More Kiss-108 info

[Chris Hall]

I just pulled out another box of old WWEL/KISS info, After Christmas 1978 WWEL received a cease and desist order cancelling
WWEL’s use of Bonneville program material at midnight December 31st as the program material was contracted to WCOP
GCC on January 1. The contract had never been renewed due major problems with Conant Broadcasting but Heftel felt these                                          problems were history with the ownership change. There was such bad blood between Bonnevilles Marlin Taylor and Loring
Fischer towards Joe Kruger and Arnie Ginsburg....as long as Arnie was to remain as operations manager they wanted out.
With this surprise situation WWEL had no programming to to stay on the air with.  Tom Hoyt had a friend who owned Kala Music
in Kalamazoo that did him a favor and shipped a BM library for use until we had a chance to regroup. Jeff Wyatt and I drove
over to Delta Airlines to pick up the shipment that day.

There had been no thought to a format change, WWEL was bare bone nothing even for a BM stationA Gates Executive with 4 rack                                           mount stereo Scullys 285’s and ITC 3 deck mono cart unit.
Production consisted on a Gates mono yard, 2 new Scully 280-B2’s and 1 Tapecaster mono recorder
The AM studio was even worse, an old RCA 1956 mono console, tapecaster playbacks with 4 ITC 750 rack mounted reel to reel decks
Nothing even remotely useable for Disco or anything else. I had to beg Lake Systems for 2 cheapTechnics variable speed turntables to get us going
later I was able to get Bob Wotiz  from WMEX to help veri speed modify Technics SP-10 MK II’s, which when installed the word got
out to PD’s and clubs from from across the country asking how we did it.
Just to show you how off guard they were, there was not even stereo turntables or preamps in the house, the day of the format 
change we went to mono out of the AM studio to rewire some stereo equipment into the air studio and modify the 
console for a rudimentry system usable for disco such as constant cue and turntable speed mixing. It came as such a surprise
that we had to go on the air with a barefoot Optimod internally modified for the BM format as no new processing chain
was thought to be needed