Savage said:
Henry Brach, John Zach, Irv Weinstein, Tom Downey - all great talents in the Pulse Beat Newsroom.
RCS, it appears we're each other's editors
Joe Downey. Huge voice. Big man, Great guy. He was a print journalist from Olean before joining KB and later returned to his home town. I was told he also did radio news at WHDL Olean. Add Don Lancer and Jim Fagan to the list of Pulse Beat News icons.
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Students of the written word should savor Savage's description in post #12, a vivid assessment of the environment inside 1430 Main Street. The building was a barn and looked every bit from the side views. The attic leaked, but was a treasure trove of K-Big memorabilia. The facade however, looked impressive, especially from the street. The interior of the building was made to look bigger thanks to a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirror that was installed at the very end of the very narrow corridor that ran lengthwise down the center of the building.
As lore had it, the mirror was installed to "economically double the size of the building." Others said it was installed to boost jocks' image as they walked to the studios at the back of the building. (But what if one entered by way of the back door?) Sales guys often preened before the mirror, prior to leaving the building to visit a client.
Back to the Control Room.
By 1973, four ITC single play cart decks had been installed on a shelf atop the RCA BC8 in the K-Big Kontrol Room at 1430 Main Street. Big Cap-Ex splurge by CapCities, which should have invested an additional thousand dollars for two quick-start 12” Rusco or QRKs turntables, tonearms and solid state pre-amps (heck, Rek-O-Cuts would have been an improvement) ... but that might have killed the tech budget.
The older RCA cart decks to the operator’s lower left remained intact, wired to a single cart pot. The four ‘new’ ITCs were wired to another cart pot. As it was, eight cart decks were funneled into two pots on the BC8. Spiffy, eh.
Around 1971, CapCities splurged on a snazzy new thin line Audimax and Volumax, which were in an audio chain that included a Kahn Symmetra-Peak. I've read that a few engineers to this day very much like that Kahn box. The old mod monitor clicked and flashed behind the operator. It must have been set to 'detect' at 80% negative peaks because it was sometimes audible during all night newscasts.
The sweet RCA BK series mic which RCS notes had been replaced by an EV long neck uni-directional with a massive wind filter that reeked of stale tobacco. It was attached to a goose-neck mike stand which was propped up by a short piece of 2
x4 that looked like a remnant from the Rocketship 7 set.
Every radio station at which I hung my Ticket (WBNY-FM, WMMJ, WDOE, WUSJ, WYSL 1400 and even WADD, 'the fish feeder') prior to my brief stint at KB had better studio and production room equipment. But not one of those stations had a 50 kw (Westinghouse) rig and antenna array that blasted RF over 17 states and two nations (and at times two continents.) None, save for WYSL 1400, had nearly the ratings and immense music influence of the time. Those who made it to 1430 Main Street gladly accepted the tradeoffs. It's one of the reasons we can lament the dumpy surroundings in threads like this. But make no mistake, each member of the K-Big staff did his best to make a silk purse from the sow’s ear and often succeeded.
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But wait! There's more! In the summer of 1995, another strange turn of radio fate occured when Rich Communications sold WGR and WWWS to Keymarket Communications, which also owned WWKB, WBEN, WKSE and WMJQ (now WTSS.) The K-Big control room at 695 Delaware Avenue 695 morphed into the WGR Newsradio 55 control room. Prior to WGR joining the fray, Kiss occupied the the former KB control room. When WGR and WWWS moved into an already cramped building, Kiss moved to a newly built studio on the other side of the second floor of 695 Delaware Avenue. IIRC, the sales staffs moved to an office complex in or near the Hyatt downtown.
The KB newsroom, which had, for the most part been dormant, again came to life as the WGR news room. The small KB News announce booth became the WGR talk studio, which at times generated bouts of claustrophobia among the WGR talkers. It could be especially tight and occasionally "aromatic" when guests dropped in, especially athletes.
Without the planning and preparation of Tom Atkins, Keymarket's Buffalo Director of Engineering at the time, and his staff of exceptional engineers assisted by a number of diligent board-ops from WGR, the transition from Franklin Street to Delaware Avenue could not have been accomplished anywhere near as smoothly. 'Twas a time.
