Ron Harris - Interview (Part 1)

 

Ron Harris is not a household name but when you read a lot of radio history sometimes you run across the same name multiple times. It makes sense that you'd see famous names repeatedly. It makes a lot less sense when they are not famous names.  It gets downright mysterious sometimes. 

I've come to believe that some people were almost famous, that they had some kind of inertia that the rest of us lack and they veered off of that trajectory at the last second, perhaps for reasons only they understand.  After the sixth or seventh time I tracked down Mr. Harris and he was very giving of his time to answer my questions ...even the ones I didn't know to ask.What followed where tales of creatively liberated equipment, FCC violations, rock stars, Russian profanity, and an unexpected intersection with Rush Limbaugh... 

He had so many stories I'm just going to go ahead and call this "Part 1." I know I'll be back for more answers.

JF - How did you end up becoming the music director at WCPR?

RH: I started at Stevens Sept. 14, 1969. I was active as a DJ and production guy there, but the Music Director position was open so I volunteered for it. 

JF: WCPR was a carrier current station at that time. 

WCPR indeed was carrier current for most of its existence.  Because the carrier current transmitters were put in many of the dorms, the 740 frequency on one transmitter would "beat" against a nearby one.  So they decided to change some to 750.  While in those days there were very few (if any) AM radios that would show the tuning like today's digital ones, it would have been unnoticed by dorm students.  At least until we started calling it "WCPR - the Sporty 7-40 and the Nifty 7-50."  :)

JF: Is there any truth to the story about WCPR broadcasting (perhaps unlawfully) from the S.S. Stevens?

RH:That was a year or two before I got there. The story as it was recounted many times over the years was that when the station engineers installed our carrier current transmitter aboard the ship (the metal hull basically blocked all the commercial radio stations, so our signal was the only one that could be picked up in the cabins), the AC power circuit they hooked it up to fed the dorm cabins and also the string of lights that spanned the length of the ship, on typically tall masts.  Evidently it acted as a terrific antenna, and the station could be heard all over the eastern seaboard and beyond. Whether they did that deliberately or accidentally is not known. Things were great until the Dean of Students received a letter from the FCC informing him that it was a very illegal situation!  That was the end of our semi-national broadcasting experience!

However there were a few years when they put a low power FM transmitter on top of the Stevens Library, pretty much in the center of the campus dorms.  I don't know the story about why it was taken down, but I suspect a certain government agency sometimes referred to as "Fred's Cookie Company" might have been involved.

JFK there was also a WCPR pirate in Brooklyn in 1976? Do you know anything about that?

I think I heard something about that, but it had no connection with us. Stevens Tech was on what's known as Castle Point in Hoboken, NJ, hence Castle Point Radio.  It's literally a stone's throw from the Hudson River, across from West 4th St. in Manhattan.  The original call letters were WSRN (Stevens Radio Network), but they were changed in the mid 1960s.

JF. Back in the early 1970s you were reporting airplay to the Billboard "Campus Programming Aids."  What was that like and how did it work?

RH:As Music Director, I wanted to increase our record company service, so, being a 15-minute PATH/subway ride from the Billboard offices, I got to know Bob Glassenburg, the College Radio Editor for the magazine.  I was also sending out our playlist every other week to every record company I could find, and I had a talented classmate drawing a radio-related cartoon on each one.  I also got to know the local (NYC) major record company promotion guys, and all those contacts and connections increased the number of promo records we received to something like 40-50 singles and 10-20 albums each week (I don't remember the exact number, but it was probably higher than that).  The promotion managers at the record companies would call me to push their current product.  All in all, it was a really successful project and I was respected at the station and by the record companies.  A side benefit was getting comp tickets to shows at the Fillmore East and other local venues! 

Stevens being a science and engineering school, our Top 40 chart was called "The WCPR Slide Rule Survey."  Yeah, I know it's a groaner!

JF: You won a "Campus Humor" contest with some kind of news report about kidnapping a college Dean. Can you tell me about that and does that audio still exist? 

RH: The Gillette Company, makers of men's shaving items, released a new product, a hairspray for men called The Dry Look.  One of their promotion ideas was a national college campus push.  They went to some 30 or 40 colleges and offered the student radio stations a contest.  Each station would have several people or teams create audio vignettes about some aspect of college life.  The vignettes would be played on the station, and there would be a vote by the students for their favorite vignette.  When they voted, they'd also be given a can of The Dry Look.  The winning creative producer/team would win a $100 prize and the college station would get something also.  Then, the first place winners from each school would be submitted for judging by several professional broadcasters, as well as the College Radio Editor at Billboard.  The judges included Leonard Probst from NBC and kids show host comedian Soupy Sales.  I wrote a script for "The Kidnap," a satirical take on the unrest and protests at campuses across America.  I enlisted our Chief Engineer, Mike Ferriola, to co-produce with me, and we both did some of the voices, as well as utilizing some station members and even one of the overnight campus security officers for voices.  I added some sound effects and music, and it was voted #1 by the students at Stevens.  Now I knew we were up against much bigger schools (I think Dartmouth and Harvard were among them), so I didn't have very high expectations.  When all of the local winner creations were being judged by the professional panel, I got a call one day from my connection, Bob Glassenburg at Billboard, saying "Ron, you S.O.B.!  I'm not supposed to tell you this, but no one even came close to what you created!  Just please act surprised when they contact you!"  Both Mike and I couldn't believe it, but it was true!  Our prize was $1,500 and an all-expense-paid week's trip to New York City, plus $1,000 for WCPR.  Of course, since we both lived on campus right across the river from NYC, the "trip" was a few subway tokens, but they did put us up in the Loew's Midtown Motor Inn in Times Square, and set up meetings for us with ad agencies and radio and TV stations!  We also were guests on the Joe Franklin radio show, and Joe played our winning entry on the air on WOR during the show!  It was a truly exhilarating and heady experience for us both!

[I have heard this audio and can confirm its amazing what he did with 1/4" tape. Will post later on]

JF: In 1973 you moved to Illinois to attend Southern Illinois U. What drove that change?  

I was in the middle of my junior year at Stevens, and by then I realized my heart wasn't in computer science or electrical engineering, but rather in radio broadcasting and production. During my first semester of junior year, I was spending all my time at WCPR, and went to something like two classes and took one test, an open-book test on which I got a grade of 26 (out of 100).  So, as the semester was drawing to a close, in the first week of December I was summoned to the Dean's office.  The conversation started with, "Ron, I know you're not happy here at Stevens..." and my reply was 'Dean, I LOVE it here at Tech, and especially WCPR!"  But the decision had been made: I should transfer to another school.  As the semester was virtually over, I asked the Dean if I could get grades of "W" for "Withdrew" instead of what I should have gotten, "WF" for Withdraw-Failed."  "WF' grades for every class that semester would have made it tough to transfer to any college, and no school meant I'd lose my deferment from military service.  This being the time of the war in Vietnam, I really needed that deferment.  The Dean said they would bend the rules for me, and so my grades that semester were all "W".

I went to the Stevens Library and looked at all the college catalogs on file (Stevens was a very hard school, and I wasn't the first to need to look for an alternative).  The one that stood out was Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, a brand new satellite campus from the main school in Carbondale, IL.  What clinched the deal was that they had a brand new 50,000 watt FM public radio station, and that the campus was about 25 miles from St. Louis.  Their classes started on January 3rd, 1972, giving me about three weeks to apply to transfer there.  I was accepted right before Christmas, 1971, and on New Year's Day 1972 I loaded up my car and drove to Illinois without having any idea what the school and station would be like.  I graduated a year and a half later with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mass Communications/Broadcasting.

JF:  You were also a DJ at WSIE-FM. That's mostly a Jazz station today, what was that like in your tenure? 

Back then WSIE was a mix of pop, classical and opera.  I was working on the air on Saturdays and Sundays, doing a show, "Swing Easy," with light pop and big band jazz, as well as "Masters of the Opera" (no easy task, as I knew nothing about opera nor how to pronounce most of the names!).  I was also doing production at the station, and was a teacher's helper in the Radio Production courses.  There were some talented people there.  Two who had graduated before I got to the school were Peter Maer, who went on to become a reporter for the Mutual Broadcasting System, and Bill Plaschke, senior sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times.  I also worked part time at a country music station, WGNU in Granite City, IL (part of the St. Louis market), and I did a full semester as an intern at KIRL radio in St. Charles/St. Louis.

JF. You started in commercial radio in 1973 at KGMO, did that overlap with WSIE or was that after graduation?

I graduated in June, 1973, and sent out about 10 audition tape airchecks to stations around the Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois areas.  KGMO was the first station to reply, (with a phone call) and I started on-air from 8pm to 1am in mid-August.  I was on KGMO-FM only, as the AM was a daytimer.  DJs on the AM and FM would make $100 a week salary, but those of us on the FM only started out as hourly employees for much less money.  Well, a month later I came down with mononucleosis, and had to recuperate for a few weeks.  KGMO had a reputation for not wanting to wait for a sick DJ to return, and I fully expected to be let go.  To my surprise, the station manager called me and said they liked my work so much they were moving me to afternoon drive on both AM and FM, and even more surprising, they made it effective for even the time I was sick, paying me the $100 weekly salary for the month I was out!  Interesting fact: the DJ who was doing afternoon drive and had left before I got there was a guy named "Rusty Sharpe," and he was pretty good, but we all knew he got his job in part because his father was half-owner of the station, a Mr. Limbaugh. And "Rusty Sharpe's" real name was Rush Limbaugh, who went on to have the number one network talk radio show for many years!

JF: What was KGMO like 40 years ago?  I think it was an AM/FM simulcast at that time. 

Yes, it was.  The station was in a building that had a metal building added-on as the studio.  It would get extremely hot in there when the air conditioning stopped working.  Of course, the service company deal was a "trade out" where KGMO gave them lots of free advertising in lieu of having to pay them, so when our AC died, we were way down on their priority list!  I did many shows in the blazing inferno wearing just my briefs! 

JF: By the mid 70s you seem to have mostly left on-air roles and become primarily an engineer. Was that a difficult change?

I had always been interested in radio station jingles, and had collected a large number of them from stations all over the U.S. and the world.  The major companies that produced jingles were in Dallas, TX (due to favorable union agreements with the singers and players).  I had gotten to know the two biggest and best known jingle "collectors," who each ended up working for the two biggest production companies. Jon Wolfert was at PAMS Productions, and Ken Justiss was at TM Productions, both in Dallas.  Ken was looking for someone to work with him in production, and had heard a lot of my KGMO production work.  He offered me a job at TM, and I didn't hesitate a second!  Even though I had never worked with basic stereo, I was determined to become proficient at using the 16-track multitrack recorders and other studio gear.  Being the new "hotshot kid," it took me a while to gain the confidence and respect of the other engineers at TM, but I did. And although TM and PAMS were competitors, Jon, Ken and I stayed great friends, and I still stay in touch with them 50 years later!

JF: You went on to be an engineer at Westwood One for decades.

In 1981, I went for an interview with Norm Pattiz, founder and CEO of the Westwood One Radio Networks.  I started there as a production engineer in April, 1981, and would stay there for the next 31 years!  In that time, I produced some of the top radio shows, like Casey Kasem's countdown shows; Scott Shannon's Rockin' America countdown; Randy Jackson's Hit List shows (Randy was, in addition to being a top music producer and a former member of Journey, was also one of the original judges on American Idol); as well as Technical Director and board op for many live concert specials, as well as "Radio USA For Africa" and a 90-minute Larry King interview show with then-President Bill Clinton in our studio!  There was even a 54-hour show called "The Rock Years," yet another history of album rock!  One of the first live concerts I board-op'ed was the Moscow Music Peace Festival, a major production involving several satellite hand-offs for a concert coming live from Russia.  It was going well until an American band frontman decided to teach the Russian crowd how to say "F__K!" in English!  This was before we had digital delays to cut out obscenities, and I had to just mute the feed to try to avoid having Russian youth gleefully screaming you-know-what on a high-profile broadcast all across America!

Westwood One merged with another radio network in 2011.  One stated goal was to combine the best people from each company for the new incarnation.  And of course, the day the merger was approved by the Justice Department, the powers that be laid off something like 98% of the Westwood One employees!  I lasted another few months, and then on February 6, 2012, it was my turn.  I was 60 years old, and after 31 years of doing what I loved and more, often on 14-hour days, 6 or 7 days a week, I was ready to retire!  The irony of it was that they ended up having to hire three people to take over all the work I'd been doing!  

As I write this almost 15 years later, I really can't complain at all.  I've had an incredible life, from my DJ days to working with presidents, rock stars and learning and doing things I never imagined I would be able to learn and do.  I'm still one of the only Chief Engineers who can't solder worth a damn, but hey, there are people for that!  For a kid from West Caldwell, New Jersey, who flunked out of his first college, I've done pretty darn well!

First AI Radio Station

I loathe AI, at least what we're calling AI today.  It's not intelligent as we would normally use the word. But it's definitely artificial. As Joe Slater once wrote "ChatGPT isn’t ‘hallucinating’—it’s bullshitting!"  But stochastic parrots don't know the difference. They don't know anything. It has no self awareness and cannot reason, invent or create. Everything it outputs is a pastiche of things which already exist. It's automated plagiarism at best. But that doesn't mean it's not good at automating repetitive tasks. That's something computers are traditionally good at.

I read an article on Radioworld about 98.7 WPBB in Tampa, FL. The classic rock station flipped to a fully automated "cloud-based" operation. It's using a platform called Super Hi-Fi. [LINK] In some ways the situation resembles an LMA more than just a software license. No matter how much programming input Beasley Broadcasting has, SuperHI-Fi is inarguably the party actually operating the radio station. (It poses interesting legal questions.) Radioworld described it thusly:

"The entire station will now be capable of full remote operations from a laptop literally anywhere worldwide, providing unprecedented flexibility and efficiency.... [Beasley] said humans will program the station music and host, but that Super Hi-Fi's AI-enabled cloud-based system will be used throughout the programming, management, voice-tracking, updating and delivery workflow."

But the end of the article also made clear that "The Shark", was not the first "AI radio station."  Back in October, Front Rang Country let Super Hi-Fi take the steering wheel. They took on less risk, the radio station is just an ancillary service; the HD-2 signal of 107.5 KQKS, which simulcasts on 103.1 FM, K276FK in Denver, CO. It broadcasts at 250 watts on the west side of the metro.  K276FK in Pinecliffe, Colorado. Originally licensed as K269FE, the stick used to broadcast 950 KRWZ-AM which may have been the last oldies station in the metro running that under an Entercom LMA from 1008 - 2015.

Super HI-Fi is not new on the scene. Their website was launched in 2016, but they claim to be founded in 2018. Today it promises all manner of things including Radio-as-a-Service, [RAAS?] a phrase that makes me feel a bit queasy. There is some debate here whether or not WPBB is the first AI station.  We need to define our terms. Electro-mechanical radio automation goes back to the 1950s. ATC, automated tape machines were relatively affordable by the 1960s. Supposedly 107.1 WIRX was fully automated in 1969. So what's the "first" here over 50 years later? 

The first here is that the programming isn't pre-recorded. It is automated, but it's through other means, The AI DJ spontaneously generates it's best DJ chatter impression. There won't be a AI talk show any time soon. (Before you ask, AI in the AM was a gag. [LINK].) Most music radio program was already pre-recorded: the bumpers, liners, ads and music. It's that tiny bit of DJ chatter which is being generated, the rest was already there when you used Selector in the 1990s. So was this the first AI DJ chatter? Not even close, not even for Super Hi-Fi. They had two previous roll outs in February of 2024. Inside Radio got the press release. [LINK]

"Cumulus Media Nashville has partnered with Super Hi-Fi and Xperi to introduce a pair of hyper-localized HD stations, “The Hill” and “Nashville Songwriter Radio.” The two new HD Radio stations are now available to all legacy HD Radio-equipped cars in the market on WGFX-HD2 (104.5) and WGFX-HD3 (104.5), respectively, using Super Hi-Fi's 'Program Director' Radio Operating System."

Prior to that, Super Hi-Fi seemed to focus on streaming in deals with Fubo and Telos. There was a Reuters article in December of 2021 about 88.5 KCSN. Where the voice of long time DJ Andy Chanley will live on, emulated by an AI DJ who can automate music production, introduce songs and talk about them. In 2023, RadioGPT performed a similar parlor trick at 95.5 KBFF in Portland with AI Ashley, who filled in for the very real Ashley Elzinga. They called it the first AI DJ in some press at the time., even though it was over 2 years after KCSN. [SOURCE] That same year RadioGPT announced partnerships with Rogers Radio in Canada and Alpha Media. The focus from Futuri seemed to be scanning the news to generate scripts, but also debuted a Spotify-powered AI-DJ. [SOURCE]

In some ways these moves were to be expected. Automation has been taking jobs for centuries. Radio was never insulated from that. Playing records replaced hiring live musicians. So it comes as no surprise the former Clear Channel corporation —I Heart Radio would lead the charge laying off hundreds of DJs back in 2020. Super Hi-Fi was behind that one too. I'm quoting the Washington Post here.  

"In 2018, some stations on the online iHeartRadio service began testing a music-mixing AI system built by the start-up Super Hi-Fi, which says it can “understand music nuances with the same depth as a human DJ.”

There it is, the founding lie. AI does not understand. It emulates content without any understanding or self awareness. I Heart Radio does though, and they proceeded to writee some really creepy stuff at the time. Stating in an SEC filing that they were in the "companionship" business, because listeners build a “trusted bond and strong relationship” with DJs. Further adding “Consumers listen to the radio because the voice on the other side sounds like a friend.”  At I Heart Radio the obvious move there is to fire that friend and replace them with a robot.

Heavy Metal Thunder

I've been tracing back the origins of heavy metal radio shows for years now. Back in 2010 I wrote about early metal radio shows and traced all the "oldest" active shows back to the early 1980s. [LINK] I hypothesized that the earliest metal radio shows would date to the mid-1970s. [LINK] I found that program in Vinyl Edge, on WGTB, and even a few digitized recordings that confirm it's place in the history of metal.

To my surprise, I recently discovered that there was at least one predecessor in the DC metro. There was a radio program on 1500 WINX-AM named "Heavy Metal Thunder". I didn't learn that from any book or any trade magazine or even my own research. It was an anonymous commenter on this very blog. [thanks!] This ties right into the etymology of the words "heavy metal" and might be the big daddy of them all. It's so early that it makes Lester Bangs look late to the party.

So let's review the origin of that phrase. It appears in the lyrics of the classic 1968 Steppenwolf song "Born to be Wild." The songs initial popularity was driven both by airplay and it's appearance in the film "Easy Rider" in 1969. The phrase refers to the roaring sound of a motorcycle engine. This isn't conjecture, that was the explanation from Mr. Mars Bonfire, the songwriter himself. The phrase instantly hooked into some kind of cultural gestalt. This etymology exists in parallel to the Burroughs etymology; beside it, not replacing it.  The phrase appears in the book Goldstein's Greatest Hits: A Book Mostly about Rock 'n' Roll in 1970 (above). By 1978 those three words were appearing in advertisements for Burman amplifiers. I doubt Bonfire got paid.

"Hey, let's make a Peter Fonda movie. It'll have bikes— big steel mothers, with the heavy-metal-thunder understood. And grass— because no one looks as good-looking stoned as Peter Fonda."

By 1973 the phrase was being invoked to describe hard rock and psychedelic blues music. Even that phrase "Heavy Metal Thunder" reads like its the antecedent of Heavy Metal. Richard Goldstein was a writer for the New York times from 1980 to 2007. He was one of the original rock n' roll journalists. That passage (above) also ran in the New York Times, and re-running a collection of their film reviews. Goldstein had a column in the Village Voice starting in 1966 "Pop Eye." He's notable and rarely credited in the etymology and almost certainly one of the earliest musical applications of the phrase. [SOURCE] 

But Goldstein wasn't alone. In February of 1973, in a review by Mark Astolfi in MIT's The Tech [SOURCE] we find a similar metaphorical use of "Heavy Metal Thunder." (He later ran Cozmik Debris.) It does not reference Steppenwolf, but makes the leap to re-use the phrase to describe another band credited as a heavy metal progenitor:

"Deep Purple, progenitors of Third Generation Heavy Metal Thunder long before there was even a Second Generation, are up against that murderous moment which has decimated more than a few of the Big Names in rock — can they follow up the great, the near-perfect record with something close to being as good, if not better?"

Just a few months later in April 1973, The Tech ran a review by Neal Vitale for the somewhat less deserving album "Mothers Pride" by the band Fanny. He was right though, "I Need you to Need Me" was by far the hardest riffing tune on the LP.

"Mothers Pride has a wide variety of different types of songs, from the wistful, acoustic "Long Road Home," to the bitterly sarcastic, autobiographical "Solid Gold" (drummer Alice de Buhr's lead vocals reminds one of a drunk Ray Davies), to the biting, heavy metal thunder of "I Need You Need Me."

That was  a lot of background but lets get back to WINX. Some sources date the start of the show Heavy Metal Thunder to 1969, but that strikes me as dubious. I credit the Washington City Paper [SOURCE] and their 1972 date as more plausible. [SOURCE] It also agrees with Skips later interview material. Skip has had some comments over the years that help us understand the start of the program like this interview with Signaland [LINK]. 

Skip caught the front of a cultural wave. Free form FM was on the airand "progressive" rock playlists were popping up everywhere slowly transmuting into AOR. Later in the 1970s there was not only WHFS and WGTB, but also there was WHMC-AM and WAYE-AM. But nobody was doing what Skip was doing.

"Nobody else was playing heavy metal at the time. There was no DC101 in those days. HFS was playing Grateful Dead, Little Feat, and things of that nature—Bonnie Raitt. So Pentagram were fans of my show and I went over and produced a six song demo by them, and then a year later I put out a 45 by them, and a year after that I put out another 45 by them." 

Groff was born in Waltham, MA but mostly grew up in Washington D.C. Like many of his generation became interested in music when the Beatles hit hard in 1964. He became a DJ at WMUC at the University of Maryland. WMUC was a carrier current station prior to getting an FM license in 1979 for 88.1. He would have been 31 in 1979 so Skip sadly missed that boat. He was first hired at 92.3 WSID (later became WLPL) to work weekends in 1968. In 1977 he opened his own record store Yesterday and Today Records, then in 1978 he was already running his own indie record label: Limp Records. It was the start of something very punk rock.

That timing with WSID is interesting because in 1969 it changed formats. WSID did not flip directly from Soul to Top 40. In early 1969, the station went to AOR, a format it aired for almost a full year before the flip. Skip had a 6:00 PM to midnight show on Saturdays and Sundays. He was a still a U. Maryland student at the time. We don't have playlists, we don't have tapes; but in that Signaland interview he names some sides he was playing then: Vanilla Fudge, Wind, Blue Cheer, Gun, Circus Maximus, and The Seeds... this is a mix of garage rock, kraut rock, and hard psychedelic rock, the precursors of metal. 

Because his show was a success on WSID he was able to cross the street to WINX, though interrupted by a stint in the army. He was there 1969 -1974, then returned in 1976 and stayed to 1977 when he was also working for RCA. In 1981 he started working at WPGC which lasted barely over a year, moving to WAVA in 1982. There he hosted 'Rock of the Nineties.' Skip was interviewed by  DSI records in 2010 creating probably the best source material on him and his various music endeavors:

• Part 1 [LINK]
• Part 2 [LINK]
• Part 3 [LINK]
• Part 4 [LINK]
• Part 5 [LINK]
• Part 6 [LINK]

In part 2 of the interviews he described his "Heavy Metal Thunder" program's playlist: Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Sir Lord Baltimore. It ran 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM at night. This is more metal than his program at WSID. That's how he met the band Pentagram, and got their career started. [LINK] If you make it all the way to part 5 he talks about his current radio show he specifically names the Foo Fighters as a band he'd play today. I never heard his WPGC program but I can imagine it now. More here.

Skip died in 2019, and the storefront closed in 2001. But his wife continues to operate the business online. More here. They donated his papers to his alma mater [LINK]. One can imagine that in that archive might be actual playlists and maybe, just maybe... tapes.

WRKZ - radio artifact

A brand name containing the number "107" might normally be assumed to be at 107.1. But in this case Z-107 was actually 106.7 WRKZ-FM in Elizabethtown, PA. At least it actually contains a "Z". The station is no more. The callsign today resides in Columbus, OH on 99.7 with the brand name The Blitz. I also also found a pin online for our WRKZ with the tag line "Country Fun" that may also have been the name of an event. It's hard to tell now, many years later. 

I found a type of radio artifact which is normally lost. It's a coupon book, clearly a radio station give away. These sort of items are almost always thrown away when they expire or get used, so it's unusual to see one intact. Coupons also have the advantage of expiration dates; providing very specific dating. The dates here are given in October and December of 1985. The Hennigans free dinner coupon alone expires in 1986. The Burger King coupons have no expiration, but good luck using them now, 40 years later. 

106.7 in Elizabethtown today is WWKL, a Rhythmic AC with an incongruous "Hot" branding. Notably it's no longer based in Elizabethtown. Today the city of license is actually in Hershey, PA; the infamous hometown of very bad chocolate. The strange thing is that Hershey isn't really a town. It's an unincorporated community in the Harrisburg metro. I wouldn't have expected the FCC to permit that as a city of license, but there it is. The move was under 10 miles but it takes them from Lancaster county to Dauphin county and thus, more firmly in the Harrisburg market. 

From an engineering point of view the move had to be a challenge. They're boxed in by short spacing.  WWKL is short spaced to four other class B stations in the region, which makes it's move to Harrisburg very odd : co-channel 106.7 WJFK in Manassas, VA and WLTW in NYC, and on the first adjacent 106.5 WWMX in Baltimore, and WCFT in in Bloomsburg, PA.

As you can see in the image above, even the colorful map they provided split the difference; showing Harrisburg in the middle, Hershey and Lebanon off to the right, then Carlisle and Gettysburg off to the left. York and Lancaster both are noted in all caps. Everyone gets mentioned except Elizabethtown.

But when did it all happen? In the 2010 Broadcasting and cable book Hershey has no stations. It notes on WMHX which it attributes to Elizabethtown. Harrisburg has a mere 10 none of which are on 106.7. You have to flip to the E-section to see the three entries for 106.7 WMHX, 1600 WPDC-AM, and 88.3 WWEC the college station at Elizabethtown College. WPDC was an ESPN affiliate back then, but is broadcasting Oldies today. WWEC is largely unchanged. Lets go through the story of 106.7 because so much has changed. 

WMSH signed on in 1964, then the sister station of WHRY 1600. Broadcasting & cable both stations as owned by Hershey Broadcasting but does note the programming was separate as early as 1965. FM 106.7 became WEPN in 1969, and then WPDC in 1971 matching the AM stick. The 1971 issue confirms this, but they were still not simulcasting. The FM stick was MOR and the AM stick was Country & Western. This foreshadows the next change.

In 1980 the calls changed again to 106.7 WRKZ and the FM country station debuted. The station was now owned by Eastern Broadcasting Corp, who also owned the AM stick. there's no format recorded for WPDC but there's a note that it duplicates WRKZ 70%. So its' safe to say they are both country stations at this point in time. Both are still in Elizabethtown as they still are in the 2010 issue. Notes in other sources that report they changed their city of license in 1980. As the town didnt' really exist trade magazines and annuals were slow to update. Hershey appears only in parentheses until the 2013 of Broadcasting& Cable. 

The Z-107 brand and country format lasted until 2004 a long period of stability for this tumultuous station. It was briefly home to the WCAT call sign and then began stunting a loop of pop goes the weasel. Then in February it changed calls to WCPP and rebranded as "coolpop" and a mixed CHR format was debuted. Coolpop was a bit unusual for the time. It mixed CHR hits with the worst of 1970s and 1980s pop singles, what they were calling "cassette classics." Fybush asked for airchecks on  a message board, other comments savaged their top singles [SOURCE] 

One writer on a message board called it "Constant poopfest 106.7." Don't Google that, the internet is not a safe space. But I would like to state for the record, that the comment was probably me. This is where Fybush and I differ, I am absolutely a music snob. He's a kinder gentler radio geek. Billboard ran an interesting article on the format that March quoting PD Will Robinson, who does a good job making demographics sound super creepy, like they're stalking their listeners.

"Actually, we know our target listener on a first-name basis... Her name is Jennifer, the most common female name [among women] born in 1971. She's 33 years old, we know what car she drives, how much money she makes, how many kids she has, where she shops. We've really targeted the station to her needs and wants. The music blend you hear is targeted toward the aspirations of Jennifer."

Then like many other novel formats Coolpop flamed out and converted to a more familiar Adult Hits format in 2005 as Mix 106.7. But that didn't do well and it rebranded as "Channel 106.7" in 2010 dropping the 70s singles. [SOURCE]

In 2011 Citadel merged with Cumulus and they flipped the station back to country music in 2012, returning to their golden period format with the brand "Z-Country 106.7". The WRKZ calls were long gone but they found a Z in the new calls WCZY.  The format stuck around but in 1024 Cumulus rebranded a swath of country stations as "Nash." It leaned a bit more country gold. 

The corporate ownership led to another series of format flips. In 2018 it went back to CHR, and swapped calls and format with 93.5 WWKL. At the time Cumulus also owned WIOV, and it reduced their overlap for that country music audience. But it was only this year that WWKL flipped from CHR to Rhythmic AC. They are still using the "Hot 106.7" brand, but I expect it to change again.

Calling all WCPRs

There have been a lot of different WCPRs over the years. Today there are three: 1450 WCPR-AM in Coamo, PR which first signed on in 1967, also 97.9 WCPR-FM in D'Iberville, MS which signed on in 1992 and then my favorite: 740 WCPR the college radio station of Stevens' Institute of Technology. My research indicates that it was founded in 1961. There were also a few historic WCPRs, all to be untangled.

Sometimes listed at 530 AM, the station never actually had an FCC license. There is a legend of an SS Steven's and a related FCC raid of WCPR somehow using that floating dormitory to boost their signal. The boat was real, [SOURCE] but the rest remains an uncorroborated legend, though very colorful. If it helps you imagine it, the SS Steven's did have a radio room which may have been the origin of the tall tale where they "lost" their FCC license.

In 1967, the first year the SS Steven's housed students, WCPR was already broadcasting on 1450 Khz in Coamo, Puerto Rico. That means at the very least, those calls were not available. Generally speaking, Hoboken hasn't been a hotbed of radio broadcasting. RCA operated WJY from Hoboken in 1921, and it's not been home to a licensed transmitter since. However, I did find that Stevens was offering radio broadcasting courses as early as 1941 so amateur and unlicensed broadcasting are certainly on the table. 

Tying it to Stevens is the hard part. If I go back all the way to the 1920s I did find one amateur license, 2AIS operated in 1925 by H.A. Thompson at Stevens Institute. The calls go back to at least 1920 with other operators, also in Hoboken: George William Stewart and Fred Britton Llewllyn. The 1922, 1923, and 1926 listings of the Citizens Radio Call Book connect 2AIS to the "Stevens Radio Club" at 521 River Street. Perhaps this is the actual origin of WCPR, not that these things tend to have only one origin, true or not. (Back in 1915 the calls belonged to Fred Dawson of Arlington, NJ)

WCPR was always a carrier current station. The campus radio station at Steven's Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ was not even audible in the one square mile area of Hoboken. They were geographically situated such that they might be on the same radio dial as the biggest, most desirable non-commercial playlists in America: WFDU, WNYU, WSOU, WKCR, WHCR, WFUV, WFMU but they were only audible in select locations on that campus. 

But because the kids at WCPR were highly organized, they were reporting their top 5 to Billboard magazine in the early 1970s right along side what we'd later call "core" reporters like WWUH, WVKC and WLSU. That's pretty amazing. Back in the 1960s they rebroadcast WNEW off hours. Hey, when you're not broadcasting, there are no rules! [SOURCE] Then in 1976, a Brooklyn pirate radio station re-used their call letters! Was it out of ignorance or was it an homage? we may never know. But that pirate and the college station both appear in various books by the legendary Andrew Yoder.  [SOURCE] There are multiple sources but the very best is a column from Popular Communications. I quote all three relevant paragraphs below:

Tom [Macko] also goes on to tell about a station he heard last December. The station, Tom says, broadcasts on 1620 kHz from "some where in New York... Obviously it is a pirate station. I heard it playing rock music and conducting what were announced as transmitter tests. The station gave a phone number, which I called. A young man answered. We talked for a while but he said he couldn't answer some of my questions about the station's location and details. This was very interesting. Probably the FCC will shut down the station by the time this report gets printed."

You betcha! That's,exactly what happened to this rather ambitious pirate ambitious pirate station used the call letters WCPR. Actually it took a number of weeks before complaints of this unlicensed operation reached the Federal Communications Commission. And during that period,the signals of this pirate station, just above the normal medium-wave AM band, were heard as far north as New Brunswick, Canada and as far west as Illinois.

But, when the FCC did learn about WCPR's illegal operation,it took just one night of radio direction finding effort to pinpoint the station's location, in an apartment building in Brooklyn, NY. The transmitting equipment was confiscated and at this writing no decision had been made as to whether to charge the offenders with a criminal violation.

So that's four or more WCPRs detailed above. But I do have just one more which is perhaps just a misnomer: In the 1990s there was another WCPR which reported to CMJ for years. It was ostensibly based in "Peona, IL" later this was corrected to Peoria, IL. (Only one of those towns actually exists of course.) For a long time I was unable to identify that radio station. It could be our WCPR in Hoboken with incorrect metadata, or some other even more obscure carrier current station. A 1986 issue of "The Stute" does claim Stevens was reporting to CMJ at least in the late 1980s adding to the confusion. [SOURCE] In some issues both stations charts appeared side by side.

In a single issue of CMJ in 1999 I found the mystery station reporting under different calls in different parts of the issue: adds, metal chart, top 30 etc. The Peoria station was now using the call sign WRBU, That's was and very real carrier current station at Bradley University, a campus also home to the public station, WCBU. (Oddly today WCBU is operated by WGLT.) There is very little information online about this station. Today Streema lists WRBU as no longer streaming. A 2014 issue of the Scout [SOURCE] lists the station manager as Ethan Hoerr in a short article about campus group ads. Their social media posts peter out around November of 2022.  Other shows were posted later directly on YouTube but those also peter out. Below is the description they were using online around that time.

WRBU The Edge is Bradley University's Student owned and operated college radio station. Here at The Edge we strive to provide quality radio programming you won't hear on any other major station. Shows are developed and hosted by students that are unrestricted in format. This results in a wide range of programming that gives WRBU a creative and original edge over all other college radio stations (yes, pun intended).

Their old URL was buedgeradio.com and thankfully there are multiple captures on the wayback machine. But most importantly in addition to streaming, it confirms they were available on Channel 3 on Bradley Campus Cable and also on 97.7 FM on Bradley Campus in Peoria, IL —that's the carrier current signal. The station has at least two separate eras. It first started around 1968 at WBUR and ending in the late 1970s. Then it was rebooted in 1987 driven by faculty advisor Tom Richman. Early station managers include Jeremy Styniner. They are able to trace the station in that form back to the 1960s broadcasting 5 hours a day on carrier current. Bradley University also has it's own Amateur Radio Club with the calls W9JWC and a public television station WTVP which all may have shared staff and/or facilities at different times. Posts on their new website stop in April of 2022. It ends abruptly with two videos on the history of The Edge. The production value is decent, clearly NPR-inspired. It's quite good.

• PART 1 - LINK
  
• PART 2 - LINK

The problem with this 1980s reboot of WRBU is that all print sources already refer to it as WRBU. The video histories also refer to it only as WRBU even thought their CMJ reports list them at WCPR for another decade. The 2nd episode of the history confirms they were a carrier current station even in the early 1990s. On United Artists cable FM at 99.5 they could be heard in Bartonville, Maxwell, Bellevue and Norwood Illinois. This expansion, while driven by cable television increased their coverage wildly beyond their campus. In pictures I do see a CMJ poster in the background. A 1998 article confirms they were moving to a part 15 low power broadcast and that they were re-branding as "the Edge" and abandoning the call sign WRBU. My theory is that they attempted to update their calls with CMJ and realized that it was incorrect, and some limitation kept them at 4 letters. Why they didn't go with EDGE, I'll never know.

Looking at all the overlapping timelines, we can say definitely there were at least four WCPRs in 1998, its a very popular call sign. But being unable to connect the two stations WRBU and WCPR there is the possibility that there was just one more, unless this was always a typo, or yet another very clever pirate. As always... there's a mythos there.