Call letters in poor taste (was RE: Howie Carr in Seattle)

[dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net]

Voice of Maine, eh? Anyone else remember when WVOM was 
the Voice of Massachusetts? 1600 AM in Brookline. It's 
been WUNR for the last 40 years--give or take a few, but 
it was WVOM when it signed on and for quite a few years 
afterward. Between WVOM and WUNR it was WBOS (AM). I've 
always been puzzled about why anyone who speaks English 
would want the WVOM calls, but then, there are some 
other good examples of calls that bring to mind subjects 
that couldn't have been intended by those who chose the 
calls.

A good example were the original calls of AM 1020 in Los 
Angeles (now KTNQ, I believe). Before KTNQ, the calls 
were KGBS, for George B Storer. Those were OK too, but 
before those, the station was KFVD, for no reason that I 
know of other than that KFVD were sequentially assigned. 
You'd think that the owners would have chosen their own 
calls when the FCC offered KFVD, but maybe it was a more 
naive age. At least _W_EVD has a good reason for its 
calls; they are the initials of Eugene V Debs, a 
controversial labor organizer for whom the station was 
named.

Then there is the possibly apocryphal story about the AM 
in Idaho to which the FCC first assigned one set of 
requested calls and then required the station owners to 
select new ones. Someone at the FCC finally recognized 
what he should have realized from the outset--that the 
calls kind of spelled an obsecne word. I say "kind of" 
because the first letter of the sound-alike obscene word 
isn't K. I think that clue should be sufficient to 
suggest the word to most readers without my having to 
spell it out.

Anyone have any more examples of real calls that were at 
least in poor taste? Or should we kill the topic because 
it's in poor taste itself?

> Howe Carr is also on "The Voice of Maine" WVOM 103.9 Howland/Bangor.
> Comes on right after Rush L. at 3.
>