WSCR memo

Presently the WSCR-AM calls are in Chicago on 670. It's a CBS owned Sports talker. It's been there since 1992. Before that the calls were in 1220 in Hamden, CT. It's a stick currently known as WQUN-AM. In the 1970s WSCR-AM resided on 1320 in Scranton, PA as it had for a few decades. Back in the 1960s it was a Top 40 station. More here.

Below is an internal WSCR memo from 1984, when it was on 1220 in Hamden, CT. I found it inside a 45rpm sleeve. Note the dot matrix printing. It describes a Sales Job at WSCR. It seemed at first pretty pedestrian, but actually, it describes the job of a local feet-on-the-street sales person. It's a job that barely exists anymore. 25 years later, after a wave of consolidation, local sales has become a dinosaur and memos like this probably look a lot different.

This image is 1070 x 1600 so its perfectly readable when you click it.

Dubbing 45 to Fidelipac

Audio CDs have been commercially available since October 1982. They were invented in 1976, and first publicly demonstrated in on March 8, 1979 at a press conference in the Netherlands. But in radioland it was a long slow process to adoption. We were still largely vinyl-based into the late 1980s. Some stations dubbed them onto carts. But, most stations were still using vinyl and CDs side-by-side in the studio into the 1990s. It was only the later step into digital databases that started to really eliminate the turntable from from the studio.But in radio we play singles, so at commercial stations spinning vinyl, this meant a lot of 45s. Not to belabor the point but these images are from two 45 rpm sleeves from the library of 1220 WSCR-AM, Hamden, CT. Back then it was a country music station. You can see from the notations above that these were dubbed onto carts (Fidelipac) to reduce vinyl wear and every 5 to 10 days they re-dubbed it to tape to keep the audio quality high. Tape can wear quickly. With this rotating system of dubs, the tape always has a fresh copy, and the single gets 1 spin a week instead of 1 every few hours.

Today 1220 in Hamden is WQUN-AM owned by Quinnipiac University and runs full service: sports, news and adult standards. I'm curious to know if the turntable is even still hooked up.