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WIOF & WKCI Stories

  • Thread starter GreatCalloftheNE
  • Start date

G

GreatCalloftheNE

Guest
The thread about WBMI brought back some memories of the history of WIOF (now WPHH). Back in 1975 when Merv Griffin still owned WPOP and WIOF, WPOP was rock and WIOF was country; I mean REAL s**t-kickin', grand ole opry country, not today's modern sound.

Greaseman was doing mornings at WPOP and had been since Jan of 1974. WPOP's ratings weren't great but they were beginning to show some life as Greaseman began to catch on. WIOF was absolutely dead in the ratings. The sales department was selling WPOP/WIOF as a combo-buy. It was easy to sell WPOP, but nobody wanted WIOF.

Unfortunately WPOP's management had decided to go all news. We were begging them to move the WPOP format to WIOF. It would have been a great move, but the GM of WIOF was a country fan and he nixed the idea.

In late 1976 I was hired by Mike West who was PD of WAVZ in New Haven. I had already done a stint at WAVZ in the late 60's-early 70's and I wasn't crazy about going back there but Mike told me he had some plans. He was working on the Kops-Monahan management to take the AM format and move it to WKCI which was still beautiful music at the time. I thought I might do a few months on WAVZ and then be part of the format change at WKCI. I was really excited about this since I thought WIOF should have done the same thing a few years earlier. So I took the job.

But I was unaware of the political in-fighting at WAVZ that was going on because of West's lobbying for the format change. Mike was canned a few weeks after I got there. He went on to become a part of the format change at WTIC-FM a bit later.
 
WPOP-FM? An interesting possibility in the early 70s. A Top 40 move from AM to FM probably would have made a few bucks with some Hartford ratings success. WAQY from Springfield was already making some inroads against the Hartford Top 40 AMs. I do have to wonder how it would have held up with its weaker signal from the hill on Route 69 in Prospect, affectionately known as the "P-shooter." Their power boost and move to West Peak in Meriden didn't happen until mid-1978 with the transition from country to adult contemporary as Magic 104. By then, the 1080 Corp's juggernaut known as "96-TICS" had already been unleashed, with a tight playlist, high energy presentation and slick promotion. WKSS was eventually up to the CHR challenge in 1985.

Would the powers at WPOP/WIOF have been itching for that kind of a fight? With all due respect to the memory of Merv Griffin, how aggressive was his radio company? Magic 104, while not an overnight success, eventually succeeded in part because they just wouldn't go away during the years when their AC competitors messed up. WRCH would put an end to that with a better signal in the center of the metro, more attention to music research and a more focused morning show.

It's a fun hypothetical, though. We'll never know!
 
Yo Glenn,

Even though you say Magic104 had a weaker signal from Magic Mountain on Route 69 in Prospect, it still had one of the most powerful signals in CT, according to me (who used to work there) & Peter Bush of WEBE108!

Hey GreatCallofthe NE,

Agreed that Magic104 should have done a beautiful music thing earlier.

Could have gotten them higher ratings in Hartford/New Haven.

Wasn't 'KCI at the time monikered as "Your Stereo Island?"

Willie B. Goode was a great jock @13WAVZ.

Heard he's in FL now.

IMHO, Merv's stations went downhill & got sold when he got divorced & his wife got the properties.

Would've been great to have WPOP-FM (great calls) w/Greaseman.
 
The old Prospect WIOF signal on 104.1 may have had a decent radius, and may even have been heard better in spots like the Naugatuck Valley, but the Top 50 Hartford radio market is where WPOP, WIOF and many others made their money. If you look at overall coverage, the Meriden-based FMs and WKCI are probably the biggest in the state. In the Hartford Arbitron area, WRCH, WTIC & WCCC are more in the center of that population even if they don't carry as far south.

You don't even have to have the biggest signal - just closest to or strongest by the diaries that count for your purposes. WDAQ in Danbury and WYBC in New Haven are not the 50K flamethrowers in their towns, but they both get consistently healthy shares in their local markets. They don't need Hartford, Bridgeport or anything else besides their home turf. It works for them!
 
amfmradio1 said:
Hey GreatCallofthe NE,

Agreed that Magic104 should have done a beautiful music thing earlier.

Could have gotten them higher ratings in Hartford/New Haven.
Click to expand...

Actually I thought they should have taken the high-energy WPOP format and put it on WIOF. Signal issues aside, it could have owned the Top-40 audience in the market.

amfmradio1 said:
Willie B. Goode was a great jock @13WAVZ.

Heard he's in FL now.
Click to expand...

I agree. He was a great guy to work with although our shifts were on opposite sides of the day. I just saw some comments from him at this site...

http://airchexx.com/markets/new-haven/archives-composite-1300-wavz-new-haven-1975-1319-scoped

amfmradio1 said:
IMHO, Merv's stations went downhill & got sold when he got divorced & his wife got the properties.
Click to expand...

Actually his wife only got half the stations. But I don't think there was any type of downslide due to the divorce.

There was a lot of autonomy at the MG stations. There may have been a "central" office somewhere, but each of the stations were largely left on their own as far as sales and programming. I don't remember WPOP making a big deal out of the fact that it was a Merv Griffin station.

Would've been great to have WPOP-FM (great calls) w/Greaseman.
Click to expand...

I agree, that's why we desperately wanted to keep Grease and the rest of the cast together on WIOF. This was 1975 and it was the beginning of the AM demise and the ascendancy of FM. The station was sounding great, but the highly directional WPOP AM signal just couldn't compete with WDRC AM & FM.

Turning the AM into an All-News outlet was a gutsy move on management's part, but they just didn't have the same foresite when it came to the FM. To this day I believe it could have been a killer radio station and probably would have changed the history of Hartford radio.
 
GreatCallofthe NE,

Remember when Magic was up against "CT's Natural92 - 'YZ?"

That's some competition after they both flipped from Country.

&, Country104s' PD liked the format, that's why he didn't want to flip?

As they say, who cares what a person who works at a radio station likes as far as music?

It's for the audience mass appeal, not for the personal music preferences of a radio station employee.

If 104 had flipped to WPOP-FM at that time, that would have been something!

Would have been one of the 1st FMs' in the USA to program such a format.

Thanks for the link for Willie who is now Gnarley Charley on The Coast.
 
I was at the short lived Star 104 WYSR. Started with them at the Prospect Rte 69 location and the move in with POP in the Rte 175 Newington Location until Merv sold it to Liberty Broadcasting in late '94. Ahhh the memories!
 
How about the time at the old WKCI/WAVZ North Haven studios when a PD (who shall remain nameless) ran into the KC101 studio yelling to the jock (who will also remain nameless) that the toilet was overflowing! The jock's response: "which one, AM or FM?"
 
Ken,

104.1 was WWCO-FM, then WIOF (calls for both Country W104 & Magic104) then WYSR/Star104 before flipping to Radio104 in '94.
 
Was Magic 104 supposed to be competition to anybody in their heyday? I know WRCH-FM didn't become Lite 100.5 until the summer of 1989. The earliest I can remember 104.1 as Star was 1992. I remember Paul DeFrancisco (who also worked at WKCI-FM and WTIC-FM) and even Kathy Fox (who also worked for WKSS-FM around 1985 and WTIC-FM a coulple of years later). I know I've got an aircheck or two from the Star days laying around somewhere. :)
 
KML-224 said:
Was Magic 104 supposed to be competition to anybody in their heyday? I know WRCH-FM didn't become Lite 100.5 until the summer of 1989. The earliest I can remember 104.1 as Star was 1992.
Click to expand...

Not 100% sure of this but to the best of my memory WWYZ went to a "mellow/soft rock" format back about 1976. Bob Craig from WDRC was the PD. They were doing pretty well in the numbers so WIOF switched from country and became Magic 104 to give them some competition. I think this was only a few months after WWYZ switched, but I'm not sure.
 
Some clarifications to some earlier posts on this and the WBMI topic....

I remember WBMI playing Top 40 for a short time in 1970.

WWCO-FM originally played country music mornings, afternoons and evenings; and simulcasted WWCO-AM's Top 40 during mid-days for only a brief time before going all country. However Dolly Holiday's beautiful music show was simulcasted for several years on AM & FM because of sponsorship from Holiday Inn. A station staffer at the time told me that Holiday Inn was paying $400 a week for the show. It was like the airline overnight show that was on WCBS and the other CBS O&O AM stations at that time.

It was WATR-FM, not WBMI, which had the Mets in the early 70s. A friend of mine was working for sister station WNAB in Bridgeport where he had to board-op the Mets simulcasts on WNAB and WATR-FM. For local spots, the WNAB board was split with separate audio going out for each station.

WWYZ became the "Natural 92" in June 1976, using a few jingles from a Jam package originally cut for Greater Media's WMGK (Magic 103) in Philadelphia. WIOF became Magic 104 in early 1978 and bought the remaining cuts of that same WMGK package.
 
GreatCalloftheNE said:
Not 100% sure of this but to the best of my memory WWYZ went to a "mellow/soft rock" format back about 1976. Bob Craig from WDRC was the PD. They were doing pretty well in the numbers so WIOF switched from country and became Magic 104 to give them some competition. I think this was only a few months after WWYZ switched, but I'm not sure.
Click to expand...
With mention of 2 urban stations in the Hartford market on this board, a lot of people don't realize that, at one point until September 1988, there were 3 soft rock stations in the Hartford market: WWYZ, WIOF and WRCH. WWYZ was the one out of the 3 who blinked and flipped to Country.
 
Not quite. WRCH-FM didn't become Lite 100.5 until the summer of 1989. I believe it was on or near the 4th of July that year.
 
There were 3 adult contemporary FMs in Hartford in the early/mid 80s:
-WDRC just before a successful oldies flip in '86
-WIOF Magic 104 ('78 to '91) before the short-lived hot AC "Star"
-WWYZ with various mellow to uptempo versions of AC before the country switch in '88.

WRCH went from beautiful music to Lite AC in the summer of '89.
 
GlennO said:
There were 3 adult contemporary FMs in Hartford in the early/mid 80s:
-WDRC just before a successful oldies flip in '86
-WIOF Magic 104 ('78 to '91) before the short-lived hot AC "Star"
-WWYZ with various mellow to uptempo versions of AC before the country switch in '88.

WRCH went from beautiful music to Lite AC in the summer of '89.
Click to expand...

Glenn,
I thought of WDRC at that time as being a Top 40/AC hybrid...not quite TIC-FM, but to closer CHR than "Magic 104" and WWYZ. Can anybody remember all of the many incarnations of WWYZ as an adult contemporary station? I was there for the final A/C format (with the 1.9 12+ share) at Lite Rock...Less Talk, and "you're just twenty minutes away from another forty minutes of Lite Rock...Less Talk on Lite 92.1 FM" followed by a six unit spotbreak.

I had left WRCH by the time they moved to Adult Contemporary, but friends told me there wasn't as much outrage as expected when the actual transition happened. My mother was a regular listener and asked me about it in passing about a manoth after the change. The real problem for WRCH was when the replaced the nostalgia format on AM 910 with the old WRCH sound as WNEZ. THat didn't take and the station was simulcasting CNN within a few months.

There were two huge holes in the market in the 1980s: country and urban. I think that what has evolved into smooth jazz would have been a viable sound in the 80s and 90s. I remember going back to Connecticut for Christmas in 1990 and hearing the Pointer Sister on four different radio station during the ride from Bradley to Waterbury. At that time I fugured that nothing would ever change in Connecticut.

Mike
 
O.K., upon further review, I stand corrected. Thanks for the clarification. :)
 
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