ROCHESTER RADIO 1967 - Only 12 stations in town........

[JIBGUY]

Sitting here near Boston, loading some public affairs shows into the computer, I have some time to recollect what Rochester radio was like in 1967 when I first came to Rochester as a student at RIT..... Looking at a list of all Rochester area stations nowadays, I amazed at how many there are.... about 3x what there were back in '67. And the market has grown a bit smaller too, in rank.

1967..... there was.....

680 - WNYR - a 250-watt daytime blowtorch that did quite well for 250w. Country format. Heavy with ads. Made tons of money. Later moved to 990, due to increased interference from 680 in Toronto.

950 - WBBF - unquestionably the most successful pop music station of the 60's and 70's. Most of the population lived inside its 1kw signal...THEN. Back in 1967, civilization ended south of Rt 252.

1180 - WHAM - It was then what it is now, but ownership had local ties.

1280 - WROC - 5kw day and night, from the 4 towers near the highway. Playing MOR music from the Channel 8 building on Humboldt St. Popularity gradually declining, then later changed to 60's oldies and then many otrher formats tried. Bob Mills seemed to fit with many formats as a DJ (also TV8 weatherman).

1370 - WSAY - Coming to RIT from near NYC where I was used to toally professional stations like WABC and WMCA, I thought I was dreaming (nightmare) when I first heard 1370. -overmodulated, general poor quality. Playing top-40 hits of the day, doing countdowns, no jingles. Owned by Gordon Brown who was often in the East Ave offices not far from WHAM. Studios and transmitter far away in that unpainted house on French Rd.

1460 - 5kw WHEC... co-owned with Channel 10, with studios on East Ave too. (TV studios were in the basement). MOR format. Hits of the day as long as they weren't rocky. Sounded good. I remember Johnny Rapp being there.(Where is he now?)

WNYR-FM 101 - simulcast of country music on AM. (AM had lion's share of audience)
(Later to become top-rated WEZO-FM with beautiful music)

WROC-FM - SRDS book listed their rates at $10. per spot. Beautiful Music or classical.

WVOR-FM 100.5 - tower on top of Midtown Plaza. Studios at 333 Midtown, third floor), great beautiful music set-up by the Wertheimer family which also owned WDDS-FM Syracuse, WFLY-FM in ALbany, and WBUF-FM in Buffalo. I later worked for Bud Wertheimer there, and often met his dad, Albert Wertheimer. All 4 stations were daisy-chained together at times or using home-made 7" reels of music produced in Buffalo. WVOR's beautiful music demise was when WEZO came on and did it in stereo. WVOR didn't go stereo til around '75.

WHFM 98.9?- WHAM's FM station which always changed direction (but still with pop music of one style or another) every year. Rumor had it that when rating started creeping over a 2.0, they'd change it to knock the ratings down... didn't want it to take anything away from WHAM. Came on in 1968 with a new package of 1964 PAMS jingles... "You're on the Rochester merry-go-go-round....."

WXXI-FM - I don't recall it being there.... but then what college student listened to stuffy public radio then?

WCMF-FM - 96.9 - Mish-mash of music. Located on 14th floor of the old Lincoln-Rochester building in tiny studios. In '67, only the IDEA of prog rock was beginning to surface. This 1350-watt station was doing combination of classical, jazz, folk, MOR -you name it, along with brokered morningR&B show with Herb Hamlett. Any kind of music that wasn't played anywhere else, ended up on WCMF in a strange way. By 1969, it became "The Sound of Underground" and was Rochester's true prog-rock station (every city had one by then or by 1970). By 1971, every "head shop" downtown and near East Avenue were advertising.
Announcers in 1969 were paid low wages, BUT got "royalties". Someone in the office (Donna Nickerson) actually typed out a list of royalties for each announcer, listing every spot aired on every airshift. Grueling paperwork. (This way my first commerical radio job, starting in Sept '70).

WDKX-FM - not born yet.
WITR-AM 600 - carrier current and/or long-wire AM that couldn't be heard off campus
(nor ON campus). -despite a ton of Electrical Engineering students there.
WRUR-FM - ooops that makes 13 stations.... but never caught anyone listening to it.

That's it! ---just 12/13 stations.....

Out in the boonies were......
WADD-1560-Brockport; not born yet. (insert comment here)
WCGR-1550 Canandaigua was doing real good local radio, but its 250 watts day only always sounded muddy. (No FM until around 1974)
WACK-1420-Newark.... Also did very well with top-40 format. Newark far enough away from Rochester signals. (Wasn't aware of an FM there)
WGVA-1240-Geneva... hottest little station in the state! Top-40 format.
Wasn't aware of any FM there.
WCJW-11?0-Warsaw... not born yet.
W--- -1600-Geneseo... not born. Died as a CP.
WBTA-1490-Batavia... not on anyone's radar in and around Rochester, but likely good in Batavia.


Good night everyone.

 

[MikeSmithWNYR]

I was but a wee lad listening to the radio out here in the boonies of Yates County in those years...

95BBF with Jack Palvino and Dick Tobias - they moved on to continued success with WVOR. Jessica Savitch was the Honey Bee, driving around in a Camaro with a beehive on top.
1180 WHAM with Jack Slattery (The World's Tallest Midget) and George Haefner. I believe WHAM was pulling a 30 share in those days. As I recall, our principal used the 6am news as a dress code indicator. If it was a reported 10 degrees or less at 6am on WHAM girls could wear slacks to school that day. (Yes, this was a public school)
WHFM "FM99" Top 40. I remember it being automated with voice tracks out of sync with the songs.
WBFB 92.5 - Classical. My aunt used to love this station.

There's more, but I gotta go to work!

 

[Play Freebird]

WXXI-FM - I don't recall it being there.... but then what college student listened to stuffy public radio then?

Surprisingly, Rochester's first non-com FM is little WIRQ at Irondequoit High School, which signed on at 90.9 in January 1960, beating WRUR (1966) and WXXI-FM (1974).

WXXI-FM agreed to accept de minimus third-adjacent interference from WIRQ when the application to transmit on 91.5 from Pinnacle Hill was filed. WIRQ proposed last October to vacate 104.7 and return to 90.9 in effort to resolve mutual interference with 104.9 WKDL, which moved in from Brockport a couple of years ago. Still no word from the FCC on this application.

 

[fybush]

WROC-FM - SRDS book listed their rates at $10. per spot. Beautiful Music or classical.

Beautiful music, programmed from automation at the Pinnacle Hill tower site, most likely.

WXXI-FM - I don't recall it being there.... but then what college student listened to stuffy public radio then?

It wasn't there yet, and didn't come along until 12/23/74. (The program log from Day One is framed and displayed on the wall in the hallway leading to the studio...)

WXXI-TV had just signed on itself, in Sept. 1966, from the basement of the old East High School.

The longhair audience that WXXI-FM would someday serve was then being served by WBFB 92.5, the classical sister station to WBBF - and indeed, the WBFB record library and several of its air staff (hi there, Simon) would eventually migrate down the dial to 91.5.

That's it! ---just 12/13 stations.....

Plus, as Freebird notes, WIRQ at Irondequoit HS. The noncomm part of the band would have its first big explosion here in the early seventies, with ten-watters signing on in Greece (WGMC), Brockport (WBSU at the University and WBKT at the high school), Henrietta (WRHR, ancestor to today's WBER) and Geneseo (WGMC), plus WITR going to FM. The next big explosion would come in the late eighties/early nineties as all the religious signals lit up down there.

Out in the boonies were......
WADD-1560-Brockport; not born yet. (insert comment here)
WCGR-1550 Canandaigua was doing real good local radio, but its 250 watts day only always sounded muddy. (No FM until around 1974)
WACK-1420-Newark.... Also did very well with top-40 format. Newark far enough away from Rochester signals. (Wasn't aware of an FM there)
WGVA-1240-Geneva... hottest little station in the state! Top-40 format.
Wasn't aware of any FM there.
WCJW-11?0-Warsaw... not born yet.
W--- -1600-Geneseo... not born. Died as a CP.
WBTA-1490-Batavia... not on anyone's radar in and around Rochester, but likely good in Batavia.

The 1600 in Geneseo didn't show up as a CP until the mid-eighties, if I recall. I'm pretty sure it was granted right around the same time Bob Savage got his Avon CP that would become WYSL. It briefly had the calls WLMO attached to it, but was never built. There was also a CP around this time for a daytimer on 1560 in Webster (WMJO?) that was also never built.

WGVA didn't have an FM until it bought WNYR-FM, and that was more than two decades after the timeframe we're talking about.

Was there much cross-lake listening back then, Bob? I imagine the Toronto FMs would have been pretty weak here in the days before the CN Tower, and the AMs were mostly hampered by lousy directional patterns.

 

[OldNumber7]

Several things to add to several posts above (and lots of memories of personalities) from a former Rochesterian:
1) Dick Tobias joined Jack Palvino on BBF long after '67. In '67, Tobias was anchoring on Channel 10, but I don't know if he was doing anything on WHEC radio at the time. In '67, the morning news on BBF was handled by Alex Lamutis (spelling?), part of the great team of BBF radio anchors that included Bob Bohrer.
2) Bob Mills -- now there's a name. Besides doing weather on Ch. 8, he was all over WROC and WROC-FM. Tom Ryan was another personality working on all three stations. Anne Keefe was another; I recall her doing Dialing for Dollars on Ch. 8 and some of the radio before she became a regular on-camera reporter. She left in the 70s for KMOX. (BTW: Remember the Channel 8 news in the late 60s? Tom Decker with news and sports, Mills on weather, Mort Nusbaum for business news/stocks -- they were dominant before 10 and 13 got their acts together and Decker left for his Safety Council gig).
3) In '67, WHEC radio heavily promoted the team of Eddie Meath and Tom Griffiths; Meath began hosting his morning TV show a couple of years later.
4) IIRC WOKR-TV sports anchor Ron DeFrance handled a weekend shift at BBF around 67 or 68.
5) Cross lake listening was pretty limited back then, though the D&C faithfully listed CBL in its published list of "regional stations" every Sunday for years.
6) Growing up in Pittsford, it was frustrating when BBF would practically disappear on night pattern. In our household, that usually meant my brother turned the kitchen radio at night to WSAY; with more rock and roll after the evening rosary. That meant we woke up to WSAY's morning drive country format -- hosted by countless Jerry Jacks -- until sunrise and we could twist the dial back to BBF.

 

[Bob1370]

Ah, memories...this is the radio a lot of us in the business now, cut our teeth on, and even got us interested in trying our hand at radio.

BBF in 1967 was VERY day-parted, with an almost AC-style music mix, missing most of the really hard rock, in morning drive and middays (core artists like the Stones and Beatles excepted), heavy on smoother soft rock and Motown with even a little Sinatra thrown in whenever he charted. The idea was to get the drive-to-work, office and stay-at-home listeners away from WHAM, and in terms of pulling in the 18-34s it worked very well. The harder rock on the charts started showing up during afternoon drive, especially after Nick Nickson retired from the air in 1966 and went into the front office at BBF (was Tom George his replacement?)--and the station really rocked the hardest at night and on the overnights. It might have been the most drastically dayparted top 40 station I can remember, way more than it would be later on, more than WAXC ever was in the 70s and more than WKBW ever was from 1958 all the way to the end 30 years later. I was a teenager just getting interested in radio and years away from my first parttime gig, so if I noticed it then, even before I'd heard the "dayparting" term, it MUST have been pretty pronounced.

Old Number 7 recalls WBBF's nasty night pattern. Growing up out in Perinton, I'd hear it well some nights, but fighting with WWJ in Detroit on other nights, depending on the ionosphere (and that was years BEFORE WWJ got the Feds' permission to run 50,000 watts 24/7; God only knows how bad things get on 950 some nights now). But WSAY wasn't a lot of folks' last resort for the hits, even though it had a much better nighttime signal pattern. The sound and presentation was just too crude. The preferred alternative when you couldn't hear BBF or didn't like the tune they were playing (and for a while, the station you listened to in my high school, Aquinas, if you wanted to be considered 'cool'--Bud Ballou was a first cousin of one of my classmates) was WKBW. It came in better than BBF at night almost everywhere except downtown Rochester, and sounded better in the western 'burbs any time of day. Pete Burk once told me that 'KB's 50,000 watt blowtorch on Big Tree Road was especially designed to serve both the Buffalo market core and Rochester well 24/7, and back in those days when computer noise, HD splatter and drop-in stations hadn't fogged up the band, it did. Everyone with a car seemed to have it programmed on the right-hand button on his radio. Besides, it was just a damn good radio station, it was available all the time instead of only at night like WABC or WLS, and you had to go all the way to New York or Chicago to find anything that matched it. KB showed up in the Rochester Pulse and Arbitron surveys back then, and even beat some local FMs in 12+ AQH and cume audience.

BBF was a good station as well, but its signal limitations really seemed to invite competition long before it got any. It was a station whose format monopoly and WMCA-inspired presentation enabled it to prosper despite signal problems that would have killed a lesser player. I'm still surprised it took until January of 1972 for a serious wide-coverage competitor to emerge on the AM band with WAXC. We didn't have the greatest nighttime pattern either (although it was 5,000 watts, and could spread a little further even in its worst nulls than BBF's could) but the daytime non-DA signal beat BBF in drivetime coverage hands down. That delivered the first blow to BBF. The second, was the emergence of FM. Nothing would be the same afterward.

 

[JIBGUY]

Ooooops... forgot about Rochester's 13th station (full-power, that is).... WBFB-FM.... owned by WBBF. They wanted to dump classical soooo bad.... the GM came to WVOR offering WVOR its classical music library if VOR would change to classical (1974). This was in the day when it was still believed that the FCC would not allow a format change AWAY from classical IF no other station was doing that format. WVOR said no. But eventually that library ended up with WXXI-FM for their classical format. WBFB-FM then changed to WNWS-FM with NBC's 24/7 news format. It sounded real good! However WBBF folks were sure that it would fail, which would leave them open to any format they wanted on this now-hot spectrum called FM. So, the news format (an FCC-liked format) was essentially used to bridge the gap from classical to what it eventually turned into... WMGQ-Magic playing softits. They did well with that for at least a decade.

Around that same time or a bit erlier, in 1975, all Rochester FM stations got together to sell "FM converters" to their audiences' cars. Most cars, even in 1975, did not have FM tuners in them.

Someone mentioned Tom Griffiths at 1460. Around the time that 1460 changed from WHEC to WAXC, three WHEC top announcers all went to WADD-1560-Brockport.... Tom, Dan Kelley and Johnny Rapp. Those guys, along with previous WADDer Larry Hunter (Larry Howard) (ex-WGR), gave WADD a professional sound. But that was all over by 1973.

Ratings: Around 1967, WHAM had lots of low-20's.... don't recall 30.
In '67, almost no one listened to any Toronto stations, excepting the intellectuals who weresmart enough to know that American news was not complete, and that another country's news would add better perspective to world events. That thinking also led to WCMF's airing of BBC news for ahile around 1971.

Wow! a 1560 CP in Webster? Did know about that! Must have been directional away from nearby 1550-Canandaigua. WADD-1560-Brockport had to have directional to stay off of 1550's turf... can imagine a 1560 in Webster, which is closer to Canadaigua would have to beam to the fish.

Still, my biggest shocker in the biz is when I visited the WSAY studios on French Road (1972).... and saw a Wollensak microphone being used as "the mike".

A WVOR staffer.. in sales.... Jim McKechnie.... who had owned WJMK outside of Syracuse...1220 I think?

 

[audio4tv]

Plus, as Freebird notes, WIRQ at Irondequoit HS. The noncomm part of the band would have its first big explosion here in the early seventies, with ten-watters signing on in Greece (WGMC), Brockport (WBSU at the University and WBKT at the high school), Henrietta (WRHR, ancestor to today's WBER) and Geneseo (WGMC), plus WITR going to FM. The next big explosion would come in the late eighties/early nineties as all the religious signals lit up down there.

WGVA didn't have an FM until it bought WNYR-FM, and that was more than two decades after the timeframe we're talking about.

WBKT went on the air first in Brockport, years before WBSU at SUNY Brockport went on the air. It was in 1976, I beleive, and the radio club there used to do a weekly show on WWBK (WADD) on the weekend for a few hours on tape. NY State's Lt. Governor at the time, Mary Anne Krupsak, was the speaker at the dedication of the new station. She now co-owns restaurants in Geneva with Sue Cohen. It joined the three other stations, WIRQ, WRHR, and WGMC to form MERA, Monroe Eductional Radio Association, to do some joint projects and broadcasts. For a short time, WSCS at Sodus High School, joined the group.

Speaking of Geneva, WGVA and WECQ were co-owned together first. It was not until later during another ownership change, did WNYR come into the WGVA and Finger Lakes Empire of George Kimble and Alan Bishop. WECQ became WFLK and is now owned by Russ Kimble.

 

[audio4tv]

WADD-1560-Brockport had to have directional to stay off of 1550's turf... can imagine a 1560 in Webster, which is closer to Canadaigua would have to beam to the fish.

The WADD pattern sent most of their power into Lake Ontario. It is bascially the same pattern as the current 1590 night pattern that is there today. They had sharp nulls to the SE and the SW, with minor lobes adjacent to them, including one due south. They used to get postcards from Sweden and Canada all the time in the Winter months before sign off, which was quite early (4:30 PM in December). They did have to protect 1550, but the main culprit was also WQXR in NY, which also was the reason for day time only operation. I remember one time, when it was WWBK, in the very early 80's, the GM at the time, decided to invoke the FCC rule allowing the station to stay on past sign off, due to a Tornado Watch, in effect for Orleans County. He was on the air giving all kinds of wrong information on what to do in case a tornado happened.

As a kid, I remember listening to the station when it first signed on. It was great. Bob Bittner even spent time there, if I remember correctly. In high school, Glenn Garmen hired me for fill in work, and weekends (A lot of ball games) He also hired Jay Stevens and Mike Doyle, while we all were in college together. Glenn ran into so much garbage there by the GM and small percentage owner, that one day, he had had it. Put "Take this Job & Shove it" on the turntable, and walked out. Probably the best decision he ever made.

 

[MikeSmithWNYR]

A friend of mine from college was hired to be the engineer for Ferdinand J Smith's morning show on WAXC - but Smith had moved on by the time he got there. Soon after they switched to WWWG. I don't recall how long Smith did mornings at WAXC.

 

[Play Freebird]

Let's not forget WMIV, former Rural Radio Network O and O that transmitted on 95.1 from Worden Hill (Bristol Mountain) with fair to good coverage across Monroe County. It was one of a group of five FMs programmed from Ithaca and taken over in 1969 by Pat Robertson of CBN. In rural parts of Livingston and Yates counties, WMIV was one of the few FM signals that could be received well in the '60s.

In 1967, WMIV's owner was Woody Erdman who operated under the "Ivy Broadcasting" banner. He also had WTKO in Ithaca and WOLF Syracuse. Apparently, he considered WMIV to have the greatest economic potential of any of his FM stations, because he installed a new Collins transmitter at the South Bristol site in April 1967, raised power to 9.5 kW, and added vertical polarization to the old RCA Pylon in an attempt to better serve Rochester. The vertical polarization was accomplished with a Collins/ERI 300-5 five-bay dipole array.

Collins may have also included some audio gear for the Ithaca studio in that equipment package. An old Collins console was sent to WJIV when CBN sold out; I saw it rusting away in the basement of the Cherry Valley building several years ago.

 

[Call Me Sherlock]

BBF in 1967 was VERY day-parted, with an almost AC-style music mix, missing most of the really hard rock, in morning drive and middays (core artists like the Stones and Beatles excepted), heavy on smoother soft rock and Motown with even a little Sinatra thrown in whenever he charted.  The idea was to get the drive-to-work, office and stay-at-home listeners away from WHAM, and in terms of pulling in the 18-34s it worked very well. The harder rock on the charts started showing up during afternoon drive, especially after Nick Nickson retired from the air in 1966 and went into the front office at BBF (was Tom George his replacement?)--and the station really rocked the hardest at night and on the overnights. It might have been the most drastically dayparted top 40 station I can remember, way more than it would be later on, more than WAXC ever was in the 70s and more than WKBW ever was from 1958 all the way to the end 30 years later. I was a teenager just getting interested in radio and years away from my first parttime gig, so if I noticed it then, even before I'd heard the "dayparting" term, it MUST have been pretty pronounced.

Second Quote:

BBF was a good station as well, but its signal limitations really seemed to invite competition long before it got any. It was a station whose format monopoly and WMCA-inspired presentation enabled it to prosper despite signal problems that would have killed a lesser player. I'm still surprised it took until January of 1972 for a serious wide-coverage competitor to emerge on the AM band with WAXC. We didn't have the greatest nighttime pattern either (although it was 5,000 watts, and could spread a little further even in its worst nulls than BBF's could) but the daytime non-DA signal beat BBF in drivetime coverage hands down.

Bob, a couple of responses from someone who was there…

‘BBF Dayparting – Music on the station was determined by a vote of the personalities in a weekly music meeting.  Each jock programmed the music on his show each day from the music that was available for play each week.  That usually included several “Picks to Pop” and a few “Housewife” or AC-type tunes for use in the mid-day shows.  If the music was “dayparted”, it was a decision made by the individual jock.  In addition to the currents, we were to play one pick hit and one oldie an hour.  There was never any formal prohibition against playing anything on the playlist in any daypart that I recall. 

Nick Nickson went off the air into fulltime sales in the Fall of ’67.  At that time, I was moved from my evening shift into afternoon drive.  Ferdinand Jay was moved from overnights to late evening as my replacement.

Now on to WAXC – I was let go as WBBF’s Program Director by the station’s new GM in September of 1971.  His predecessor, John Sayre, had put together some partners and was buying WHEC from Gannett. The new GM suspected that I was going to be joining Sayre once the sale was approved so he let me go.  As it turned out, his suspicion turned out to be true in January 1972.

Sayre and I put together a staff that included Scott St. James from WPOP in Hartford in AM Drive, Don Ryan from WOLF in Syracuse in mid-days, myself in afternoon drive, Larry Black in early evening, Lou Paris of WHEC in late night and Johnny Rapp of WHEC overnights.

When St. James bowed out just before we debuted to take a job in St. Louis, we moved Black to morning drive and hired Bob Savage, an Ithaca College Senior who at the time was at WELM in Elmira to handle early evenings.  Savage made the trek from Ithaca  to Rochester daily until his graduation in May.

Bob, several times over the past few years you have mentioned your time at WAXC and the success of the station against WBBF.  I was there from the beginning up until the station was sold to Tony Brandon and then fired when he restaffed, 

When were you there?  For the life of me, I don’t remember you being on the staff during my time there.  Were you part of the staff that Brandon brought in under consultant Chris Bailey, ex-KCBQ jock? 

Incidentally, WAXC’s success against WBBF was in 1972, 1973 and into 1974.  Bailey’s short-live screaming Q format was hardly a success.  Brandon called me back a few months later to put 3WG on the air and that didn’t last long either.  Tony wasn’t a patient man!  Fired again!

Larry White

 

[therealjm12]

WGVA-1240-Geneva... hottest little station in the state! Top-40 format.

In 1967 WGVA was owned by R. Peter Straus and the Straus Broadcating Group. Straus, also, owned WMCA in NYC, WALL in Middletown, and WTLB in Utica-Rome. I was working at WTLB in the later years of the Straus ownership. We got all the hand me downs from from WMCA. Cart machines, turntables, mics, etc. - great stuff. Peter wanted to succeed Rockerfeller as Govenor of N. Y. So he had an hands on approach to his stations. He did editorials on all of them and had very strong news depts. and did a lot of public service. Plus we were "The Home of the Good Guys". All the upstate stations had a direct audio line to NYC so Peter and his croonies could listen to his stations anytime.
I only heard WGVA a couple times in those years but I know it was very similar to WTLB which was an incredible sounding station. Utica-Rome was the #76 largest market at the time so TLB had a very big time sound. - and WGVA was pretty much its clone.

 

[Mike Sheridan]

Re: ROCHESTER RADIO 1967

Sitting here near Boston, loading some public affairs shows into the computer, I have some time to recollect what Rochester radio was like in 1967 when I first came to Rochester as a student at RIT..... Looking at a list of all Rochester area stations nowadays, I amazed at how many there are.... about 3x what there were back in '67. And the market has grown a bit smaller too, in rank.

Do you remember in 1976 talking to a kid living in Fort Lauderdale who wanted to work in Rochester? You were at WVOR and gracious enough to talk to me giving me the lowdown on the market. I have never forgotten that kindness.

I wanted to work at WROC 1280 but it didn't work out and it's just as well it didn't. In the summer of '76 WROC was in the middle of some really bad union problems. A couple years later I almost had a chance to do overnights at WHAM but that too fizzled out.

 

[JustPastBuffalo]

IIRC, the 1600 kHz assignment for Geneseo drifted south to Dansville. It was put on the air as WDNY and now operates on 1400. It's a pretty nifty local AM-FM combo and you can't help but like that the AM broadcast the 11-12 year old Little League District Finals. Now that's local radio.

 

[Paul_Warren]

Brandon called me back a few months later to put 3WG on the air and that didn’t last long either. Tony wasn’t a patient man! Fired again!

Larry, 3WG sounded terrific once it got past the first couple weeks. I still remember the TM "Listen to Your City" package. (And the hilarious "Tomorrow Radio" spoof on the B-side of the vinyl demo LP, for that matter!) If memory serves me, Brandon went brokered religious, and the last AC-format book, released by Arbitron after the change, made him look pretty dumb for dumping the format!

Whatever became of my fellow East Aurora High School alumnus, Wade Keller, AKA Tom Keller?

 

[yugoidar]

Last I knew, Tom Keller was still working for the CC cluster in Rochester primarily in production.

 

[Mark Giardina]

This topic sure brought back a lot of memories for me. I just read where David Laird is retiring. I worked with Dave at WHAM and it's hard to believe that he's reached retirement age already. Guess we are all getting a bit older.

Besides production, Tom Keller is also doing an air shift on 100.5 I believe. I heard him weekday nights, but it might be voice-tracked, I am not sure.

WGVA was a great training ground for a lot of talent that eventually moved on to larger markets. Unfortunately these "farm clubs" as I called them, no longer exist; at least they way they did during the 60s and 70s. Many of us came up the ranks from Elmira, Corning, Geneva and other stations to work in Buffalo and Rochester.

What I remember best about WGVA was Jerry Sherwin, the so-called "Mayor of Geneva" who was at the station for, I believe four decades, before he either left or was shown the door.

As for Jack and George at WHAM, that was a wonderful experience working with them.

After reading the comments here there are times that I wish the "good old days" would not have ended. But alas all good things come to an end.

 

[Play Freebird]

IIRC, the 1600 kHz assignment for Geneseo drifted south to Dansville. It was put on the air as WDNY and now operates on 1400. It's a pretty nifty local AM-FM combo and you can't help but like that the AM broadcast the 11-12 year old Little League District Finals. Now that's local radio.

1600 drifted the other way, starting out in Dansville in October 78, then moving to Geneseo after WDNY's shift to 1400. I was DNY's first contract engineer during my senior year in college and took the job more for the experience than the pay, but isn't that usually the case?

Several months after the station signed on, I got a call from GM Dave Mance, who reported the transmitter meter readings were all way off and signal coverage was poor. When I arrived at the site, I saw that the lower part of the "lightning gap" across the tower base insulator had been pushed up by ice and was causing a dead short to the tower. (The base pier hadn't been built quite high enough and drainage around it was poor, causing the entire lower half of the base insulator to be frozen in this block of ice.) So I needed some kind of makeshift spacer to jam in the gap to prevent this from happening again. Inside the building, a yellow plastic thing caught my eye -- it was a 1240 WGVA frisbee, and the edge was just the right thickness to do the trick. We made it through the rest of the winter with no more shorts, thanks to our friends in Geneva!

 

[Bob1370]

A shout out to Larry White, aka CallMeSherlock...

Yes, indeed, I was part of the crew brought into WAXC by Tony Brandon. I was the morning news guy working directly under ND Forest Lewis, who hired me to replace Karen Hasby, and working with two different morning men, Tom Keller and Dan Collins (who worked for part of his tenure as Dan Money and then dropped the pseudonym). Greg Schaefer came in from WNDE in Indy to program and do PM drive. I'd been a street reporter and fill-in anchor at WKBW following grad school, and WAXC represented a significant step up, to a station in my home town that I'd admired for years--not to mention a little fatter paycheck. TPTB asked me to stay on when WAXC became 3WG in the spring of '78 (you probably wouldn't remember, but we met and chatted briefly when you came back aboard to lead the transition to an AC format--as I recall, it was in that office at 50 Chestnut Plaza that used to be Bishop Fulton Sheen's back before WAXC moved in). But I had an offer from Jim McLaughlin to join the news department at WBEN in Buffalo and be part of Jeff Kaye's morning drive show. So I headed down the road to Buffalo on April Fools' Day '78 and stayed for three years on the up-before-the-roosters early watch. Came back to Rochester to help my dad in the family business in '81, and after he passed, joined WXXI as daytime talk host in 1988--been there ever since, 20 years and counting. So much for my story.

Everyone in upstate NY was following WAXC all during the 70s, and people in the business admired the sound and its success out of the box. It was an excellent station...you built a really good sound, IMHO had BBF all beat. I was over in Syracuse at WHEN, itself an AC pioneer, during WAXC's height in 1973-74--and to tell you the truth, we were all listening (as best we could from 75 miles away) and learning a few new wrinkles in the process. We admired what you did.

A side note about Tony Brandon...after he sold out all his radio properties a few years back, for a considerable chunk of change, he moved down to Baltimore and became general manager of WYPR, the Charm City's main NPR news/talk station, with a format a lot like WXXI-AM or WNYC.

And Tom Keller's still in town working at the Clear Channel cluster, voicetracking for a lot of eastern markets and appearing on-air on Fox 95.1.