I believe WDEL-FM was doing a beautiful music format prior to 1969 before the calls changed to WSTW. I remember listening to it prior to 1969 in the mid 60's (66-69) and they were still WDEL-FM and played easy listening music, so the similcast of the AM must have stopped prior to around 1966. On Saturday night they aired a big band show, but unlike typical big band shows, this didn't feature big bands of the 30's and 40's, but big bands of the 50's and 60's. I liked the show, my dad who's favorite band was Glenn Miller, didn't. For him, the big band era ended in 1945, after the war, when the big bands started going more into a jazz/bebop rather than just swing music for dancing.
I remember going to the WDEL AM/FM building on Shipley Road somewhere between '66 - '69 and seeing the automated FM station that had three large reel to reels, with a carousel of carts in the middle that had spots, promos, station id's, etc. The machine would fade whatever was playing and stop the tape once it got to the end of that song as it would do a legal id and switch to NBC radio for the hourly network news right with the time sound that NBC used at the time, sort of like the one used on CBS, but a different sound. After the news, on cart was local weather and maybe a spot or two and then the reel to reels would start playing music. If I recall what the board op, who ran that machine told me, each reel to reel holds about 3 hours of music. When a reel ended, he'd put another reel on while one of the other reels was playing. As I recall WDEL-FM was broadcasting in stereo at that time. I'm not sure when WSTW switched dropped Beautiful Music for a Rock format. I'm sure there's others here who'll remember more details of what WDEL-FM and WSTW did and when WSTW made the switch to rock music.
