WPOP call letter history

[mwaters@wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

Garrett Wollman wrote:

>And it was then co-owned with what is now WPOP, which was then
>licensed to New Britain and had the callsign WNBR....  The WPOP
>transmitter is just over the New Britain line in Newington.  The WNBC
>transmitter used to be in New Britain proper before they moved to
>Farmington, which is why WATR-TV was able to get an NBC affiliation at
>that time.

        The 1942 station list at Jeff Miller's collection on the web lists
it as WNBC, New Britain. City of license notwithstanding, it's my
understanding that it was considered a Hartford station, and one of the
three major ones, from the beginning in the '30s. I think it was affiliated
with one of the NBC networks, which would have given the call letters a
double meaning. The transmitter is only about 6 or 7 miles from downtown
Hartford, closer, as it happens, than WTIC (AM), which was the other NBC,
and about the same as WDRC (AM), which was CBS. Of course, we're tiny in
Conn. It's only nine miles from downtown Hartford to downtown New Britain.
I don't know when the city of license change was made for WPOP. It had
another set of calls, not WNBC or WNBR, as the last calls in the 1950s
before it became WPOP, but I can't recall what they were. I think they had
an H in them. The switch to WPOP went along with the switch to a top 40
format. It was the first major station in the Hartford area to do so,
around 1957.

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