That leads me to another question. While its not a radio question, maybe someone can answer without me getting intotoo much trouble. When did they start doing delays/closings on KDKA, WPXI (WIIC formely) and WTAE?
I don't know, but I can push it back as far as 1977, when I first arrived at KDKA. I lived on Mt Washington (as did the P.D. And Harry O'Toole, come to think of it. he was the secretary in the Programming Department and a frequent foil on the Bogut show.) Anyway, we had to bust hump to get to the station by 4:30am on possible snow mornings and take the phone calls from the various principals. The system was pretty rudimentary: our five incoming program dept phone lines were decoupled from the main switchboard, the Principal (or whoever) would call that 'secret' phone number and give us the name of the school and the code number, which was "92.9" (KDKA-FM's frequency.) Everybody had the same code number, which turned to disaster when some kids, somewhere (never found out who) got hold of it and called in one morning and cancelled several schools which were, in fact, open.
(We always got a few calls from voices that sounded like they were 12, and who hung up quickly when asked for the code number ... But this one slipped through.) You can imagine we had some very irate school officials - and parents - and had to jigger the system virtually overnight. By which I mean we had to contact every school, hundreds of them, assign an individual code number, and come up with a system to check the numbers quickly as they came flooding in on snow days AND get the information to Bogut or Cigna in some sort of coherent form to broadcast. (Which we did.)
I always thought the TV guys were idiots for not just scooping up our work and running it on a lower-third crawl during the CBS morning show, whatever that was back then. But they never asked, and I certainly never went down to them and said "Hey, why don't you take one of our best features and run with it." The TV people thought the 4:3 screen was inviolate at the time. They didn't even out up a KDKA bug as all the channels do now.
The system we had was quite ingenious and they could have had it for free. (Actually so could every other radio station, delayed by 30 minutes, but they were content to let us have it exclusively.) It was all on strips of paper and master lists. I'm sure it's all computerized now.
Yes it was the most boring programming imaginable. It also got us a spot on the kitchen radio not only on big snow days but also on light snow days and sometimes even on no-snow days, and got a letter from every principal carried to Mom by little Suzie & Johnny telling the parents that they had to tune to KDKA for the "official" information. I saw radios in people's houses with a big grease pencil or lead pencil mark at 1020, obviously not regular listeners, but they knew where to find us. (The Pirates accomplished the same thing with slightly more interesting programming.) We also found that the halo extended to credibility in our weather reporting and community service image. It doesn't get much better than that.
