My parents always and only had 610 WIP Philadelphia on the AM-only radio that sat atop the fridge, and played Ken Garland every morning. It was also the primary setting in the car radio. And I tended to listen even on my own little transistor radio when I was a kid. Even helped keep track of the cash call jackpot amount on the little chalkboard in our kitchen. However, the giant stereo console gizmo in our living room with that fancy “FM” tuner was often on Easy 101. Sometimes they’d put WIP on there as well, and we had wired speakers in a small “den” in another room.
As I branched out to my own tastes as I got into the pre-teen and teen years, and got a boom box 🤣, I did listen some to Philly’s 98 WCAU, like seemingly everyone under 21, but gravitated more to the approach WZGO/Z-106 took, and also really enjoyed the hot AC-ish WSNI.
I didn’t totally give up on the music on WIP. They did, of course, but I would occasionally tune in for the music until the bitter end, down to the last music shift on Saturday mornings for a bit.
When Z106 gave way to Electric 106/WTRK, that was more of a laughingstock, a joke that wore thin quickly. I bounced between 98 and 104.5 most of that time, and pretty much locked back on 106 when WEGX came along, and once they departed, on to WPLY until they went alternative.
