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THE FIRST 13Q?

S

Savage

Does anyone know anything about a long-dark AM licensed to Solvay - it was a 500-watt, two-tower directional daytimer on 1320, WQSR. If memory serves it was on the air from the early 60s until sometime in 1967. WQSR operated during the period I was just getting into radio, and I would listen to them while punching around to regional legends like WNDR, WOLF and WTLB on my way to visit my brother who went to Hamilton College in Clinton from '64 to '68. My recollection is that they sounded pretty darn good at least at the infrequent times I was listening.

WQSR must have been pulled in pretty tightly to the east to protect first-adjacent WTLB and co-channel WWHG (RIP) in Hornell. IIRC the Solvay station did a version of top 40 when WOLF was country. With the eastern null it couldn't have had a very signal in much of the Syracuse market.

My Ithaca College friend Bill Hergonson, ex-WSYR and WNDR, related that the station had an RCA equipment package and the owner just pulled the main breaker and turned the license back in to the Commission some time in '67 after years of losing money.
 
WQSR was on the air from October of 1961 until the owner pulled the plug...the guidebooks of the day say a guy named Myron Bolotin owned and ran it. Bob, he must have been the guy who just shut it down when the red ink got too deep for his taste.

It just disappeared from the listings after the '67 Broadcasting yearbook, but people working in the Syracuse market in the early 70s still talked about it and wondered if someone was ever going to give it another try. I remember Ron Curtis from Channel 5 saying to me one day as we chatted in the hallway between the radio and TV newsrooms at the old WHEN James St. building that it might be fun to run a little station like 'QSR sometime as a sideline. (He never got around to it, even after he retired in 2000.) I also heard that the transmitter site just west of Syracuse had been sold and the towers dismantled by the time I got to Syracuse in '73. They had a studio and office suite on Hiawatha Boulevard West but that was also gone by then--knocked down for the I-690 overpass.
 
Here's what I posted three years ago......

5. Does anybody remember a station called WQSR 1320 around late 50's early 60's?

Yes, I do. They were located in Solvay on the west side of Syracuse. I never heard them. They were long gone by my time spent in the Salt City. I do know they went dark pretty soon after signing on. They were a daytimer. Don't know the format or even if they had one. I don't know exactly where the tower was but am thinking it was near Rt. 690 somewhere south of Onandaga Lake. I was told after they shut down someone stole all the copper out of the ground field. Maybe, that's why they did go off for good. The tower was torn down soon after.
Wow, I'm good! (or maybe just old) What's next?
 
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