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WFTL 1400 HISTORY

Given that you're asking about something that happened 31 years ago I doubt anyone alive could remember the exact date.
 
Hey Guys:

Found this in my millions of notes and the date was "Nov 28, 1981".

Would anybody know the date in 1971 that it became Gold Coast 14?

T.J.
 
Congrats for that TJ. As for becoming Gold Coast 14 it was more of a slogan line actually.

Some of the night time programs were, the Gold Coast Musical Review and the All Night Concert. When I got to WFTL in '74 we had the Bunning Classic Hours from 10p to midnight which featured classic MOR songs. It was a very good place to work in those days.
 
Hey Mike thanks. How long were you at WFTL?

What kind of MOR music did you play?

And what would you have called WFTL's format when you were there.

T.J
 
I was there from 1974 till 1978. I came back for a little while in 1979 but as they say you can't go home again.

WFTL-14 was Full Service Personality MOR with a wide variety of adult music. WFTL had a strong news department with a large staff of quality news people. There was a full time Sports Director and a Financial Commentator. Basically the WIOD of Broward County.

How they did this with 1,000 watts day and 250 watts at night I don't know but it worked will until the end of the Broward only ARB. When the market went to a combined Dade-Broward book that was the end of WFTL as I knew it.

Courtesy of another gentleman who posts here I have been able to do some digging to investigate stories I'd heard about
WFTL. For example there were two and I guess counting WFTL-850 there would be 3 WFTL radio stations and 1 short lived WFTL-TV. The first WFTL on 1400 was started in 1939 and moved to 710 a few years later with a hefty power increase! That WFTL was purchased by George B. Storer and became WGBS in 1943 if memory serves. The second WFTL-1400 was started in September 1946. In 1954 while this WFTL was owned by Gore Newspapers, they started WFTL-TV-23. The station was only on the air for a little while before being sold to Storer and the call letters were changed to WGBS-TV. UHF was tough going since TV sets were not required to have UHF tuners and it takes more power to cover a given area when you're on UHF. WGBS-TV only lasted a couple more years as channels 7 and 10 came on.
 
Hey Mike:

Thanks for that info.

I am doing a little research about the original WFTL on 1370, 1400, 710 with exact dates on changes. When I get everything together I will post it here.

T.J.
 
I have done a lot of research but have never heard of WFTL being on 1370. Are you sure? Would like to hear more.
 
Mike Sheridan said:
I have done a lot of research but have never heard of WFTL being on 1370. Are you sure? Would like to hear more.
Click to expand...

I believe this was pre-NARBA, when, in the 40s, many AM stations moved 'en masse' to new positions on the dial.

There was also a short time, say, mid-late 80s, when they did something called "Entertainment Talk", a mix of Talk (prior to the Steve Kane/Al Rantel, etc era) with more up-tempo MOR tunes....They briefly went back to Standards/Big Band, then came the Talk format that was on there pretty much until James Crystal bought it.
 
radiosanchez said:
Mike Sheridan said:
I have done a lot of research but have never heard of WFTL being on 1370. Are you sure? Would like to hear more.
Click to expand...

I believe this was pre-NARBA, when, in the 40s, many AM stations moved 'en masse' to new positions on the dial.

There was also a short time, say, mid-late 80s, when they did something called "Entertainment Talk", a mix of Talk (prior to the Steve Kane/Al Rantel, etc era) with more up-tempo MOR tunes....They briefly went back to Standards/Big Band, then came the Talk format that was on there pretty much until James Crystal bought it.
Click to expand...

You are correct! The 1940 Broadcasting Yearbook shows the first WFTL on 1370 with 250 watts day and 100 watts at night.
 
Just about any station on one of the five lowest present-day "graveyard" channel (1230, 1240, 1340, 1400, 1450) that was on the air prior to March 29, 1941 would have been operating 30 kcs lower on the dial at 1200, 1210, 1310, 1370, or 1420, respectively. Stations that ended up on the sixth "graveyard" channel, 1490, moved for the most part from 1500.

There were many stations back then that started out on one of the pre-1941 graveyard channels, moved briefly to a post-1941 graveyard channel, and then managed to get an upgrade to a better facility after the war.

David (Eduardo) Gleason's excellent AmericanRadioHistory.com includes some useful documentation from the 1941 Broadcasting Yearbook listing the "before-and-after" frequencies for every station affected by NARBA:

http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-BC-YB/1941/NARBA-BC-YB-1941.pdf
 
A great site for radio history geeks (like me). Thanks David! This stuff often gets lost over time.
 
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