VelvetR said:
Point of reference - SNE Broadcasting Ltd (Jim and Robert Karam) took ownership of the station in Aug of 1989 (if I recall August 20th) from Frank Battaglia. Mr. Mitler was out of the picture long before that.
As for the on air stunt, I heard about it from our traffic reporter while I was anchoring the WHTB program "Newsbeat" around 5:15 PM in the good old days when we had to call Providence to get our traffic reporter. Laurie (formerly of WSAR) gave me the heads up, but also told me something didn't feel right about it. The producer of that show (Kenny) was a former WALE Fall River production director, tucked back away off the kitchen and just outside the small engineering room at 130 Rock.
As for Frank taking the call letters from Fall River: yes, they were a part of Fall River history, but I think it was a good thing that the Karam's got the chance to "start fresh" (so to speak) with WHTB. I suspect that if Frank didn't take them, they might have let them go anyway to shake the less-than-stellar image that WALE had in its later days in Fall River.
From someone who was there...at both WALE 1400 AM and WHTB 1400 AM during good (and not so good) days.
Marc Lemay