Dawn Patrol!

Nat Wright played the last song on the last episode of Dawn Patrol back in 1984 when WIP-AM switched from an AC format to all talk radio. It started with a single talk program at 8:00 PM called “WIPeople Talk” hosted by Michele Iaia. But perhaps that's not fair. Maybe it started with WIP-FM siphoning away their own music listeners. Regardless, eventually talk programming would run from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM and slowly the station transmogrified into sports talk over the next decade. the turning points was the end of Dawn Patrol.

Nat Wright hosted Dawn Patrol for 17 years. He took over the program from Gene Milner who hosted it from 1958 to 1967. Prior to that, Joe McCauley hosted the program since before 1940. Mort Lawrence had hosted it since 1942, and Fred Wood in 1941. Tom Livezy was host somewhere in 1943 as well. . The show was an all night record flipping program that ran from midnight to 6:00 AM. Back in the 1940s WIP had been one of the few 24/7 operations. So the program was very popular by default no matter who was the host.

Dawn patrol began as a swing program: Glen Miller, Count Basie, Ray Anthony, Ralph Flanagan. as WIP-AM became more of an AC station the playlist took a required turn to continue being relevant to the station as a whole. Nat Wright had joined the station in 1961 filling in and flipping records.  In 1967 he was tapped to host the program and in that era still free to play his own picks. The show ran for

Wright died in 12009 at the are of  82 of a stroke at home on Thanksgiving. McCauley, who had hosted the program's 5,000th episode in 1953 died in 1968. McCauley was inducted into the Philadelphia Broadcast Pioneers hall of fame in 1999. [Source]  Fred Wood later started WWOC-AM in Avalon NJ and WMVB-AM in Vineland, NJ. Tom Livezy, and Mort Lawrence... I have no idea what became of them. Nat Wright is long overdue for a nomination.

WYSP to WIP a little early

For months now the word on South street has been that on September 6th, 94.1 WYSP will end its classic rock format, and start simulcasting 610 WIP-AM.  Today they pulled the trigger early. As early as 7:00 AM today Radio-Info was abuzz with the news, WYSP would not be grilling this weekend. [Here.] 

The reason is simple. 97.5 WPEN was starting to put the hurt on their former sports talk monopoly. In a nutshell, AM radio is on the way out, and an FM sports talker is going to eventually subdue an AM sports-talker. So for WIP this was a change-or-die decision. They chose to fight on and so kudos to them. It waqs only fair, WYSP had long ago lost it's own battle with WMMR. Ben Feldman explained the situation well at Brotherly Game.  Anyway, ready or not, at 3:00 Today came the big flip.

Here's a short clip.


It was very dramatic, but the fanfare was warranted. Gimbels department store signed on WIP-AM back on March 17th 1922. It was the first commercial radio station in Philadelphia, and it's calls were WIP. That's a perfect example of what should be considered a "heritage call sign." Now after almost 90 years they've made the jump to FM. All I can say is welcome aboard. Hope you last another 90 years.

Delaware Valley Radio Ephemera

This is an odd one. This is some kind of business card for C.H. Davis, Inc a stereo and television store in Ardmore, PA. Inexplicably the store still exists today, just a few blocks away from the junk shop where I bought the book that contained the card; presumably as a book mark. But this is an old card. They were still selling portable radios and phonographs when this card was made.I do notice there are no Am stations listed. That indicates that it's after 1960 —during the ascension of FM.

The call changes can narrow the date of this scrap of paper. Some isn't helpful.  WJBR is still on 99.5 unchanged since 1956. WPEN became WMGK only in 1975. WFIL only became WIOQ in 1971.We know it's older than that.  92.5 FM was WIFI back then and is WXTU now. They changed format from pop to country before 1984. WIP-FM hasn't been on 93.3 since 1965, after which it has been WMMR. On 93.7 these days we have WSTW, it hasn't been WDEL-FM since abotu 1966. (WDEL-AM remains on 1150.) WFLN-FM is now WBEN, it only dropped the heritage FLN calls in 2006. WHAT-FM also changed calls in the late 1960s when it dropped it's jazz format. 98.1 FM is now WOGL as it has been since 1987. Back in the 1960s WCAU-FM  was simulcasting MOR with WCAU-AM.   

WSNJ-FM 98.1 helps narrow the date a bit. That station signed on in 1946 as WSNJ. (FYI: Wikipedia incorrectly dates that to 1961) What happened in 1961 was that WSNJ swapped calls with 107.7 WPBS. they had already been on air for 5 years.  They changed calls to WUSL in 1976. WSNJ remained on 107.7 until about 8 years ago. So, it had to be printed before 1961 the date of that call swap and after 1956 the date WJBR signed on. (Math corrected by Fybush)

WXPN, WHYY and WRTI are about all where they were even if the programming has changed a lot. WHYY has a typoed frequency. But WPWT is more of a mystery. they were a share-time with WKDU on 91.7 from the1950s into the 1980s. I hear they were a crazy psychedelic hippie station. I'd love to hear an aircheck.  I'll have to write a post about them sometime.

WIP and the Liberty Bell

Generally speaking, people are not permitted to ring the Liberty Bell. But it was not always that way.  In the late 1800s it travels to expositions and was frequently rung, often further damaging the relic. In February 1915, the bell was tapped gently with wooden mallets to produce sounds which were transmitted to the fair as the signal to open  the 1915 San Francisco Fair, a transmission which also inaugurated transcontinental telephone service.  The bell returned to Philadelphia by train.  Since then, actual touching of the bell has been diminishing. But to preserve the bell this had to stop, the bell had to go to the people without physically moving. Later events were held in Philadelphia, and broadcast live by radio. By that conduit it continues to be struck on special occasions. FYI: it's an E-flat

 In 1926, the sesquicentennial of American Independence, the wife of Philadelphia’s Mayor Kendrick tapped out 1-9-2-6 in Morse code using a rubber mallet. It was carried live on the radio. About a third of Americans had access to radio in those years and it was estimated that several million tuned in. It was also rung on New Year's Eve in 1924, 1925, and 1926, each was broadcast live on the radio.

At President Franklin Roosevelt’s urging, the bell was tapped for his radio broadcasts to pump up patriotism. The tapping went out over the radio waves throughout the war: tapping “V” for Victory in October 1942 to mark the 31st anniversary of the Chinese Republic; for “I am an American Day” on May 16, 1943; for July Fourth in the same year; for the opening of two new war bond drives in September 1943 and January 1944. The recording of the 1926 sesquicentennial was re-broadcast on June 6, 1944, to signal D-Day, the WWII the invasion of Europe. Former Philadelphia Mayor Bernard Samuel tapped the bell once, gently at the start of the broadcast. No recorded text of the event that I've found mentions any radio station by name, but the one image (above) clearly shows the 610 WIP-AM nameplate on the microphone stand. It is my assumption that all these early broadcasts were carried on WIP.

WIP-AM was the first commercial radio station in Philadelphia. They were started by Gimbels Department store and began broadcasting in 1922. It makes them one of the few stations that were available locally for these events all the way back to the first noted radio broadcasts of these events starting in 1924. As an affiliate of the Mutual Broadcasting System in the 1940s, they were able to feed the programs out to the rest of the network

To open a 1950 Savings Bonds Independence Drive Drive then Secretary of the Treasury, John W. Snyder, tapped the original Liberty Bell in Philadelphia near the close of an hour-long nation-wide radio show featuring an address by President Truman and a number of celebrities. By then radio coverage of any Liberty Bell event was guaranteed along with TV news coverage. But that was probably the last event they covered directly. In the 1960s WIP began adding more soft rock to their day shifts until by the early 1970s they were an AC station with hourly news casts. Over the 1980s they made room on their schedule for syndicated talk programs. the end came in 1986 with a flip to Sports-Talk in 1986 thus severing their connection to news programming and local coverage of the Liberty Bell.

McMahon

Ed McMahon had a strange job while he was alive. His job was to laugh at Johnny Carson. Plenty of people already did that for free. From 1962 to 1992 his job was to sit on stage and laugh like a monkey. It's no where near where he began his career. He began as a carnival barker in Mexico, Maine about 50 miles from Augusta. He put himself through college as a pitchman for vegetable slicers on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Somewhere in the middle of all that, he did some work in radio.
His first broadcasting job was at 1400 WLLH-AM in his native Lowell, Massachusetts. He studied electrical engineering at Boston College and it enabled him to do his remotes solo, a plus for hiring managers. McMahon's voice was heard on WLLH doing station IDs in the 1980s, and he returned to Lowell in 1994 to be honored with a live broadcast on WLLH alongside then-morning host Paul Sullivan. WLLH-AM was a whopping 250 watt station back in those days. Today it's an ESPN affiliate with a more substantial 1000 watts. More here.

In 1949 Ed scored a gig doing overnights at WCAU-AM in Philadelphia where he was the announcer for The Ol' Night Owl, Powers Gouraud . He also co-hosted an afternoon program. He also did some announcing on WCAU-TV. Nobody is proud of it now, but he also was a clown on Saturday Mornings. He was drafted twice. Once in WWI and once in the Korean war both tours flattening his broadcasting career. This second tour was when he was at the peak of his work in Philadelphia. By 1952 he had bits on 13 different programs; new game shows, and the late night movie program. He had learned to fly in WWII so now they wanted him to bomb small islands in the pacific. When he got back they were all cancelled. He got a little piece on the nightly news. Philly was over he started looking at New York. But in 1958 he was still in Philadelphia, still on WCAU. but Agent Chuck reeves set him up with an audition for announcer on Johnny Carson's show on ABC. It was called "Who Do you trust." It was in actuality a game show but most of it was Carson being a funny man in the classical sense. That show ran for four years. In 1962 the two of them started on the tonight show replacing the twitchy Jack Paar on NBC.

For Ed that was really the end of radio. He came back to WLLH a couple times to do some station IDs as a favor to be friendly to the station that started him at $10 a week. He came back again when they celebrated Ed Mcmahon day with a parade. In the 1990s, on the USA Radio Network he hosted a weekend talk program called "Lifestyles Live." I think that was his last spin in radio. He died June 23, 2009. He was at 86.

Broadcast from the Sea Floor

I enjoy how exceedingly arcane some radio "firsts" are. Officially the first submarine broadcast was December 7th 1930. But on October 15th 1919 there was a two-way radio communication between Commander Clark Withers of the US Submarine H-2 and the US Destroyer Blakely. the submarine was submerged in the Hudson River off 96th street NYC. There is almost a decade between those two events. I didn't believe there was that size gap in experimentation.

In 1924 a diver from Philadelphia named C. O. Jackson, broadcast from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. A microphone was mounted inside his helmet wrapped in sponges to protect it from impact and to mute his voice at that range. the carbon mics of that era were very delicate.

He did not broadcast from the bottom. A cable ran back up to the boat where a more traditional transmitter and antenna rig relayed the signal to WIP-AM. From there the city of Philadelphia could hear Jackson describe the briny deep. At the time WIP was owned by the Gimbel Brothers Department Store.

WIP began it's first official broadcast on March 18, 1922. WIP had been a flashy station from day one. Back then, as a day share with WGBS in New York, they were audible straight into Manhattan. They broadcast from inside a glass DJ booth so that any onlooker could watch. So broadcasting from the sea floor may have been a stunt, but it was a stunt hundreds of thousands of people heard. More here.

The Uncle Don story

He's not my uncle Don. I don't even have an uncle Don. I'm speaking of that old urban legend. The one so old, it's rarely told. It's the one you tell to the young DJs to teach them to keep their yap shut in the booth whether they think the mike is on or not.

A flub committed while filming a movie or TV program could be eliminated merely by doing a new take or in the editing room. If someone say's "fuck" you can bleep it. In radio, especially early radio, everything was live and often unscripted. If you say "fuck:, it was already too late. This is such a tale. but let me first say There is no evidence of at all that Don Carney was ever penalized for anything he said as an on-air radio personality. His show was never cancelled. Period. Like Fatty Arbuckle, the whole deal is a humbug.

Don Carney had an incredibly long-lived broadcasting career. he began as an announcer at WMCA in the 1920s. He moved onto WOR where he broadcast six days a week, beginning in 1928 and continuing through 1947. After that, instead of retiring he got a gig at WOR as a DJ with a program of children's music. After that he semi-retired to Miami beach in 1948 and hosted a weekly children's show on WKAT which he did until his death in 1954. Radio Guide called him "a saint, oracle, and pal to 300,000 children." But the legend says there was an incident that marred this kindly purveyor of children's programming. Witness accounts vary, but here is the basic version:

Uncle Don ended each show with Floyd Neal to signing him off, a station break and intrtoduction for the next program. But this week Uncle Don twittered his usual cheery wind-up, and then, not realizing that the mic was still on, thinking he was off the air, he blurted out: "There, I hope that'll hold the little bastards."

Some sources put it in 1939 others in the early fifties. But really the legend preceeds Dons program by several years and appears ealiers with the flub being attributed to "Uncle John" Daggett of KHJ in Los Angeles, John "Big Brother" Keough of KPO in San Francisco and even the lesser known Graham McNamee even Uncle Whip of WIP. According to Snopes the earliest reference might be the 23 April 1930 issue of Variety"

"A wisecracking radio announcer in a Philadelphia station lost his job about two weeks ago as a result of a stern reprimand of the station by the Federal Radio Commission. Announcer had concluded a bed-time story for children and thought the power was off. For the benefit of the control room he added: 'I hope that pleases the little bastards' This went out over the air. Within 10 minutes several telegrams of protest, among them the Federal Radio Commission, had arrived. Others came later in bundles."

But the variety article mentions no data, no DJ and no station. It's utterly apocrophyal. The lack of verifyable details it typical of legends such as these. ... and never has the FCC or the FRC had the ability to respond in writing to a complaint in 10 minutes.... 10 months would be more believable.

Where Philly and Milwaukee Meet

While listening to the mighty WMSE this morning I began thinking about radio's oddly retail beginings in this decidedly cheese-obsessed metro. With a little research I find that It's beginnigns are also tied to those of Philadelphia; a city that has nothing to do with cheese whatsoever. http://www.wmse.org/

In 1922, the United States Commerce Department granted the Gimbels Department Store broadcasting licenses for WIP-AM in Philadelphia and 830 WAAK-AM in Milwaukee store. Interestingly enough WAAK-AM is also one of the very first 4-letter call signs. http://www.610wip.com/

In Milwaukee they built a 100-watt transmitter atop a 40-foot tower on the roof of the downtown store. The studio was on the third floor. On the retail floor Gimbels installed "listening posts" throughout the store, where consumers could listen to the programs on individual earphones.

WIP did not have the dial to itself, but still it perservered and eventually became the uncontested king of legacy stations in Philadelphia. WAAK wasn't so lucky, less than a year later in 1923, new federal regulations mandated the installation of wave-metering equipment at all radio stations. Rather than upgrade, Gimbels decided to pull the plug on WAAK. Their license was deleted.

WIP went on to be owned by Spectator (the same company that owned the Philadelphia Flyers and the Spectrum arena.) And became one of the first sports talk stations in America. Today INfinity rpoudly continues in that format.

a little philly radio history here: http://tangentsunset.com/radiophi.htm