Re: Made-up callsigns

[Donna Halper <dlh@donnahalper.com>]

>regarding old call letters and their meanings, Scott wrote--
>
>Donna...give us some of the other good ones.

And there are many.  Sometime back, I discussed how some of the earliest 
calls didn't stand for anything but were in fact ship radio station call 
letters-- after the tragedy of the Titanic, the government passed a law 
stating that all ships had to have an on-board and operational ham radio 
station.  But if a ship sank, the next ship didn't want those call letters, 
thinking them to be bad luck; so the Department of Commerce stock-piled 
them and when radio came along, assigned many of them to the new commercial 
stations. the call letters of WBZ originally belonged to a ship radio station.

Beware of legends about call letters, however.  Many stations took randomly 
(and sequentially) assigned calls and insisted they stood for something, 
when in fact the so-called meaning was added much later.  WSAR in Fall 
River used to claim their calls were requested, standing for "We Sell 
Advertising Results", but if you check the list of call letters from 1923 
(and yes there are several sites on the internet that give the call letters 
and when the stations got them), you will see that these calls were just 
assigned in order (WSAB, WSAC, WSAD, etc).  In 1924, the calls "WSAD" used 
to belong to a Providence station, and no the owner (a jeweller who owned a 
store in downtown Providence) was not unhappy as far as I can tell...

Some calls *were* requested for a specific purpose, such as when the late 
great John Shepard 3rd put his all-female station on the air in January of 
1927 and asked for (and got) WASN-- All Shopping News.  No joke, no 
sexism-- it really was an early attempt at a home shopping station, and the 
women who ran it also did news, public service, and announced the music 
(the orchestra was all male, however).  But our earliest historical calls, 
like WNAC and WBZ and even the late lamented WGI were just assigned by the 
Department of Commerce and had no particular meaning.