that horrible BEEP

[Dan.Strassberg]

When I arrived in Troy in late August 1952, WROW was owned by Hudson
Valley, the company that built the station (probably around 1947 or
1948). I remember seeing a letter on WROW's stationery, which very
promnently announced "Harry L Goldman, President."

The following anecdote reveals a certain irony in Goldman's so
unabashedly publicizing his ownership of the station: Probably in the
early fall of 1953, when Goldman still owned the station. a new
announcer, Arnold Friedman, joined the air staff. Friedman was very
good (as were all of WROW's announcers with the possible exception of
Ralph Vartigian, who I regarded as marginal for a major market
station). But a few weeks after Friedman appeared, he quietly
disappeared. A couple of weeks later, "another" announcer, who sounded
EXACTLY like Friedman, appeared on WROW. This guy was "Mark Edwards."
A while later, I visited the WROW studios, located in a cramped and
dirty former apartment building not far from the State Capitol
building on the south side of State St in Albany. I asked the
announcer on duty (might have been George Leighton) what the story was
with Friedman/Edwards. He said that Goldman had decided that the
Capital District audience was not ready to accept an announcer with a
Jewish name, so he had Friedman disappear for a while and then
reappear with a more generic (that is, WASP) name. Apparently, Goldman
figured that the advertisers WERE ready to do buiness with a station
owned by a Jew. How else could he have justified having his own name
appear so prominently on the station's stationery?

Anyhow, when WXKW 850 left the air in the fall of 1953, WROW took over
the ABC Radio affiliation from WXKW.  At that time, WROW dropped
Mutual, which I believe migrated to WOKO or maybe WPTR. Goldman still
owned WROW when that happened, but I believe that Hudson Valley had
already been granted (or expected to soon be granted) Channel 41. I
believe that Goldman had hired Friedman in expectation of his working
in both TV and radio.

You have placed WTRY's dropping of CBS Radio in 1955, which seems
quite right to me. WROW picked up CBS and dropped ABC at that time. I
believe that was when ownership of WROW was transferred to Capital
Cities. I have a couple of reasons for thinking so; I think both WROW
(AM) and WROW-TV switched affiliations at the same time. Also, Frank
Gicca, who was one class ahead of me at RPI, had formed Rho Tau Sigma,
the short-lived national undergraduate extracurricular
radio-television honor society. Rho Tau Sigma was Gicca's ticket to
being named to Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities. Gicca
graduated from RPI in 1955. Before he graduated, he had assiduously
cultivated the gentleman who had come to WROW from New York City to be
general manager of WROW AM and TV. That gentleman was Roger Bauer,
best known as the creator and producer of the Mutual Network comedy
show "Can You Top This?" I clearly recall Bauer receiving an award
from Rho Tau Sigma and appearing as the guest speaker at the RPI
chapter's first annual awards ceremony and induction dinner, which,
IIRC, took place in the spring of 1955. Gicca's and WRPI's association
with Bauer paid off, but not until both Frank and I had graduated from
RPI (he in '55; I a year later).

As had many AMs in the 50's, WROW had dabbled in FM, operating WROW-FM
93.9 from WROW's transmitter site in Glenmont, running 1 kW from a GE
transmitter into a single-bay antenna mounted on a telephone pole near
the Tx building. WROW was on the air the legal minimum of six hours a
day (3:00PM to 9:00PM) and IIRC never did anything but simulcast WROW
(AM). Gicca knew that WROW was going to surrender its FM license
(which it did a year or so later) and he wanted the station to donate
the GE transmitter to RPI for use at WRPI, which he hoped would apply
for an FM license. And that is exactly what happened. I remember
traveling to Troy for WRPI-FM's formal sign-on cermony while I was a
graduate student at MIT (which means it HAD to have happened between
'56 and '58).

Moreover, the relationship between WROW and WRPI continued to bear
fruit. Later, when WRPI (by then using the donated transmitter on 91.5
with a (probably different) single-bay antenna mounted on a different
telephone pole outside RPI's 15th St student lounge building) wanted
to increase its coverage, it moved to WROW-TV's (or maybe by then it
was WCDA's) Channel 41 tower in N Greenbush and increased its ERP to
10 kW. (BTW, WROW later got back into FM with a new WROW-FM on 95.5
with full Class B facilities from a site in the Helderbergs.) Anyhow,
I'm sure that Bauer was at WROW in 1955 and I don't think he arrived
until Captial Cities had acquired the station.

-----
Dan Strassberg (dan.strassberg@att.net)
eFax 1-707-215-6367

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "A. Joseph Ross" <joe@attorneyross.com>
To: "Dan.Strassberg" <dan.strassberg@att.net>
Cc: <boston-radio-interest@bostonradio.org>
Sent: Monday, January 21, 2008 12:06 AM
Subject: Re: that horrible BEEP


> On 20 Jan 2008 at 9:01, Dan.Strassberg wrote:
>
>> Capital Cities started in the Capital District (and indeed was
>> named
>> for it) and WROW was its very first station! WROW got a TV CP,
>> which
>> initially resulted in the construction of Channel 41 (now Channel
>> 10
>> et al). In those days, it was cutomary for radio and TV networks to
>> affiliate with commonly owned radio and TV stations in most markets
>> where they existed.
>
> I don't know when it became Capital Cities, but while I was there,
> up
> until May 1957, the company that owned WROW was called "Hudson
> Valley
> Broadcasting," and that was how they answered their phone.
>
>> IIRC, WROW-TV (which was later renamed WTEN after
>> it built the Channel 10 facility in Vail Mills) initially became
>> the
>> CBS-TV affiliate. It was thus fitting for WROW (AM) to be the CBS
>> Radio affiliate.
>
> My recollection is that WROW-TV was not originally a CBS affiliate.
> When we moved to the area in late November 1953, WROW radio was
> still
> an ABC affiliate and WROW-TV had just come on.  It may have been an
> independent station or it may have been nominally an ABC affiliate.
> Just after the start of 1954, I saw an ad in the paper proclaiming
> that it really was a happy new year because Channel 35 would soon be
> on the air.  It would be WTRI and would be a sister station to WTRY
> CBS.  That meant that Channel 35 started as a CBS affiliate.
> Channel
> 74, WMGT was a separate station with its own programming, possibly
> with a DuMont affiliation.  At the time, however, whatever the
> affiliations of the UHF stations, WRGB, although an NBC affiliate,
> also carried many programs from the other networks, often by delayed
> broadcast.  I recall that they had Ed Sullivan's show on Friday
> evening and Jack Benny on Sunday afternoon.  At one point Bishop
> Fulton J. Sheen's Tuesday night show on DuMont was also on Sunday
> afternoon.  Space Patrol, an ABC program, was carried live from the
> network on Saturday morning at 11:00.  Some of CBS's weekday
> afternoon shows were also carried on WRGB.
>
> I don't remember whether it happened at the same time as the radio
> shift, but at some point WROW-TV began to advertise itself as the
> new
> CBS affiliate (despite all the CBS shows on WRGB).  WTRI at that
> point went off the air for awhile.
>
> Finally, I believe in 1956, WTRI returned as an ABC affiliate.  By
> that time, WROW-TV had become WCDA channel 41 and WCDB, channel 29,
> and WMGT had left the air.  I believe it had already shifted to
> Channel 19 before the fire.  I'm not quite sure the timing of its
> return as WCDC, but I suspect it might have been motivated at least
> in part by the demise of the DuMont Television Network.
>
> In 1956, when WTRI came back on, there was a general reallignment of
> programming, and all CBS programs moved to WCDA etc. and ABC
> programs
> still being carried on WRGB moved to WTRI (with one exception I
> remember:  I was surprised to discover that Art Baker's "You Asked
> For It," which was WRGB continued to carry, was an ABC program).
>
> -- 
> A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                           617.367.0468
> 92 State Street, Suite 700                   Fax 617.507.7856
> Boston, MA 02109-2004                    http://www.attorneyross.com
>
>