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WXBR-1460 (ex-WBET) IN AGREEMENT TO BE SOLD?
- Thread starter JIBGUY
- Start date
If the format is going to be overmodulated dollar-a-holler crud, who cares what the call letters will be? Especially if it goes Spanish -- most Spanish-language stations bury the call sign under a slogan, the way stations in Latin America and the rest of the world do: "La Mega," "El Clasico," "Radio Mundo," etc., etc. (The U.S. and Canada seem to stand alone in their odd attachment to combinations of letters.) Why try to get WBET back if it's only going to be whispered under a loud music bed once an hour?
Because, in the long-run, some future owner may make use of the station where the callsign is appropriate. One cannot assume that this is going to be the last time the station will be sold. For a $95. check to the FCC, and a few keystokes, getting 'WBET' would be a no-brainer.CTListener said:
The original callsign, WBKA, is available the last time I checked. WBET was the original call on 990. When WBET, WBET-FM, WBKA & WBKA-FM combined, WBET & WBKA-FM went away, leaving WBKA & WBET-FM. That's the "classic" combo we know.
I always thought 1460 should focus on the surrounding south shore communities & 1410 should be all-brokered foreign language: mainly Haitian but with some Portuguese & Spanish Beisbol Network's Red Sox coverage. But, sadly, as in most of radio it looks like things will be bass ackwards once again.
I, for one, love callsigns & think they should be trumpeted as loudly as possible. No more stupid cutesy "names".
I always thought 1460 should focus on the surrounding south shore communities & 1410 should be all-brokered foreign language: mainly Haitian but with some Portuguese & Spanish Beisbol Network's Red Sox coverage. But, sadly, as in most of radio it looks like things will be bass ackwards once again.
I, for one, love callsigns & think they should be trumpeted as loudly as possible. No more stupid cutesy "names".
It's sad. WBET was once a great force in the city and surrounding communities. They had a superb staff that made the place sound great on a shoestring budget. There have been many greats that passed through the halls of WBET/WCAV. I'm afraid those days are gone. It would be nice to see the call letters back. Hey Bob think you could 'steal' them for one of yours? LOL
JIBGUY said:
If the Mashinkucket Pequod tribe gets its casino in Middleborough, WBET would work better on 1530 than on 1460. And given the $$$ that the potential casino operators are dangling in front of all manner of businesses, a few grand for a call sign to a Class C AM in Michigan would be peanuts. The Michigan station could probably change its calls to WBED, which sounds the same. Moreover, if Sturgis is near Grand Rapids, where they used to manufacture beds and maybe still do, WBED might work better there than WBET does. OTOH, if Sturgis is lobbying for its own casino as an antidote to Michigan's economic woes, it might be hard to pry the WBET calls away from the Michigan station.
DanStrassberg said:
Then what would happen to Steve Callahan's 1530 WVBF Middleborough which, if I'm correct, is the only full-time outlet for the Talking Information Center (for the Blind) on a conventional (non-subcarrier) signal?
WBET - Brockton Enterprise and Times (former owner)
I don't know if too many non-radio people would appreciate the history in the
WBET callsign. The callsign has also been gone for a long time.
Full disclosure: I worked for 1410 WOKW, Brockton, back in the day. 1980-81.
It was a full service, local, family-owned station, it was bought by a publishing
outfit in NYC, who had no experience in broadcasting. In short order, they ran the
station into the ground, and it went dark for a while...
I don't know if too many non-radio people would appreciate the history in the
WBET callsign. The callsign has also been gone for a long time.
Full disclosure: I worked for 1410 WOKW, Brockton, back in the day. 1980-81.
It was a full service, local, family-owned station, it was bought by a publishing
outfit in NYC, who had no experience in broadcasting. In short order, they ran the
station into the ground, and it went dark for a while...
Eli Polonsky said:
When 1570 WPEP went dark, WVBF began running some of their former shows, so it isn't 100% Talking Information Center anymore.
http://www.hometowntalkradio.com/
There is also a CP for a new 88.5 in Milddleboro, with the calls WRRS (Radio Reading Service), which will mostly likely run the TIC as well. I think both are a waste, since blind people are able to get free SCA radios anyway...
D
drredbeard
Guest
I was just in there to cut a couple of spots last month. The old prod. studio where I used to do Sonny May's show on Sunday night is still set-up the same way and posters from artists we played on 98 Country still adorn the now defunct FM studio.
A shame to see Mark Burns and Michael Page's old offices empty, Bill Alex and Tom Roulstone's newsroom non-existent and the WBET studios devoid of music...how times have changed.
The whole Enterprise building is pretty much empty, too.
A shame to see Mark Burns and Michael Page's old offices empty, Bill Alex and Tom Roulstone's newsroom non-existent and the WBET studios devoid of music...how times have changed.
The whole Enterprise building is pretty much empty, too.
drredbeard said:
It the walls could talk! It's hard to believe that nearly 21 years have passed since my last airshift on WBET and WCAV. I learned so much during my nine year "tour of duty" there and met so many great people over the years. Bill Alex, Mark Burns, Dick Benham, Charlie Bergeron, Charlie Petti..... the list goes on and on. The nice thing about WBET (now WXBR)/WCAV was that it was as close to being a family as you could get. Everybody liked each other there. In spite of what little we had to work with there in terms of the overall station equipment, we really made some great radio over the past 65 years. It's rather bittersweet to think back on how much we accomplished there and how it's pretty much all history now. I miss the old place. I miss the people who lived there. It was home! It's also sad to think that even the Enterprise building sits dormant today with the presses silent and the many people who made that paper run are now long gone. *sigh* :/
WLYNgm said:
I have to say that the old WOKW/1410 was a rather good local station in its' time. Many of the folks who worked there eventually became WBET/WCAV alums! It was a great full-service station with a lot of schoolboy football back in the 60's and 70's. It had a nice upbeat presentation back then, too! I had the pleasure of sitting in on "Tom Brown's" (Frank Cameron) airshift one summer afternoon back in 1973. At the time, the station was well maintained (you could actually see the towers without a jungle of trees in your way back then)! The staff was very friendly and really welcomed my visit (I was 13 at the time). Like WBET, they really took pride on what they did (from sunrise to sunset). I used to love the recorded sign-off they used for many years with "Wonderland By Night" with the background with a very pleasant female voice-over reading the station info with nice "good night". Back then those 1000 watts did pretty well. It was a shame the NYC publishers gutted the place and ruined it, complete with dumping the old WOKW call-letters for WAMK (yuck). Sad indeed.
If I remember correctly, WAMK stood for "Americ(k)a's Music"; the brainchild of the NYC publishers that wishes they hadn't (and we wished they hadn't) gotten in to radio. But didn't they also, at the beginning, didn't they call themselves "Weather Radio?" -and in doing so, they aired the weather forecast every 10 minutes?
JIBGUY said:
That's right Bob. But before "Weather Radio", they called themselves "AM 141, WAMK....the key to your day!". They bombed! They put a lot of money into the station, new audio processing and a big ad campaign including billboards and such. When they bought WOKW, they silenced it for a week or two and came on acting like it was a new station as WAMK. It was basically all for naught. They up the ghost in the winter of 1985. But, back to WOKW....... (before "Weather Radio") 1410 had a weather phone that was updated rather frequently. 588-5555 was the number and it was sponsored by various businesses in the Brockton area. 'OKW was a station that really tried hard. It did very well for many years. But with FM coming on strong and with WBET gaining ground and finally beginning to do something different with their FM side, it was beginning to take its' toll on 'OKW. The publishers wanted to make a new start. What they found was that they were not qualified to handle a local station due to their lack of experience and a lack of knowledge about the area. It was doomed from the start.
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