Herald: Ch 4 going back to "WBZ" brand

[Dan Strassberg]

I think that Scott (maybe even in his recent reprise of the WEPN transmitter
site at Tower Site of the Week--WEPN is the station that used to be WHN,
WMGM, WUKQ, WEVD, and probably others) showed us that what is now WEPN had
been WHN on more than two occasions--maybe three. If so, I've forgotten the
details. I know that the original WHN calls date back to when the station
was owned by the Marcus Lowe booking agency--later Lowe's Theaters. Lowe's
later changed the calls to WMGM. After radio magnate George B Storer bought
the station, he used his considerable influence with the FCC to have the
calls revert to WHN.

Storer owned a lot of stations with interesting histories. And you can bet
the histories would not have been so interesting were it not for Storer's
FCC connections. He was behind getting a full-time license for what was once
KFVD in Los Angeles, a daytimer on 1020, which, like a couple of other West
Coast AMs that operated on clear channels assigned to stations in the East,
would sign back on in the late evening (West Coast time) when the Eastern
stations were off the air overnight. Only after Storer convinved the FCC to
allow what was by then KGBS to go on the air full-time did the other
stations that he didn't own (in San Francisco, Portland OR, and Seattle) get
full-time authority. Storer also moved his WJBK Detroit, a Class IV
graveyarder, to the 1500-kHz Class IB channel and built a nine-tower
directional array to increase to 10 kW-D/5 kW-N. The array didn't work
properly and that Quixotic exercise wasn't straightened out for 50
years--long after Storer's death and long after the station had been sold
repeatedly. The station is now WLQV and runs 50-kW-D/10-kW-N. The WJBK calls
may survive on TV in Detroit--not sure.

--

Dan Strassberg
dan.strassberg@att.net
Fax: 1-707-215-6367

----- Original Message -----
From: "A. Joseph Ross" <joe@attorneyross.com>
To: "Dan Strassberg" <dan.strassberg@att.net>
Cc: <boston-radio-interest@rolinin.bostonradio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 10:47 PM
Subject: Re: Herald: Ch 4 going back to "WBZ" brand


> On 22 Nov 2006 at 19:52, Dan Strassberg wrote:
>
> > The radio station was KHJ in Los Angeles, which became KKHJ for many
> > years and then convinced the FCC to let it go back to KHJ, which are
> > the current calls. The reasoning for dropping the extra K was a bit
> > hokey, but I think the FCC was simply looking for a reason that it
> > could a accept (that is, a reason that sounded plausible) and the
> > licensee came up with one. And yes, there is (or was) a KHJ-TV, which,
> > I believe, is not co-owned with KHJ (AM) and has not been for many
> > years.
>
> Thanks for recalling it.  I thought it was something like that.
>
> Incidentally, it apparently was once possible for a station to
> reclaim its old three-letter calls, even if they hadn't been used for
> awhile.  As I recall, the former WHN in New York went back to those
> calls sometime in the 1960s for awhile, then gave them up again.  I
> remember being surprised at the time, since I didn't know the station
> had once been WHN, and I wondered how they had managed to get a three-
> letter callsign.  Then I saw an old movie where someone was speaking
> with a microphone labelled "WHN," and I figured out that the station
> had once had those calls.
>
> --
> A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                           617.367.0468
>  15 Court Square, Suite 210                 Fax 617.742.7581
> Boston, MA 02108-2503                    http://www.attorneyross.com
>
>