Re: The Colonial Network

["Robert Paine" <MACANDREW@LDSLiving.com>]

When WTHT-AM, Hartford, went on the air on August 12, 1936, The Hartford
Times (WTHT's licensee) reported that  Colonial, which it referred to as a
new network, would begin operations in the later part of September that
year. I do not have access to the exact date but it was around the 26th.

Former Yankee personality Bill Hahn told me several times that when he came
to WNAC from WCOP, sometime during 1943, Colonial had been gone for some
time. I don't recall coming across an exact date of termination for Colonial
but would put it around 1941 and certainly by 1942, as by that time WAAB was
already in the process of moving to Worcester.

The best I've been able to come up with is that some Colonial stations
became Yankee affiliates. There were cases, such as in Hartford where in the
beginning of Colonial's existance, one station (WTHT) was Colonial, another
(WDRC, then WTIC, then WDRC again) carried Yankee. By 1940-41 or so, WTHT
had both Colonial and Yankee, as well as Mutual.

Re: Cedric Foster - he was station manager of WTHT until the 1940's, when he
left for Yankee in Boston. His earliest commentaries originated from the
WTHT studios and were fed to Yankee (or perhaps, Colonial at first), and
thus to Mutual.
He also began the first sponsored FM-only newscast/commentary over
W1XOJ/W43B during the war.

I have a photocopy of Election Night 1940, of the Yankee-Colonial studio
(later the Ch. 7 studio) at the Hotel Buckminster. There were separate
setups for each net. Colonial, the smaller, had one microphone at it end.
Yankee had two or more at the opposite end of the dining room-turned-studio.
My guess is that the two simulcast a good part of the evening and Colonial
broke away to feed its stations from time to time. I'd be interested to find
out is my assumption is accurate.

BTW, each net had its own control room with both webs being engineered
through Master Control. (I wonder if the apocryphal NBC Red-Blue mixup might
have occurred at 21 Brookline Avenue. "This is WNAC, the Yan-...no, this is
WAAB, the Colonial....no, this IS WNAC, key station for the Yankee Network
in Boston.....I think....")