Adventure Car Hop is the Place to Go

[Donna Halper]

At 12:32 PM 5/15/2007, Mark C. wrote:

>I should add however that in Arlington and Belmont WCOP-1150 was 
>king with the kids in '61.  I'm sure the transmitter being in 
>Lexington helped.  After school, most transistor and table radios 
>tuned in to Eddy-Eddy-Eddy Mitchell!, a true whacko who was zanier 
>than Ginsburg and at least on par with similarly-crazed Chuck 
>Stevens out of RI (550).  Both Mitchell and Stevens joked about 
>other stations' DJ's (e.g. "Carl DeSnooze") and interrupted records 
>with sound effects and loony comedy clips (Spike Jones, Dickie 
>Goodman, Stan Freberg, etc.).

I too used to listen to WCOP in its top-40 days (1956-7 is when I 
used to be a big fan); I even have some old WCOP surveys from back 
then. What's interesting was that even at a young age, before I knew 
I'd be going into radio, I could perceive that the station rotated 
the songs, and I knew how often certain songs would come up... they 
used really really tight rotations in the early days of top 40, given 
that there were few "oldies" to fall back on.  There were a number of 
Boston and suburban stations that played around with top-40 in the 
50s-- I believe there was WVDA, WILD did a little experiment with 
top-40, etc...  I recall listening to Joe Smith, Wild Man Steve, and 
several others in addition to hearing Arnie on the old WBOS.  The 
original "Night Train" theme had the lines "It's Arnie Ginsburg, on 
the Night Train show.  At 1600, dee-doobie-doo-wah, on your 
radio."  When Arnie went to WMEX, Mac Richmond was evidently too 
cheap to let him cut a new jingle, so he just chopped those last 2 
lines oout.