Re: WHET (was Re: William Pierce of WCRB)

["Dan Strassberg" <Dan.Strassberg@att.net>]

I remember that WHET's AM-drive show was hosted by Johnny Towne. The show
was definitely big band/nostalgia. I remember listening to Towne on my way
from home in Arlington to work in Norwood, where I worked between April 1975
and July 1978. Others who did shows on WHET included Betty Daye, and I
think, Alan Dary. Daye and Dary were later on WXKS (AM) in the early days of
adult standards there.

I also remember that sometime in the spring of 1976, WHET began work on the
directional array that consists of two 300' top-loaded towers. The work was
completed that fall. 1330 has used the two-tower array for the last 25 years
although at least one of the current towers isn't original. Accidents
involving trucks and guy wires have claimed one or both of the original 300'
towers. The two-tower array replaced the former array, which consisted of
three 200' non-top-loaded towers.

I have always suspected that the two-tower array, which considerably
improved WHET/WDLW/WRCA's daytime coverage, was paid for by WNYM, which in
an earlier life had been WEVD. WNYM and WPOW shared time on 1330 in New
York, and the two stations used separate TX sites--WNYM in Queens and WPOW
in Staten Island. WPOW's pattern pushed all of the signal to the northeast
across the salt water of the Narrows and into lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and
Queens. At night, during hours when WPOW was on the air, the skywave really
did a number on the Boston-area 1330. But Monday thru Friday, WPOW operated
only from 3:00 to 8:00 AM and 5:00 to 8:00 PM. When WNYM took over the
channel, the signal from its north-south figure-eight pattern was much less
troublesome in Boston.

However, WNYM wanted to operate from the WPOW site, presumably because some
developer had made a tempting offer for the land on beneath its Queens TX
site. I figured that WNYM's owner (probably Salem communications by that
time) and WCRB's Ted Jones struck a deal that had WNYM pay for a new array
that improved the Waltham station's daytime coverage in return for the
Waltham station's accepting the bad nighttime interference during additional
hours.

The use of a two-tower array become possible when WHAZ in Troy NY (then
owned by my alma mater, RPI) dropped out of a three-way time-sharing
arrangement with WPOW and WNYM to become a daytimer. When WHAZ was a
"full-time" station, WCRB had to protect it. (Full-time was a funny term for
WHAZ, whose share of 1330's broadcast week ran all the way 6:00 PM Monday
night to 3:00 AM Tuesday morning--and the station didn't even use the time
that it was allocated between midnight Mondays and 3:00 AM Tuesdays.) Then,
a decade or so later, when the New York station (by then, full-timer WWRV)
moved its TX to the site of WWDJ in Hackensack (in a curious
what-goes-around-comes-around turn of events, now itself owned by Salem) the
Boston 1330 got back the lost nighttime coverage and then some.

--

Dan Strassberg, dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net
Phone: 1-617-558-4205, eFax: 1-707-215-6367

-----Original Message-----
From: David W. Harris <dwh@totalnetnh.net>
To: umar@nerodia.wcrb.com <umar@nerodia.wcrb.com>
Cc: Joseph Pappalardo <joepappalardo2001@yahoo.com>;
boston-radio-interest@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu
<boston-radio-interest@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>; Bob Nelson...WMWM
<bobonradio@yahoo.com>
Date: Sunday, June 03, 2001 2:55 PM
Subject: Re: William Pierce of WCRB

>Another Herald article (9/8/75) from music critic Ellen Pfeifer lists
>September 29 as the intended change date with no "on or about"
>qualification and says classical will be simulcast on 1330 and 102.5
>weekdays 7-9 a.m. and 4-6 p.m., with some additional simulcasting on
>weekends which may or may not include BSO concerts.  Anyone remember
>that?  I didn't live inside 1330's coverage area until the fall of 1976,
>at which point I remember WHET as a big band station, not as MOR with
>some blocks of classical.