Pleasant noise. Music, Talk, Traffic. A taste of the home town or someplace you’re visiting. AM, FM, Sirius. A lifeline or a billboard of where you are. Jazz, Rock, Country, Classical. Background or pleasant distraction. Those large antennas, the booming voice, the Call Sign. Long trips, short stops, easy listening. We used to love radio. Do we still? Stations, Personalities. What’s yours?
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Note: For me the station WOWO loomed big in my life. Bob Chase, Komet Hockey, Penny Pitch. “WOWO!!! 1190 AM!!!” I heard it for years and think of it fondly. We all have a story. A station that grabbed us. Both then and now. This is a thread for those stories. Those stations, those DJs, those programs you remember. The local stations, the far off legend. The Wolfman Jacks and All The Jacks We Don’t Know. This is for them. The stuff that effects you and that’s close to home. Please keep it on subject and remember Community Standards. Thanks.
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Again, I’m spoiled rotten, here in town, we have one of the best community radio stations:
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Started out listening to the Top 40 stuff that my classmates did, but things changed in late 1983 when WOXY 97X went on the air.
They broadcasted from an old golf course in Oxford, Ohio and it was one of the first modern rock stations in the US. As a kid used to hearing nothing much more exotic than Duran Duran, 97X introduced me to stuff like REM, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Echo & The Bunnymen, New Order and so many more.
The station was referenced in the movie Rain Man as Dustin Hoffman’s character locks in on the station’s slogan…97X - the future of rock and roll.
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Station’s been going for 50+ years. I still have fond memories of going to the 25th anniversary concert back in high school. 89.9 FM WWSP. Your only alternative.
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I don’t have any pictures of it but do we have any New Yorkers who remember early 1990’s WDRE, the alternative rock station out of Long Island? That’s the only station I have any attachment to, it was my station through high school.
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I grew up on the outskirts of St. Louis. One nice about living in the central midwest, was being able to catch random broadcasts from distant AM radio stations at night. This seemed especially true during the spring and summer months. I guess the radio signals can travel farther in the warmer weather.
This may not seem like a big deal today when so many radio stations are streaming online and you can listen to them around the world. But back then, to be a kid in MO and being able to listen to bits of audio from Chicago or Texas or Nashville or wherever, it was like an audio window to other worlds.
The bad part was the signals would wax and wane and sometimes you’d only get a few minutes of audible content followed by minutes of garbled noise. Sometimes a show you were interested in would fade out never to return. But I remember summer nights scanning around the dial and finding radio broadcasts of the Royals, Rangers, White Sox and even the Cubs if they had like a West Coast road trip and the games were held later.
I remember catching radio station WWWE in Cleveland from time to time and listening to the Pete Franklin sports talk show. They also did the Cavaliers broadcasts and since St. Louis had no NBA team, the Cavs became my adopted team for the time.
There was some station in Chicago back then that featured old time radio shows on Sunday nights. I think they had “Gangbusters” and “Gunsmoke” every week. That’s where I first got interested in old time radio shows.
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There’s something about Sports Broadcasts from other areas. Like you said “other worlds.”
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Radio reception is pretty lousy where I live, twenty-odd miles west of Chattanooga as the crow flies. Lots of hills and valleys that block the reception. At home, radio reception is nil.
Driving from home to work in Chattanooga, stations start to come in. Given the time I usually drive to work (evening) I usually tune into the local classical station, 90.5 WSMC. It’s actually broadcast from Collegedale, which is a community dominated by Southern Adventist University, which has a strong music department.
Coming back home (morning), I usually tune into 88.1 WUTC, associated with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, which is the local NPR affiliate.
Other choices are 105.5 WRXR (new rock, some classic rock), and 106.5 WSKZ (classic rock.) Not much else, as I’m not into country or religious broadcasting.
I don’t know if this is true elsewhere or not, but similar formats seem to cluster together on the radio dial. Religious on the low end, rock on the high end, country in the middle.
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Jack Carney was one of the greatest radio hosts I’ve ever listened to. He had a daily show on KMOX in St. Louis back in the 1970s-80s. His show was a mixture. He did play some records, but a lot of it was 1) his monologues 2) conversations with other KMOX people 3) interviews.
He did a lot of celebrity interviews. Any singer, actor or performer who was coming to St. Louis was bound to be a guest (often in studio) on his show. He was a good casual conversationalist, so he asked about things that interested him and did not just read a series of questions prepared for him.
Here’s a few samples, although it seems like from the time frames mentioned they predate his stay in St. Louis. Still it gives you a nice idea of his style.
Let’s start with MST3K experiment actor Francis X. Bushman:
A chat with Andy Griffith around the time when his namesake show was ending (definitely before Carney’s St. Louis tenure):
A very interesting chat with the suave Ricardo Montalban:
This clip is definitely from his St. Louis days. The featured guest is Miss Blue whom Carney made a star in that city. She was actually on the custodial staff at the station and Carney so enjoyed talking with her every day that he put her on the air and gave her her own weekly “Dear Abby” type segment on his show. Her catchphrase, “All is well” was guaranteed to brighten any one’s day.
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