AM in Boston after WW II was: WBZ-AM Allston backup is no more

[Kevin Vahey]

WTAG was owned by the Worcester Telegram and Gazette and they obviously had
political clout in Washington with the old FRC and then the FCC.

Worcester at the time was the second-largest city in New England and still
is today and civic and political leaders there resented Boston. That is the
reason the Mass Turnpike when first built in 1957 did not have a direct
Worcester exit.

What baffles historians is that WTAG was granted the TV license for Channel
5 and they then decided they didn't want it. Was getting a network
affiliation for a Channel 5 in Worcester an issue?

Worcester had a vibrant AM market into the mid-'70s - WBZ was the only
Boston station that factored.

In 1975 that was shattered when WPJB-FM in Providence flipped to Top 40 and
the station became huge in Central Massachusetts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ofUxEJIZRQ

https://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/pat?call=WWLI&service=FM





On Wed, Oct 21, 2020 at 12:44 AM Martin Waters <martinjwaters@yahoo.com>
wrote:

> Kevin Vahey wrote:
> >
> > 590 WEEI - Covered the market well plus the Merrimack Valley and South
> Shore - Only 5kw but at 590 that wasn't an issue - The weakness was in what
> would become Metro West because of WTAG at 580
>
>     It's always been a mystery to me that two stations both started around
> 1925 ended up on first adjacent channels despite being located so close to
> one another. It's hard to figure why in those early days, when frequency
> assignments were shuffled around often and there were few stations on the
> air yet, some other arrangement was not made.
>