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WADD vs. WBUZ vs (fill in the blank)

C

cee

We haven't done a bad radio station horror stories string in a long time. So it might be fun to vote for worst upstate radio station of all time. Criteria can include abusive management, financial troubles, bizarre programming, bad facilities, troubled co-workers or many other negative factors.

(1) WADD, Brockport
(2) WBUZ, Fredonia
or
(3) some other station.

Having been associated briefly with stations 1 & 2, I'd have to vote for station #1, WBUZ. To work there for 2 months, you would have been considered an "old timer."
 
wjjl comes to mind.
A morning man that thinks he's so funny by saying "Don't go there to shop..."
when it's the main sponsor! :eek:
Ofcorse, I'm sure he meant "Don't go there and do what I did..."
However, it still sounded a lot like "Don't shop there..."
 
WEHH in Elmira Heights-Horseheads was legendary (Call Me Sherlock started his radio career there.) It was called "Rainbow Radio" because its studio building on Latta Brook Road was painted in various pastel stripes. The owner traded out paint for the building but could only strike a deal with a paint store that wanted to get rid of small leftover batches of various colors, so WEHH couldn't be painted a single color without paying cash (horrors!) The place looked like a really boring kiddie amusement park ride.

Inside the building the owner had never gotten around to finishing the interior walls, which were only 2x4s with tar paper nailed up. If somebody at Rainbow Radio said they "were mad enough to put you through the wall," they only had to be slightly annoyed. It was also funny to see the framed acoustic windows - with no glass in them. Workers blithely handed materials through the windows to each other.

At one point the General Electric BC-1A control console (circa 1950) had its 4-inch VU meter smashed. Until the owner/CE could scrounge a replacement, there was a bent piece of aluminum with two neon lamps mounted in it for level control - one light for NORMAL and one for DISTORT.

WEHH-FM, now WLVY, had an intriguing automation system - consisting of a Voice of Music record changer loaded with scratchy EZ listening LP records. When the changer cycled, the noise of the next record dropping and the pickup plopping into the first groove all went over the air. Spots? Elements? There weren't any. Of course the station was programmed in thrilling full-dimensional mono.

All of this went on prior to Ray Ross' ownership circa 1980.
 
The Gordon Brown properties, WSAY and WNIA, certainly have to be in the discussion. Everyone knows the details (including the dozens of Mike Melodys and Jerry Jacks who passed through their halls). Never worked there myself but there are legions of people who can tell you stories.

The station that proved that talented people, not facilities and equipment, are what make good radio, has to be the old WKBW in Buffalo at its 1430 Main St. studios. They were literally built in a building that was once a garage and horse barn, with old perforated masonite (that hadn't been painted in eons and had turned a very dirty gray-green) for sound-deadening in the studio walls, and an old 1950 RCA tube-type 10 fader board for news production. (Air studio and spot production had more modern McCurdy consoles by 1977, when I got there, but I'm told until the mid-70s literally everything in the place was pre-1955 vintage and tube-type, from the tape recorders to the boards.) Henry Brach, may he rest in peace, told me the rats were such frequent newsroom visitors, he and Jim Fagan had given them names. Maybe they were the same ones that inspired Danny Neaverth and Joey Reynolds to record "Rats In My Room"...
 
Really enjoy reading a thread like this and I hope it has many contributors and a long life.

The call letters were laughable and the station may have turned into a toilet in later years, but WADD was barely two years old when I worked there. Yes, the highly directional signal on 1560 could be better heard in Trenton, Ontario and Watertown, NY than five miles east in Spencerport and the format was a mish-mash of AC stiffs and hits, but the Collins-Autogram board and Collins 1kw transmitter and phasor, Audimax and Volumax were new, there was a fairly decent production room and the carpets had barely a coffee spill on them. Compared to the barely audible POS signal on 1590 that I heard the last time I was in Brockport, WADD on 1560 sounded hi-fi.

WBUZ was once a gem in Fredonia. I never worked there, but some very talented people came through that station, especially in the early years when it was a solid Top 40 station. Even with 250 Watts on 1570, WBUZ, an omni-directional daytimer on a Mexican clear channel transmitting on a short stick next to the railroad tracks (hmmm) could be heard well in Hamburg, NY. WBUZ began circling the drain when an absentee owner bought it and a wack job GM ran it into the ground, resulting in the FCC giving it the death sentence and deleting the frequency, thereby thwarting any capable local licensee from applying for the frequency and making WDOE the sole local AM in the market.
 
WEHH in Elmira Heights-Horseheads was legendary (Call Me Sherlock started his radio career there.)
Click to expand...

Therefore...would deductive reasoning hold that Sherlock is also a Legend? ;D
 
At 1430 Main, the way you could tell the rats from the salespeople - the latter could dial telephones (rimshot on rattling grey Fidelipac.) :p
 
Savage said:
Actually WEHH is a legend BECAUSE Sherlock started there.
Click to expand...

Aw shucks, guys! Thanks a lot! Actually, my first job was weekends at WCLI in Corning which stood in sharp contrast to WEHH. Spotmaster cart machines, 2 big console-mounted Ampexes, RCA mics everywhere, 18" Gates turntables. The big studio even had a piano in it. This place was a palace.

WEHH - none of the above. As I recall, the walls were cinderblock throughout. The control room had one light that was basically a single bulb that hung from one of the ceiling rafters. No acoustical treatment whatsoever. The owner built a hard wooden bench with no cushion and no back that he called a "jock bench" for us to sit on while on the air. It also served as a storage shelf for the "Radi-Ads" information. They were classified ads that ran on the air frequently.

Fun days!
 
Yep..."Radi-Ads," the classified ads of the air. You could mail in your little ad to sell your old snow tires or tricycle, and they'd read it ten times....for a dollar. "Send a dollar with your Radi-Ad," said the WEHH on-air tag. I think they read Radi-Ads once an hour.

There was a cruder and earlier edition of the WEHH studios before they either bought or built the Latta Brook location. A guy who was there at the beginning in '56 told me about it. WEHH was in some second-floor room in an 1880s business block in Horseheads - that is, the the whole station was one room. They didn't even start with a professional "board" - the jock used a couple of turntables and a tape machine with a Bogen PA amp for a console. When he had to talk, he flipped on a big red light warning anyone else in the room to be quiet.

The story goes that when WELM moved into their then-palatial Lake Road campus in '61, at the same time moving from 1400 to 1410 and going DA-N, they retired their original Raytheon board for a Gatesway. WEHH inherited the Raytheon as their first actual broadcast console to supplant the PA amp. Later the Raytheon was repurposed for WEHH-FM when it went on in the mid-60s and Frank Saia bought the G-E BC1A through some Woody Erdman connection.

When I was at WELM in 70-71 they still had the original 1947 Raytheon RA-250 as a backup.
 
Actually, my first job was weekends at WCLI in Corning

Ah, so Sherlock WAS a weekender!! And then put us interns (back in the day) through the "paces"...just to plot his course to Legendary status!! If I didn't admire his wisdom, I'd probably be annoyed!! Ah...the grass roots MUST return somehow, someday!! :D
 
In my opinion of the worst radio station facilities in the upstate wasn't here in WNY but over down the Albany way at WENT in Johnstown. The people were nice and friendly, it was just that the facility was horrible condition when I visited.

Worst radio higher-up I've ever came across was an arrogant man who use to work at WGY and he shall not be named in case he reads these boards.
 
Savage said:
WEHH inherited the Raytheon as their first actual broadcast console to supplant the PA amp. Later the Raytheon was repurposed for WEHH-FM when it went on in the mid-60s and Frank Saia bought the G-E BC1A through some Woody Erdman connection.
Click to expand...

I'll bet the GE came from one of the Rural Radio/Ivy Network transmitter sites, which were all originally equipped with studios for local farm programming. I wonder where the other five ended up.

More info on the former network's history here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Radio_Network
 
"At 1430 Main, the way you could tell the rats from the salespeople - the latter could dial telephones (rimshot on rattling grey Fidelipac.) "

LOL!!!

Actually Frank Woodbeck (a future GM at both KB and elsewhere in the CapCities/ABC chain) was a good guy. As to the rest...well, I won't pass judgment, although one of the first things Jim McLaughlin told me when he hired me was to steer clear of the sales office.

I will say in passing that in most stations where I've worked, I've found the sales folks to be quite likable and easy to work with.
 
And all of these stations (excepting KB) certainly ran those "safety spots" that phone-marketing people from Chicago (they changed their name every 18 months). Remember those? High-pressure Chicago phone salesmen called every business in and out of a station's coverage area, alienating everyone they called. Some advertisers signed up just to get rid of them. They'd sell to ANYone! I once heard Brockport's WADD advertising a garbage collection service, set up those Chicago hucksters, where the last line of the ad was "..serving the Town of Perinton, only." WADD's signal in Perinton was about a 0.0000003mv/m.

Those live-read Chicago spots were annoying. "Brockport Hardware reminds you to tell your children not to walk in the middle of the road, for a truck may come along...."

The Chicago company sold as many as 20 live-read spots per hour. Nightmare for the live DJ.

Any station airing them is either close to death or the station-owner is about to close on the sale of the station, whereas the station-owner gets a blast of last-minute money and the new owner faces very recent negative impressions from local formerly-potential advertisers.
 
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