-weekend jock Tony Ventiroli. I learned all this from Pete Bevorka, a WGR engineer who was tending the transmitter that evening and gave me the tour. He said if the program feed from Franklin Street went down for any reason he or whoever was there at the time would have to fire up that tape, call the studio, call Larry Anderson (the PD) at home, and someone would have to go out there and be ready to go live once the backup tape ran out. IIRC he told me they'd also call WKBW studios and notify Sandy Beach if any similar problem happened with the KB transmitter or audio feed, as a courtesy.

Guess WGR hadn't gone to remote control yet.

KB went remote as soon as the FCC changed the rules in the early 70s to allow directional AMs and stations running more than 10 kW (and KB was both) to go remote-control.

"In the old days before remote control I wonder if Cap Cities and Taft ever shared a transmitter engineer? After all why would you need 2 transmitter engineers at one site?"

Couild be, I wish I'd asked Pete about that. Maybe he was that guy from time to time.

I do know that at the time, Capital Cities owned the whole site including the land and building, and Taft was CapCities' tenant. Even though the stations were competing increasingly with each other, the working relationship was always cordial.

Of course it all belongs to Entercom now...
 
Thanks guys for all the great info. That site on Big Tree Road is my all time favorite. I have seen quite a few sites too WLW, WBT, and many others.

I got a tour of the Big Tree site around time time the Harris MW50 replaced the big Westinghouse that KB used. I happened to go out there when the engineers were working. Wish I knew who it was that showed me around.
 
That Big Tree site is one for the books and I feel priveledged to have visited it at least a dozen times over the years thanks to guys like Bob Collins, Victor Michael & Lynn Deppen and Tom Atkins.

WKBW had a fish bowl backup studio just as WGR did, but for many years WGR's was better equipped. Facing the K-Big Westinghouse, Harris or Continental (depending on the era) the small WGR step-up glass enclosed TX studio was on the right, KB's studio of similar size was on the left.

Back in the day, I'm, told these were the perches for the transmitter engineers who were at the site 24-7. For many years, there was an engineer for each station. KB's transmitter site studio consisted of one turntable, one (beat) RCA rack mounted cart machine, a (similarly beat) 300 series Ampex reel, RCA boom mic (you'd love to have one of those today) and a four rotary (of course) pot RCA board. I once heard (when I was a mere lad) Rod Roddy broadcasting from the transmitter site. Years later, I heard Stan Roberts work a few hours from the TX site when power was out at 1430 Main Street.

To the best of my knowledge, KB had transmitter remote control capabilities in the mid-60s. Savage probably knows the make and model. It was one of those classic telephone switch, step-up-step-down models. Probably an RCA.

For years, according to the NABET agreement, the K-Big transmitter was remote controled from 7 a.m. to midnight by the control room engineer at 1430 Main Street. From midnight to 7 a.m., a "maintenance engineer" was on duty at the Big Tree site. Very often it was Frank Saj, who wouldn't hesitate to call the all nite jock with admonitions in his heavy Polish accent "You didn't give the dem legal ID at 3 o'clock..." or "You better back off the modulation, buddy, you're beating up the limiter out here..." or my favorite, "Don't plug the bulk eraser or coffee pot into the AC power strip by the left rack, you'll blow out the power in the control room."

The all nite guy at KB worked in the control room, as did Stan and Danny for their first hour of AM drive, but didn't take TX readings because there was an engineer on duty at the transmitter.

In the mid-70s, when the competition between KB and WGR heated up with Larry Anderson and Randy Michaels in the WGR corner (folks say it became quite, errr, "competitive") and Bob Harper and its CE in the KB corner. KB upgraded its TX site studio to match WGR's.

When Tom Atkins became CE of KB, the processing war again ratcheted up with all kinds of shenanigans being played out (fake processing settings to mask the real settings, cosmetic processors that weren't in line) between the two stations: the days of AM stereo, processing and loudness, the whole magilla. Dave Mason was a hale and hearty competitor on the WGR and the stories are quite entertaining.

Keep in mind the Big Tree site was always owned by the owners of KB, whether it was Churchill, Cap-Cities, Price or Keymarket. WGR always paid (substantial) rent to KB and that always added to the dynamics of the competition. Today, as it was in the BBC era, both stations are owned by Entercom. I guess that's one way to reduce the rent.
 
I remember hearing Bob McRae...or maybe it was Casey Pietrowski, mention gathering up the music, etc. and moving to a different studio than what 'KB used during the day. Did the jocks sometimes play music off disc instead of cart in that studio? I remember hearing records occasionally skip or stick, and songs that had Pop-Tops during the day missing them in the overnight. This would have been 1971-72.

Also I had the privilege of working for Larry Anderson at WWVA-AM/WOVK-FM in Wheeling, WV from 1989-92, it was his first GM gig...which included running the weekly Jamboree USA radio show and annual Jamboree In The Hills festival. His previous stint with Taft - by then it was Great American - had taken him to WTVN/Columbus prior to Wheeling. Larry was a true radio guy...we spoke a couple times about Buffalo and 'KB vs 'GR...he had a huge 'GR thermometer in his office. I also remember him as a true family guy...right down to wife Nancy helping the traffic director with program logs...even when changing computer systems and it took 'til 10PM to get the logs out. The Andersons never placed themselves above their employees. Larry expected 110% from everybody but he and Nancy always gave their 110%. He never begrudged me when I went to Pittsburgh in '92...we remained cordial up until Larry's death in 2001. Incidentially, the Pittsburgh station was owned by Entercom. Hope they're not running Buffalo they way they ran Pittsburgh!
 
I was fill-in at KB just prior to Casey Pietrowski, and at that time we were using 45s exclusively. We moved into the engineers studio at some point in the evening for overnights because there were no engineers after the evening shift, and we needed to go combo. The more important day-parts did have an air engineer in the engineer's studio where there were turntables and cart machines.
The main studio had 2 mics (jock and newsman), clock, and record shelving. Later on one (1) turntable was installed in the main studio.

-30-
 
In the K-Big Kontrol Rheum of the late 1960s, the remote control was the telephone-dial stepper type as Jim recalls. IIRC it was a badge-engineered Rust unit wearing the RCA "meatball" (RCA subcontracted a lot of its non-RF gear out and put its logo on a lot of stuff made by other companies in the day.) The modulation monitor was a General Radio 1931-A in vintage crackle-enamel black.

Overnights were combo, as noted - you had to swing a mic over the RCA consolette, and make sure you threw a mike delegation key on the board so that muting corresponded with the combo control room RCA ribbon mic. Otherwise your carefully-thought-out (!) first comment over the fade of your first record would be obliterated by an earsplitting bark of feedback from the control room speaker. If memory serves it was a huge RCA corner unit, so old it had its own field supply - it wasn't even a permanent magnet (PM) speaker.

Nor was there any provision for monitoring off-air in your headphones. The only audio available on the console was off the program line. Naturally this conflicts with any on-air person's DNA, so I would wait until Norm Bruckner (or Jim Adler or whoever) was safely off-premises - then I'd patch the mod monitor into the Magnecord and plug my Brush-Clevites (I still have my original 1967 set, which still work fine) into the tape recorder's monitor jack. The tape machine was just far enough away you'd lynch yourself if you turned your head quickly, so I made up (off-premises) a ten-foot patch cord. I made the mistake of bringing this cable into the control room one night when Bruckner was still on-duty, which prompted a number of suspicious inquiries about what engineering and tinkering temerities this 19-year old long-haired punk was perpetrating.

And d'accord on how Frank Saj had no compunctions about chiming in with comments on your show from Hamburg via the hotline. I took a call from an enraged Frank one night who was highly offended by my jocular on-air reference to "Alexander Graham Slominski" as "the first telephone Pole."
 
Are there any pix...anywhere...of those 'KB studios? Of course I have a picture in my mind how it might have been but that's all. There's nothing on David Fill's tribute site AFAIK other than the 2003-2006 Entercom revival.
 
I'm laughing still from Savage's recollections about headphone cord whiplash and the Frank Saj story. And as I expected, he solved the riddle of the K-Big remote control unit.

Couple of things. First, major market, high cumes props to Fybush for updating his WMAK-WBL story page.

Second, Chas, you may not want to see pix of the 1430 studios. It might be better to keep the ideal images you have of KB (aka, "The Barn") in your head rather than have them sullied by tales of roofs that leaked and turntables that took 3 turns to come up to speed. A slight exaggeration. Okay, those transcription RCA's only took half a turn to come up to speed. Thus, the fine art of slip q-ing and stretching your hand as wide open as possible, pinky holding the 45, thumb planted on the turntable housing.

Third, corrections. Yes, I know how to correctly spell "privileged." Hey, it was 4 a.m.
Had lunch today with Tom Atkins today and talked about this thread. We also debated the remote control unit at 1430 Main Street. Had the Microtrak with me, but didn't record a thing. Radio geeks would have enjoyed it.

I have to correct my earlier schematic. Although I attributed the proper function to the towers, I gave them incorrect number assignments. The correct numbers, according to Tom, are as follows:

South^


#KB1&WGR1 #KB2 #KB3 #WGR2

West >

#WGR4 #WGR3
Self-supported


As initially noted, towers 3 and 4 are the latest addition to the array, coming when the nighttime power was upped to 5kW. Tower #2 was the original non-DA radiator. The self-supported tower (#4) was at one time used as the non-DA tower. Tom notes that the newer WGR towers (4 and 3) are about 15-20 feet shorter than the other towers in the array.

RCS is correct as to why WGR tower #4 is self-supported. Land access, at the time of construction. In later years (around '90-'95) an additional 20 acres was purchased just east of tower #4.

Some notable recollections from Tom about Cap-Cities upgrade of the plant, KB's highly regarded Chief, Leroy "Uncle Fid" Fiedler and his beloved Westinghouse, Peter Burke, the Harris MW-50, the RCA 10, Continental 50 and the RCA DX-50.

They asked us "if we were staying for dinner," so we took the hint and paid the check.

They said we couldn't be real radio guys because we left a tip. It was in quarters, dimes and nickels, but legal tender nonetheless.
 
chas108 said:
Are there any pix...anywhere...of those 'KB studios? Of course I have a picture in my mind how it might have been but that's all. There's nothing on David Fill's tribute site AFAIK other than the 2003-2006 Entercom revival.
Click to expand...

I have only seen a couple of pictures one of Bob Diamond working the all night show combo in the control room in front of an old RCA board with 3 old looking turntables around him, and a picture of Tom Shannon standing in what looked like a big room with an old RCA mic with a big long boom, the kind you'd expect to see in TV not radio. The walls were made up of that tile with the holes in it.

I walked in once and tried to get a tour of 1430 Main but the receptionist said they weren't giving tours that day. I wonder how many times she said that? I assume 695 Delaware Av was a much nicer place. I did read on Old Forgotten Buffalo that 1430 was very likely the first WKBW transmitter site.
 
The three transcription turntables at 1430 Main Street were RCAs, with both vertical and lateral-cut arms, of course the former of which were never used. Similarly you used the two turntables which were closest to the operating position; the third was pretty much idle. IIRC there were no remote starts - you had to grab the little bakelite handles to turn on the motor. Generally my preferred procedure was to leave the motors on, turntables always revolving, and to slipcue the 45 rpm records because you couldn't see the on-off switches from the mic position. It was really easy to grab the identical speed-selector switch by mistake or knock the tonearm off the record.

You had to be gentle with those RCA tonearms. The cartridges had factory-installed permanent stylii. If you snagged one on the felt or dropped the arm accidentally, the entire cartridge had to be removed from the arm and sent back to RCA for repair. They didn't have slip-in needles like the GE VR-IIs. We had the same tonearms at WENE - 12" version, on QRK turntables - and the engineers hated 'em because of this.
 
Another quick Frank Saj story: one night, for whatever reason, Frank was on the Main St. board for the 7-midnight show immediately preceding my overnight shift. As I sat down and started cueing my first 45 up, it struck me that the volume on the outboard cue amplifier - mounted with, for some bizarre reason, a 12-inch bass reflex speaker under the counter next to the right two turntables - was pretty quiet. Frank was standing there, haranguing me about how I needed a haircut.

I asked if he could reach down and crank up the cue-amp volume a bit. Frank's face lit up with feigned sympathy: "Oh, de CUE ain't lowd enough for you? SURE." The song was ending, so my attention was forced momentarily to talking over the air - therefore I didn't notice Frank turning up the 30-watt Bogen PA amp and huge speaker ALL THE WAY.

The next song was playing. I'm sure Frank was laughing loudly with a Polish accent as he drove away down Main Street - listening, I'm confident, as I dropped the next 45 into cue and backed the record off. A gigantic audio explosion from the cue speaker rattled the countertop - the vibrations even shook the control room floor. The tonearm popped off the record on air like somebody hit the turntable deck with a claw hammer, with the stylus landing on the label. I dove for the console, dumping the song until I could get the stylus back on the record - approximately at the spot from which it had been launched.

Why Frank pulled this stunt I don't know. Maybe it was the telephone Pole bit. Maybe it was my long hair, or perhaps lingering resentment over teenaged combo operators invading that engineering sanctum, KB's decrepit 1940s control room. As Samuel Hopkins Adams once wrote: "I don't know. Nobody knows."
 
Bob (both of you) and Jim should write a book and get all these stories down on paper in some form. If only the listeners could see what went on behind the scenes!

Typical setup at stations I worked at in the '70's: Gates board (Gatesway II or Dualux II), ITC triple decks and 12" QRK turntables with the wooden MicroTrak brand arm and Shure M-44-7 or SC35C cartridge, Mics were usually Shure SM7's, SM5B or Senheiser. Tape usually Ampex AG-440 and maybe an old Ampex 600.

One of the things I liked about working in radio was playing with all the toys in the studio!
 
Encore, Savage, encore! It's a good thing I wasn't guzzling coffee as I read your latest Saga of Saj, I would have nose blasted java all over the keyboard. The recollections here from Al Wallack to Savage and others, have brought back a few memories and made me appreciate my brief stop on the long and winding road of radio.

I'm a fan of NPR's Story Corps (truth be told, I thought of doing something remarkably similar years ago, as I'm sure a few hundred other radio people have) and wish people could upload audio of their tales here, complete with FX.

Wouldn't you like to hear an audio re-creation of Savage's cue speaker from hell story. Wouldn't you like to hear how a skating tonearm landing on felt sounds on a 50kw flamethrower at 12:08 a.m.

Wouldn't you like to hear a re-creation of guys like Frank Saj.

It's not so much stereotyping as character acting, but Frank Saj cannot be done without using an East Side Buffalo accent. Or Jim Adler's voice, gruff, with a dash of NY city street hustler... "I ain't here to babysit ya." Adler always had at least two good profane jokes for you when you worked with him and he was a gem.

Wouldn't you like to hear Fred Klestine's classic Yiddish Sid Freedman, Richest Man in Da Vorld shtick? And Danny's annual Christmas tree lighting?

I stand in awe of the guys who "went before us." You get to work with them if you're lucky and at least "a little bit talented." Maybe you become their peers, but rarely their equal. At least that's the way I feel. The best part is, if you're smart and have a modicum of respect for the game, you learn something from the tribal elders. If you're really fortunate, you might actually contribute in some small way to what they do.

Hard to top Savage's stories, but here's another Frank Saj fractured fable.

First daytime show I did at KB, Saturday midday. I'd worked a few weeks of summer relief all nites and like most jocks, I never worked with a producer. First time ever with an engineer and Frank Saj was in the control room. At that time the KB announce studio had a mic, two turntables and a McMartin rotary pot board which fed the RCA board in Master Control. The engineer ran herd on audio and also ran all commercials and tape.

"So, you're da new guy huh?" Frank asks.

"Guilty as charged." I respond.

"Well look, we got a lotta commercials here, so don't fock it up, okay new guy?"

I'm thinkin' I'm four hours away from working at Purchase Radio again.

So I say something like "I'm looking forward to working with you."

No reply.

"I'm a dead man."

So the show gets started and things go okay for about ten minutes, until we roll into the first commercial break. I tell Frank, "I'll give you a direct hand cue to start the commercial."

No response.

Song ends. I back sell it, read a liner and begin reading a live commercial (those were the days when there were "lives" on the log.) I try to burn off nervous energy. You know this routine, you wring your hands or do the Letterman-Leno routine as if you're warming them over a fire. Anything to calm down.

But suddenly, my nose itches and I instinctively reach up to scratch it around 20 seconds into the commercial in the middle of a sentence.

BAM! Cart fires.

At least I had the good sense to stop speaking and cut the mic. Push the intercom button. "What was that??!" I asked, slightly pissed off.

"You gave me da demn cue."

"No, I was scratching my nose. I told you I'd be specific and point to you."

"Well sonny, dat looked like a point to me."

I'm not nervous anymore, now I'm angry.

"Look, you've worked with some of the best, so bear with me here. When I want a spot, I'll point to you like this..." Exaggerated arm motion, finger extended.

Frank responds, "And I'll point to YOU..." gives me the finger and laughs.

The next two or three breaks were tense. Everytime I pointed, he gave me the bird in return. After that, I began to laugh whenever he flipped me off. After about two hours, the return finger stopped and the tension was gone.

I asked him, "What happened, your hand get tired?" He flipps me off one more time and laughs, "You keep up the good work, sonny, maybe they'll let you come back next week."

Savage! Your turn.
 
This is awesome stuff.

Yesterday afternoon, while I sat behind a top-of-the-line Wheatstone console, speaking into an Electro-Voice RE-20 feeding a Focusrite mic processor...punching up the next .wav file in the Audio Vault, after turning off the mic...I thought about what a wuss I am, and how you KB VIP's made such magic using obsolete, worn-out and makeshift equipment...especially when you were "combo" after midnight. I never would've guessed...although the lack of photos should've been a clue. Just curious, did Jeff Kaye ever bend the GM's ear about getting some new toys written into the next cap-ex budget? It just never occured to me that a company like Cap Cities would use anything but the newest and best equipment in the newest and best facilities.

Today, in contrast, we're out running down the hall after an engineer if so much as a mike stand begins to drop. It was a huge adjustment when current owner CBS started mandating a delay and we could no longer monitor the air signal in real time. At least they attached a processor to the headphone amp so it sounds good when we're on-mic.

I remember RCA transcription tables...had them at my first gig in small-town Vermont in 1973. They must've been the newest version since they only took 1/2 a turn to get up to speed. Were those tone arms murder on those old plastic 45's! And no audio processing to speak of. Pin the VU and an alarm went off, you were off the air!
 
"Just curious, did Jeff Kaye ever bend the GM's ear about getting some new toys written into the next cap-ex budget? It just never occured to me that a company like Cap Cities would use anything but the newest and best equipment in the newest and best facilities."

Jeff told me he did ask...repeatedly. That was one of the things that made the move to WBEN's state-of-the-art facility so easy for him in the mid-70s..

By 1977 KB had gone to full combo operation, and in the process, finally equipped the main air studio with an up to date McCurdy board and new tape machines and cart decks. They re-fitted Alan Lafler's production room with similar stuff. But the old air control room, behind the glass of the studio back wall and elevated a couple of feet, still had the old reel-to-reels, the old turntables and the old RCA board. It had been relegated to news production duty by then. But if you popped in a few patch cords, it could have been used for air work again.

Jim McLaughlin once told me CapCities never liked spending a whole lot on equipment. Their philosophy was, if you put together a staff of smart people, and put enough of them on the job, they'd be more important to producing good radio than fancy equipment. KB proved that...although Jim admitted to me that he sure enjoyed playing with all the shiny toys too, once we all got over to 2077 Elmwood. (Turned out Larry Levite put a premium on talent too, but he also believed in giving them all the necessary hardware to work with.)

The KB building, of course, was still a rat trap.
Literally.

Henry Brach insisted 1430 Main Street was converted from Clinton Churchill's old horse barn and garage. He figured if you went up into the attic (neither he nor I ever did) you might still find hay up there in what had been the hayloft. When he said that I think he was just half-joking...
 
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