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The 1st Annual WYSL-FM "Teen Disk Jockey" on-line Reunion

Did someone mention my name (Paul Palo) Chris Clark? Yes it was me the former PD of WYSL FM then WPHD FM. Did I miss something? My wife and I are in LA where we are working on features and casting films for the last 28 years. I remember Larry Vance and most of yuz guys. It is amazing what you find when you google something. My email is [email protected]. Recently in
touch with David La Russa in the Tucson and Tim Kelly here in LA. Cal Brady and I had a business for a few years in film production.
He is now an owner of a station in Oregon. I remember you Ken and Bob Allen who, I understand is now doing the Great gig in the sky" If you want to get in touch [email protected]. You can look me up on www.imdb.com. Love to hear from anyone who
I worked with, got fired from or hired from or just Buffalo folks in general etc.

thanks
Paul palo
 
My father was James Moran CE of WYSL. Jim Moran passed last year June 07 with cancer. My father had a love for radio as far back as I can remember. As I little girl I can remember our home phone ringing at all hours of the day (before cell phones and beepers) calling my father into work because of equipment not working properly or someone pouring their drink into a pieces of equipment and making them malfunction. My father had 8 kids and would take us to Bob Schwab 's parents farm out in Java, I remember those times to be very interesting. He often spoke of WYSL with all the good and bad times, never forgot anyone. I can remember as kids he would take us down to the studio and let us watch the DJ's on the air and to a child that was very exciting. We always had the radio turn on to WYSL and if for one moment there was a pause of silence my father would run to the phone and call the studio and ask "Whats going on down there".
I could go on but I'm sure we all share the same memories. I was hoping the Buffalo Broadcasters would at least have some kind of mention for him but I am not sure if they know he passed away.

I really enjoy this site, I am enjoying reading all your post.

Mary Moran
 
Welcome to the board Mary and thanks for refreshing people's memories of your dad. As I recall, Jim Moran also worked at WKBW radio after he left WYSL. Kal has suggested the Buffalo Broadcasters stop the sycophantic adulation of the Big Four and the legendary WBEN and look at the big picture. This is a fitting example: There are many men like Jim Moran who deserve to be recognized.

Honoring engineers and technicians may not sell tickets to the annual awards ceremonies, but these men (and women) deserve recognition. The Broadcasters have improved in this regard, but there are many more who are deserving. Behind the scenes people were/are as important as the cupcakes who anchor the TV newscasts.

-9-
 
MaryMoran said:
My father was James Moran CE of WYSL. Jim Moran passed last year June 07 with cancer. My father had a love for radio as far back as I can remember.
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Thanks, Mary for the post.

I never had an opportunity to meet your dad, but in my collection of historic trade journals, I have several old issues of Broadcast Engineering magazine addressed to him. Someone gave them to me after cleaning out the old engineering shop in the attic of 425 Franklin.

It would be great to include more profiles of engineering staff on Buffalo Broadcasters and other historical websites.
 
Play Freebird said:
MaryMoran said:
It would be great to include more profiles of engineering staff on Buffalo Broadcasters and other historical websites.
Click to expand...


The Buffalo Broadcasters would be glad to accept any submission along those lines.
Manpower is the problem, it's a volunteer organization and anytime you find the muse feel free.
Click to expand...
 
AJF said:
- Some of the WPHD jocks I remember include Harv Moore, Robert W. Taylor, Jim Scott, J.P. (John Piccolo), Brian J. Walker, Rick Arnay and Larry Norton. What other names can the folks here remember.
Click to expand...
Just off the turnip truck from Rochester, I got to WPhD in 1974 when McClendon had put the station up for sale and relinquished programming control from Dallas. John McGhan, Steve Lapa, Tom Teuber (moi) David Cahn, Hank Ball, Jim Santella, Don Berns basically got to do what we wanted, and when the ratings came out, it was the best the station had done on several years. Anita Meyer was the copywriter.....remember copywriters?! I left to return to Rochester in September of 1974, a week before Bob Howard took over....on the first day, about a dozen folks were let go and the simulcast with WYSL returned, with Harv Moore and Kevin O'Connell leading the charge. Larry Levitt had been the GM....great guy to work for.....he went to WEBR while working on buying WBEN. 'PhD studios were in that great house on Franklin Street. Allentown was the place to be back then. Anita later followed me to Columbus and Chicago, where she thrived at various big time ad agencies, and where I made an honest woman of her.

Thanks for all the memories....I've been enjoying reading the posts from my current location, behind the Cheddar Curtain in Wisconsin.
 
I have an image burned into my brain pan of several disc jockeys in Buffalo standing in a control room holding tee shirts up to cover their faces and torsos.....I see what looks like a caption reading "---k Rock".
The only DJ I can clearly identify is Santella, who belongs in the ---k Hall of Fame.

Is this real or just a horrible nightmare?

Tom?
 
Two of the jocks in that picture may have been John Rivers and Matt Reidy who worked at QFM97 at the time.
 
That image in your brain is correct, but whether it was a dream or a nightmare is in the eye of the beholder. If you still have a copy, I'd like to point out that it was Winter....in Buffalo.....very cold.....the
Q-FM-97 studio was very drafty.......
 
AJF said:
I was a big fan of WYSL and WPHD starting around 1969, listening from Toronto. It was quite a novelty to hear rock music on the FM band back then (we had CHUM-FM). I remember listening to WYSL-AM (on 103.3) in the day then it would switch to progressive rock at night.
A few questions:
- What did the WPHD call-letters stand for if any?
- WPHD switched back to the WYSL calls in 1974, only to switch back to WPHD in 1977. What was the story behind that?
- Some of the WPHD jocks I remember include Harv Moore, Robert W. Taylor, Jim Scott, J.P. (John Piccolo), Brian J. Walker, Rick Arnay and Larry Norton. What other names can the folks here remember.
- Why did WPHD become WUFX (The Fox) in 1989?
Click to expand...

Through the magic of Google I see that I've been sort of "name-checked."

Here's a reply, albeit 18 months after the fact (if anyone still cares). My stint at WYSL/WPHD was from January 1975 through April or May 1978, working part-time overnights, weekends, and vay-kay fill-in, so I can not address questions from before or after that time. I was a sophomore at Buff State ("Go, Bengals!") where I had become Program Director at the carrier current college station WSCB, and was hired at WYSL/WPHD by then-PD Harv Moore. The term "Teen Disk Jockey" amuses me, as I was 19 at the time of hire.

Anyway, to answer some of your questions:
- What did the WPHD call-letters stand for if any?
We didn't use WPHD when I started. The origin of the calls "WPHD" were never explained. I'll speculate that because Buffalo was such a big college town, it was an an acknowledgement of that.
- WPHD switched back to the WYSL calls in 1974, only to switch back to WPHD in 1977. What was the story behind that?
As I remember it, the AM/FM simulcasting was being cut back, and management (Bob Howard, may he rest in peace) wanted to capitalize on the good will of the old 'PHD calls, as the FM side was gravitating back to more of an AOR format. This was good for me and the other part-timers of that era, as it meant more air time.
- Some of the WPHD jocks I remember include Harv Moore, Robert W. Taylor, Jim Scott, J.P. (John Piccolo [sic]), Brian J. Walker, Rick Arnay and Larry Norton. What other names can the folks here remember?
Wow, most of those names bring back memories! I worked with all of the above, save Brian Walker. Other names you might remember include John ("Grabber") Grabowski, Ken Davis, Craig Matthews, Gary Hamilton, Keith Luke, and Lee Alexander, who, if memory serves me, went on to become "Moontan Davis" at WGRQ/97FM. Btw, J.P.'s last name is spelled P-I-C-C-I-L-L-O, not like the woodwind instrument. Apologies to any of my colleagues I may have missed.

From that time I remember many fun "Y's Guys" basketball fundraisers, most notably getting crushed playing against the Bills. What were we thinking?!!?? They had NO mercy on us! Also, there was "The WYSL/WPHD Disco Road Show" party deejay company, and hanging out at Mother's Bakery and the Elmwood Village Nightclub. ("The only place you go up, to get down!") Good times. Just a few months after I left, "WKRP In Cincinnati" went on TV. It was an amazingly accurate depiction of a mid to small market radio station.

Thanks for remembering me, AJF. It was fun to take a stroll down Memory Lane.
 
The joke among some jocks was WPHD stood for We're Pretty High Daily. Perhaps only partly true. As I heard the legendary Jim Santella once explain it (and I do wish he'd post on this board) the "WPHD" call letters were chosen to reflect a higher degree of music variety and knowledge as it related to the station and its listeners. The first WYSL-WPHD progressive era was every bit as legendary as the WKBW Top 40 era.
 
JustPastBuffalo said:
... As I heard the legendary Jim Santella once explain it (and I do wish he'd post on this board) the "WPHD" call letters were chosen to reflect a higher degree of music variety and knowledge as it related to the station and its listeners. The first WYSL-WPHD progressive era was every bit as legendary as the WKBW Top 40 era.
Click to expand...

Yep, that sounds about right! I did not get to know Jim during my time in Buffalo, but I always admired his work.
 
RickArnay said:
Other names you might remember include John ("Grabber") Grabowski, Ken Davis, Craig Matthews, Gary Hamilton, Keith Luke, and Lee Alexander, who, if memory serves me, went on to become "Moontan Davis" at WGRQ/97FM. ... Apologies to any of my colleagues I may have missed ....
Click to expand...
Of course, immediately upon hitting "Post," I realized I failed to include Steve Matela aka "Dino" and Tom Atkins, who doubled in the Engineering Dep't.
 
I was just getting interested in radio 1966-67, at age 16, and as a longtime listener to WKBW (since we lived south of Jefferson Road we couldn't get WBBF at night, and besides, who wants to listen to endless dumb bits and 24 minutes of spots an hour?) was utterly stunned to discover the massive, commercial-free hits bombing in from Buffalo on WYSL-FM. (Wasn't FM a just the place for classical music, elevator music and Empire School Of The Air?) I didn't care if the jocks sounded like kids - like me, so I identified with them - or that the records were obviously really beat. It sounded fantastic, as opposed to KB's perpetual skywave-groundwave phasing, it had those too-cool Pepper-Tanner "Where The Music Is" jingles and NONSTOP music!

I had an after-school stock-boy job at Long's IGA in Livonia, NY, and the high school kids there had a running battle with the managers at the grocery. We'd sneak into the office and retune the FM tuner from WMIV Bristol Center to WYSL-FM. I remember price-stamping Campbell's Soup listening to some obvious greenhorn DJ playing "Reach Out, I'll Be There" and "Stop, Stop, Stop" by the Hollies on WYSL-FM, and the wrath of Mr. Long for tuning out the 101 Strings of WMIV.

When WYSL-FM disappeared from the air - wasn't it late '66 or early '67? - I got advance permission from my parents to place a long-distance call to Buffalo to find out what happened to the station. An impatient receptionist told me about the storm damage. I was bummed, but at this point I was evolving from listener to cue burner...having bought my FCC Radiotelephone Operator's Permit Study Guide at the old Rochester Radio Supply, and was studying up on Elements 1, 2 and 9. By April '67, on my 17th birthday, I started my first gig - $1.50 an hour at WLEA Hornell.

Another teen DJ - I'll have to alert him to this thread - was Wayne Fuller, longtime WBTA staffer and voice of the Batavia Muck Dogs NY-Penn baseball franchise. Wayne worked for us as a play-by-play guy when we started here in Avon, and I actually lifted one of those Pepper-Tanner jingles from a 1966 reel-to-reel aircheck of him on WYSL-FM. His parents would roll tape on him as a TDJ at their house in Batavia. I still have the jingle on a dusty Fidelipac cart.

Little did I realize, at age 16, that (much) later in life I would end up being keeper of the legendary Western New York callsign: WYSL.
 
There we go...the Heyday!! I believe you've written Chapter 1 of a book soon to be available on Amazon.com! That is the story, I'm sure, many can tell. I also picked up that same book at Rochester Radio Supply in 1974 and began to study. Remembering Element 9 was the biggie & the toughie! Without Element 9 - no Xmtter readings - no board op job. A successful trip to Buffalo for the exam, and I was off & running.

Wayne Fuller - haven't heard the name in a long time. Nicest guy you can meet. Worked with him when he did news at WAXC, and I believe you missed the nod to his Red Wing Baseball fill in gigs. (Is there anything around today to play the Fidelipac on?)
 
That's right, heyday, and Wayne wove in and out of my life repeatedly over 40-plus years in radio. He was 18 (could drive at night) and I was still 17, he at WBTA, me at WLEA, and I would stop by the old Seaver Place 1490 studios and hang with Wayne when visiting my grandmother and aunt/cousins in Batavia. One winter night in 67-68, Wayne and I decided to go to Buffalo to tour KB and WYSL. Incredibly, Jim Adler let us come in and stand in the KB control room to watch Bud Ballou do a couple of sets before he chased us away. Thus ensued a windblown, snowy drive down to the Statler and WYSL. Wayne and I took turns in a phone booth in the Statler lobby, trying to get through to Tim Kelly on the jammed WYSL request lines...improbably, finally getting through and getting permission to come up to 18.

A cranky Tim sat in front of the Gates Dualux console, complaining about how cheap Gordon McLendon was. He was amazingly violent with the equipment. The entire time Wayne and I stood there - about 20 minutes - I never saw the VU meters drop off the pin - pegged the entire time. Down the hall, the FM studio consisted of - if I recall correctly - a 1950s Collins console, a couple of old Gates transcription record-eaters with the Gray sliding-weight tonearms, and a (one) first-generation tube-type Collins/ATC cart machine. It all looked really beat-up.

Later on, after graduation from Ithaca College in '72, Wayne was my news guy frequently at WAXC. And as I said he was the voice of (tape-delayed) high school football at THIS WYSL in 87 and 88. We would put Wayne up at a local motel and he would come in after the Friday game and do Saturday mornings, and actually adopted a stray cat he found huddling near our front door one winter morning.

And, yep - we've still got cart machines, which aren't used much, but which are still functional. You never know when you're gonna need a Pepper-Tanner jingle.... ;)
 
Chapter 2 is done already? Need an agent?
You better write faster. All of us from 'way back when" have similar passion stories to tell. Look back and laugh now, but it was "worth the stupid things we did" just to get near the 4 letters - always starting with W or K.
So tell the world, how did YOU handle the groupies calling from phone booths to make requests (like playing the odds that Top 40 hit will be on within the next hour) when you had finally made it to the cue burning seat? Accomodating? Stand-offish? Just curious. Stars forget their roots sometimes ;)
 
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