Re: 1950s oldies

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

>Joe Ross wrote:
>I was listening to the UMass game yesterday on WATD on my car radio (The
>only radio that
>gets a decent signal on WATD).  After the game, the station began playing
>1950s oldies.
<snip>

    WATD is a real gem -- still locally owned, etc., by Ed Perry. It
follows a basic adult contemporary (I guess you would call it) format with
lots of local news until around 7 or 8 p.m. Then it goes into all sorts of
eclectic programming, some of it brokered, but not psychics and all that
schlock. Folk music, blues, various sub-genres of oldies, all night long.
And on weekends.  I believe there's an oldies show around 6-8 a.m. on
Saturdays that's actually done by two teenagers -- barely born when the CD
reissues of the oldies were released :))

    At least a few nights a week, from around 2 or 3 a.m., a DJ who is
blind does an oldies show from his home. From the fourth-hand accounts I've
heard, Mr. Perry helped set him up to do that so he wouldn't have to come
to the studio anymore.

   There's a hilarious framed letter Mr. Perry keeps in the front foyer.
It's a letter from the FCC in the 1950s, to Mr. Perry's father, saying, in
essence, that he really needs to get his son to stop running the priate
radio station in the backyard. Now, there's my kind of radio station owner
....

    Of course, I can't resist editorializing: WATD also is an example of
why it's good to have the lower power FM category of stations. How long
would WATD remain the funky local outlet -- or locally owned -- if it got a
big power increase and tip-toed its antenna site north to Hingham or
somewhere?