story about Portland Maine Top 40 History

[rogerkirk]

chuckigo@maine.rr.com wrote:

>had this link sent to me by a listener.
>http://www.aroundmaine.com/03/wlob/default.asp
>great story about the early days of Top 40 Wars and station 
evolutions in Portland between WLOB and WJAB, with some nice period 
>photos of Bob Fuller, JJ Jeffrey, Jim Sands and others.

Some additions to the article:

Surfer Joe originally called himself "Killer Joe"
after "Killer" Joe Piro and used the Rocky Fellers'
song as his theme.  Seems not a lot of people made 
the connection (I certainly didn't) and he changed to
Surfer Joe - somewhere around mid-late '65 IIRC.

The old WLOB had a SPCE club - "Society for the 
Prevention of Cruelty to Ears"  - Logo was the
silhouette of a symphony conductor.  I have one 
somewhere in my archives (read pile of junk)

WLOB apparently stood for LOBster as in "The 
Lobster Network"  - no other info available.

Around the time of their '65 "Awakening" they were 
purchased by Atlantic States Industries (ASI).  
Anybody know who they were?

One of their early DJ's was "Dr. Go" a.k.a. Peter
Gowan - Chief (?) Engineer.  Anybody know where
he ended up?  In '67, he was CE for WRYT in Boston.

In '65, a pipeline was run through their property
at 779 Warren Avenue Westbrook and the towers had 
to be "moved."  Apparently ASI spent a goodly 
portion of the tower re-location (and re-tuning)
money on studio equipment and then fell short of $$
when the re-tuning bill came in.  Times were tough.

At one point in their "small budget" days, they asked
their then CE Eugene Terwilliger (sp) to be the overnight
DJ - spinning discs while he worked on the equipment.
Billed as "The World's Worst DJ" he quickly became quite
good.

Then there was their "Seeburg" automation system.  A 
Seeburg JukeBox head was lashed up to play the "A-Side" 
of all the records in sequence.  When the record ended 
and tripped the mechanism to change discs, it also fired 
off a cart machine to play one of a set of bumpers - all
timed to fit in the slightly indeterminate time between
the end of one record and the beginning of the next. 

I think the weirdest thing was letting the evening jock 
record two of his early hours with relative time checks 
("It's 5 past the hour") and then replaying them while 
he slept from Midnight til 2:00 am  next to the transmitter.

Ah, Local Radio at its Finest!