1150 and 1600 old days

[Mark Connelly]

Where I lived in Arlington near Route 2, WCOP was King Kong compared to WMEX.  In 1958-1961, when I was going to the Brackett elementary school, WCOP "ruled the school"; you could even get it on one of those crystal "rocket radios" that didn't have a battery.  Kids sneaked those in and clipped them to desk metal to listen surreptitiously to WCOP.
http://www.crystalradio.net/misc/rocket/index.shtml

Those radios needed a barn-burner local signal to work.

WMEX, on the other hand, only had a so-so day signal and sometimes got hammered by talker 1500 WTOP DC on one side and rocker 1520 WKBW Buffalo on the other - even on reasonably good home and car radios.


Ed Mitchell's afternoon show on WCOP was very popular.  He used a lot of audio clips in an era when there were no laptops and mp3's.  These must have been on reel-to-reels, cartridges, or carefully-cued records.  He dropped comedy bits from Stan Freberg, Spike Jones, etc. in for humorous effects.  Records he thought were silly or goofy got mercilessly spoofed.  These were often "teen tragedy" songs.  I remember him "killing" this one by slowing it down to a growl and dropping twanging bedsprings and other sound "defects", likely from the Radio Shack sound effects record, over it:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8JHNWt7w3Q  (Cathy Carroll "Jimmy Love": plot = lightning hits tree, it falls and kills her boyfriend right before they were to get married)

As stated by others, WCOP did not do well on the North Shore.  Signal at Revere Beach was just adequate, but much weaker than WMEX screaming across 10 or so miles of water.  In the car, heading north on Route 1, WCOP was totally out of gas at night by the 128 interchange in Lynnfield-Peabody.  It submerged below a cacophony of competing 1150 stations, mostly Canadians.  Even at midday, as close to Boston as Bearskin Neck and Granite Pier (Rockport, MA), co-channel 1150 stations from Maine and New Brunswick clobbered WCOP.

Mark Connelly
South Yarmouth, MA
  
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On the other hand, in Bedford, where I spent my teen years, WCOP was the
most popular station.  With the transmitter in Lexington, it was the
strongest signal in town, even stronger than WBZ.  We all listened to it
until it very suddenly shifted to a MOR format during the summer of
1962.  That was when I first started listening to WMEX a lot.  Their
daytime signal came in quite well, but at night, they had problems with
WKBW at 1520.


On 7/10/2018 2:04 PM, Jim Hall wrote:
> WCOP's big problem with top 40 was that you couldn't hear them at the beaches on the north shore. I listened to WCOP at home in the city, but when we got a summer cottage at Hampton Beach, you could get WMEX clearly, but WCOP was non-existent even in the daytime.
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> I think Ken Mayer did well because those were the days when all the stations except WHDH signed off at midnight on Sunday/Monday. WHDH stayed on with Norm Nathan's jazz show. Ken had soooo many commercials, all of which he read himself. But he played a lot of comedy albums too, which made the show interesting.
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> --But even 1600 had Ken Mayer who had a substantial cult following between Midnight and 2 AM every Monday. WCOP had a slight run with Top 40 but their -night signal was worse than WMEX. Ken Carter hosted a very successful dance show on Saturday's in Cambridge but otherwise not much except national NBC sports events like the World Series.
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