Re: Carl DeSuze

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

>Dave ISeman wrote:
<snip>
>Here on Cape Cod, I know it's near the top of the hour when I listen to WOCB,
>Ocean 104 (standards, sort of) and hear an instrumental. They "DeSuze 'em"
>into the top hour news.

        In the WBZ top 40 heyday, early and mid 60s, all the jocks used
instrumentals at least sometimes. And I remember others than DeSuze having
to bail out in the middle of vocal songs when they had screwed up. And I
remember they'd sometimes run only 15 or 20 seconds of the instrumental in
the clear before coming in over it. They seemed to have two rules: No
yackety yackety without music underneath coming up to the hour and they
treated the hourly tone and starting the news on time as sacred as the BBC
and the Big Ben chimes. There was no such thing as running through the
tone. One thing to remember about then is that there were a lot of
instrumental hits, both currents, many times, and oldies, to choose from,
so it didn't sound as odd as it would now. And they always backtimed the
instrumentals.
        The super-classic timing was for the tone to go off just after the
news intro said "from the WBZ news center" and the intro music's last note
was cross fading into the teletype sound effect: news intro voice/last note
of music crests/teletype fading in/time tone/teletype peaks/Streeter Stuart
starts.