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WECQ QUESTIONS

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Wow, talk about a blast from the past.......lots of familiar names here for sure. David Waples was one of the early news directors...he and Kim Young (they were a couple) shared news duties and did the noon block togehter. Don't think he is the news director you guys are talking about..I know who he was, just can't remember the name...it was DAVE something or other and he had worked briefly at CNN in the very early days. I think I remember Gabe and i having to go to his house one time to get him for work cause he was ....ahem......a little tipsy.

Another impressive alum of CQ 102 would be NBC correspondant Dawn Fratangelo. You might see here on Dateline or doing stand ups on the nightly news. I hired her right out of college and she was there less than a year before getting a gig in tv in Plattsburg.

David Weinfeld did not actually start his recruitment business with out another stop in radio. He and I were reunitied in Raleigh in 1991 at WTRG. He was GM and hired me to program the station. I was in Charlotte at the time at WRQQ. We had a great runion in Raleigh until Davids time was cut short by an idiot owner who decided he wanted to run the station instead of having a GM do it.

Another post refered to Davids plan to buy a station in Oneonta NY, I was part of that plan with John Hogan who eventually became the sales manager at CQ. We went into Oneonta and worked for the current owners to get the station on track and then they tanked the deal and blew us both out....that's how we both ended up at CQ in Geneva. David took care of us and when he had openings we both landed there.

It was the most important 4 and a half years of my career because I learned so much from David and he allowed my to grow as a manger.

Being a former PD at WECQ is a high honor and the two guys who preceeded m and I talk to often. Pat Gillen who works in syndication and lives in NYC and John Roberts who is programming in Denver now for CBS. Our conversation always starts with a Dave impression....

Lots of great memories of CQ, The CQ Sundoger Van....the automation reel to reel gold library......Danny Weinfeld re-wiring the control room during pm drive.....Carrying the Hobart Lacrosse games with Paul Attea, RJ Mckay and Gabe doing a great job......Marty and Monica running the news department.....

The great CQ sales team including Nancy Van Damme (who I still get a christmas card from every year), Ginny our great receptionist, Evan Colemans smooth deep voice when he was all of 18 years old and banned from the Red Barn all you can eat buffet.......Tom Sherman who passed away a few years ago and who could forget Uncle Louie who held down the night shift for a while doing the Top Five at Nine.....playing song number one first......ooops.

CQ 102 is very special to a lot of people for one reason....Dave Weinfeld and we all owe him for helping us grow our careers and work with great people.

Randall C. Bliss
PD 93-1 The Wolf/WPAW
Greensboro NC
Entercom Oldies HD2 format administrator.
Proud CQ102 Alum!!!
 
Hey Randy & Mike! Yes, the ND we can't think of was lit most of the time and it his last name may have been Carpenter?? But I remember "Magnet Head" cleaning the cart decks during AM & PM drive! Too funny...
Those were the best years--miss you guys & think of you often.
BTW, check out www.ifickle.com...email me there
 
No not Bill Dixon..he was actually part of that Oneonta deal when David tried to buy that station. I'm sure the ND was Dave _______________, just can't come up with the last name.
 
Hmmm..

I have some pictures scanned, but apparently this site won't let you insert images hosted on another site.

Must be they figure it's radio, so why would we need pictures? :-\

I'll try to put some up and post a link soon
 
These are awesome, Mike!! Thanks for posting them. I think that last unidentified guy is Bruce w/ a really groovy 80's perm!!
 
The ND name came to me finally...drove me crazy all weekend.
Dave Carmichael!!!
 
RCB said:
The ND name came to me finally...drove me crazy all weekend.
Dave Carmichael!!!
Click to expand...
Yes! The brain - it works!!!

Todd Hallidy e-mailed me to say he is unknown CQ person 003, 002 was an AE named "Judd somebody" and he thought 005 *might* be Pat Gillen.
 
An old college friend of mine in Rochester brought this forum to my attention yesterday. As I read it, it became less of a stroll down memory lane and more like a head-on collision with the distant past. Names and stories I hadn’t thought of in thirty years came to mind. As an original WECQ alumnus who knew Dave Weinfeld before our days in Geneva, it has been fascinating to read these posts and view the photos. Allow me to add some insight into the early years.
WECQ was indeed established and operated by the Shoupe gentleman named in an earlier post, and he operated it for three years before the Weinfelds purchased the assets on February 11, 1978 for something like $38,000. Adjusted for inflation, that would still be only $130,000 today. Needless to say, the Weinfelds “shopped victoriously” and staked their claim in radio broadcasting while Jimmy Carter was in the White House, gas was about 33 cents a gallon, and the Pittsburgh Pirates were perennial winners.
Joe Weinfeld, Dave’s dad, was the president of the company, the newly-formed Astro Communications Inc. (no, the Jetson’s dog was not our mascot). Dave was the Vice-President and General Manager, and Danny Weinfeld was the chief engineer and chief pain in Dave’s rear end most of the time.
I met Dave when he came on board as the GM at WKST – a Great Scott Station -- in my hometown of New Castle, PA. I was doing part time work overnights on weekends while attending Westminster College ten miles away. Dave’s management skills were honed at WKST under the tutelage of the late Herb Scott who had a mini-broadcast empire headquartered in Pottstown, PA. I’m not sure, but Dave may have learned more of what NOT to do while working for Herb. Dave, though, made a pretty good splash in New Castle with an eye toward ownership of a property somewhere, sometime.
In 1977, the WECQ opportunity revealed itself. I was over a year out of college and doing evenings at a small station in Indiana, PA, where I worked with someone who would become WECQ’s morning man following the departure of Gary McNamara who wrote an amusing post earlier in this forum. Dave and I met in October of ’77 where he detailed his plans … and yes, this was the “ground floor” with more stations to follow, but, as we all know now, it never happened. In spite of the fact that he knew me pretty well, Dave hired me as his first AE and I relocated to Geneva in late February, a couple weeks after the deal closed.
WECQ had absolutely nothing that first year except a remarkable stable of talent and a very healthy amount of self-esteem. We entered the market with no listeners, no credibility, no signal to Canandaigua and points west, virtually no existing business, and little or no promotion except for the trades Dave worked out for PennySaver ads and those ubiquitous cigarette lighter holders. To add insult to injury, we were a stand-alone FM, and FM radio penetration in cars was less than 50% in those days. If not for the Crutchfield Electronics monaural FM converter in my Ford Pinto, I would not have been able to listen to my own station – when I wasn’t listening to WMJQ, Magic 92, in Rochester.
All of this didn’t stop us from charging more per 60-second unit than our chief rival WGVA-AM, $5 to their $3-and-change. And that five dollar rate was the LOWEST bulk rate on our card, the rest of our rates ranging from LOL to OMG to WTF. Whether you bought one spot or one thousand, we charged five bucks and never discounted it or offered bonus spots. WGVA’s counter punch was: They’re too expensive, they have no listeners, no one can hear them in their cars, and – best of all – FM will never make it.
We took our rate and our limited, uncluttered seven-units-per-hour inventory and hit the streets building the business a brick at a time. Jack Kidd led the sales team. He was – and still is, I’m sure – an incredibly gifted writer with a great set of pipes who produced some of the best commercials ever heard then or now.
The sales team featured the dangerous Tina Boehm who could sell ice to Eskimos (not to mention make ice melt in a blizzard), Liz van der Woud whose husband ran the Holiday Inn over in Waterloo, and a couple women whose names I can’t recall but they were great sales people recruited away from the PennySaver. Finally, there was the clueless, geeky rookie, me.
The on-air staff, pound-for-pound, could compete with any staff in our larger neighbors Rochester and Syracuse. Following the exit of Gary McNamara and Dick “I-forgot-my-new-air-name-ten-minutes-into-my-very-first-show-so-I’ll-stick-with-my-real-last-name-because-it’s-all-I-can-remember-after-my-accident” Kuklinski, we were fortunate is assembling some fine talent.
Tom Gongaware did mornings after originally being hired for overnights. I worked with Tom in Indiana, PA, where he left in 1976. I found him in Richmond, VA, and somehow managed to convince him that Geneva was the hotbed of the radio universe. He joined us in the spring of ’78.
Mid-days were anchored by our PD Russ Aykroyd, a good name to have in those days as Dan Aykroyd – Russ’ alleged distant cousin – was still a member of the cast of Saturday Night Live. Russ was recruited from WACK in Newark.
Afternoons were hosted by Bob Helbig and his dulcet tones, followed by wunderkind Evan Coleman. Young Evan had more passion for radio in his little finger than anyone I ever met. Connie Cummings did overnights, and a pile of kids from Hobart-William Smith Colleges staffed our weekends.
When JW Nittler left the newsroom (and I believe he had a brother who did our evenings for a short while at the start), he was replaced by Tom Terrico and then someone who might have been Mike Moran but I don’t really remember the name – only the face. In early ’79, Joan Siefert came to WECQ, ultimately became news director, and not only that, became Joan Siefert Gongaware in 1981while they were both teamed at an FM rocker in Raleigh, NC. Also assisting in the newsroom was William Smith grad Diane Doctor. I wonder if she ever got her PhD at Syracuse as she wanted to do, so that she could be called Dr. Doctor?
The trouble with hiring talented and ambitious people is that they leave. This great group of people, all of whom I would like to see again some day, offered enormous sums of their talent and energy to allow WECQ to establish its beachhead in the Finger Lakes Radio wars. Like all good teams that eventually disassemble and move on to other things, more than half this group was gone by the end of the World Series won in the fall of 1979 by the “We Are Fam-A-Lee” Pirates.
Today, if my information is right, Dave Weinfeld is an executive recruiter working for a national firm out of Raleigh, NC.
Tom Gongaware is the Vice-President and Managing Broker of a real estate firm in Raleigh, NC. Alas, he and Joan divorced not long after she went to WJR, Detroit, the Great Voice of the Great Lakes. Today she is the General Manager of North Carolina Public Radio/WUNC based in Chapel Hill, NC.
If a WECQ alumni convention is ever held, Raleigh would evidently be a good location with at least three of our prominent alumni in that area.
Russ Aykroyd and his lovely wife Trisha moved from Geneva to Pittsfield, MA where he worked in radio for a few years before entering the insurance business, and now I believe they live somewhere in the Hudson Valley near Trisha’s hometown of Poughkeepsie.
Jack Kidd runs KiddCom Photographics Photography and Design in Penn Yan. After 28 years, Jack and I reconnected through the internet and email and I’ve made promises to visit when my wife Patti and I get around to touring the Finger Lakes vineyards and wineries that were virtually non-existent when I left there.
I don’t know what happened to the rest of the staff from those days but would love to find out. As for myself, I’m involved in a Youngstown, Ohio, company that produces and sells dealership management software to powersports dealers all over the country. I always get the warm and fuzzies when talking to motorcycle and ATV dealers in the Finger Lakes.
It’s quite apparent from this forum that regardless of when one worked there, WECQ holds a host of memories – good, bad, funny; cherished. For myself, at the time a young, naïve guy who never sold a thing in his life until then, I didn’t like the work. It was like climbing Mt. Everest every day. As Jack Kidd reminded me in an email a couple years ago, every one of our days began at 8 with a sales meeting, followed by eight hours of rejection, and then capped by two hours of recounting that rejection in Dave Weinfeld’s office. Then we’d go home at 7. Or later.
The old joke was we got three orders on every sales call: “Get out, stay out, and don’t come back.”
But as much as I did not like the work, I loved the people. WKRP in Cincinnati was a popular TV sitcom in those days, and our whole crew readily identified with the show. We were a band of lovable knuckleheads – very smart, hard-working knuckleheads – collectively engaged in the seemingly hopeless cause of helping our radio station make its important mark in our community. Even though this seminal period in the development of WECQ lasted only 20 months or so, it was a special time and place for all of us.
And David C. Weinfeld is the tie that binds it all together.
 
There was a burp in my copy-and-paste maneuver. Paragraph 10 should be:

The on-air staff, pound-for-pound, could compete with any staff in our larger neighbors Rochester and Syracuse. Following the exit of Gary McNamara and Dick “I forgot my new air name ten minutes into my very first show so I’ll stick with my real last name because it’s all I can remember after my accident” Kuklinski, we were fortunate in assembling some fine talent.
 
I just discovered that I didn't include my real name in the novel I posted. Although I think only Gary in Dallas, TX, might remember me - and then only vaguely - CTinOH = Chris Travers. I stood for David in the judge's chambers when he and Marcia were married.

One more postscript to my story. About 14 years after I left Geneva I had the pleasure of working with a WECQ alum from the 80's, Rick Steele. Rick and I worked together for the advertising arm of the then cable giant Tele-Communications, Inc. He and I met at a conference in Indianapolis in '93 and in the course of shooting the breeze about our former lives discovered we had each darkened 'ECQ's doorstep at different times. Good guy. I lost track of him when he moved on to TCI's corporate HQ in Denver. Some of you folks may remember him.
 
I remember Rick. There was some resemblance to Tom Cruise that the women thought interesting. IIRC, he was a two-time CQer like me and one of the many Cayuga Community College alums who came through the station

Evan Coleman's brother Wade was also at CQ.
 
Yes, Rick. He and Martha moved back to the area (Orchard Park) a few years back & he was involved with Adelphia Cable & made out really well with that whole mess. They are doing well & have 2 children. I see them once in a while at CC reunions. He's still as handsome as ever! And such a good guy.
 
Hey Casper - were you there when they threw us out of FL Mall for giving away flowers on Mother's Day?

Kevin Colton still talks about that.
 
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