RE: WTIC (AM) anniversary broadcast

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

>Joe Ross wrote:
>I seem to remember that we discussed this not too long ago, but I don't
>remember what we ascertained.  Does WTIC still do the V on the hour?  If
>not, when did they stop?

        Thanks mostly to me, we have gone through this before here.
Extremely short version: The four-tone hourly time signal, still used on
WTIC (AM), debuted July 4, 1943, as a patriotic, depths-of-World War II
symbolic gesture/statement: V for victory. It was cooked up by two people
at the station, an engineer and a young "executive" type, as a combo of the
Morse for the letter V and the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth. The
four tones are at different pitches to mimic the music, but they're also
three shorts and a long. The same tone generator they built by hand then is
still used. Until Travelers sold the three stations in the early-mid 1970s,
the time signal also was sent over WTIC-FM and channel 3, then WTIC-TV.
        Always the cynic, I keep waiting for it to be discontinued the day
somebody tells a wretched bean counter at Infinity that the generator needs
a 29-cent replacement part.