Saturday, January 30, 2021

KAAY Request Lines

 Friend of this blog, Doug Virden, sent in some interesting phone information:

"This past month the radio stations currently located at 2400 Cottondale Lane have dropped their 433 prefix studio numbers.  I will go into the reason for that and the reason for the establishment of the prefix for radio stations in Little Rock.

Thanks to having some old phone books I was able to gather information on the studio phone numbers for KAAY.
When KAAY premiered in September 1962 the studio and main office shared one phone number which was FRanklin5-5311.
 
Sometime after moving to 7th Street the name prefixes were dropped by the phone company and the 7th Street number became 375-0105.  The offices kept the 375-5311 number. When KAAY moved to 2400 Cottondale in the fall of 1976 the studio number was 661-1212.  Within about a year or two KAAY's studio number became 433-0059.  According to someone who currently works in the Cottondale building KAAY may have been the reason the 433 prefix was established for radio stations in Little Rock.  The prefix was set up to be able to handle a large amount of  calls without blowing up phone circuits all over town.  These were also known as choke lines.
 
The reason the radio stations currently in the Cottondale building discontinued their 433 numbers is because those particular phone lines won't transfer to the digital system and if the lines went down there is really not anyone from the phone company that knows how to work on those lines anymore since all those workers have pretty much retired."
 
Yes, folks who actually know analog technology are few and far between now. In fact, in our area of Alabama, the phone company is quietly encouraging people to drop their terrestrial phone lines in lieu of all cell phone coverage.  I personally know (being in the emergency power generations field) that cell sites can go down because of power and emergency back-up generator failure.  Those cell phones are only portable radios that are linked to physical phone lines somewhere, just not at your domicile.  You're friendly, neighborhood phone technicians are slowly retiring and all you get is someone in India who can't speak in English wanting to tell you that your cell phone is at fault.

Enough of that.  Speaking of call-in lines to radio stations, my wife used to be the Chief Operator at a local hospital and had a bank of lines available to her; when a local station had a contest going on, she could start calling and put them on hold, then come back and answer them.  When she was the "nth" caller, she won!  I know, that was "loading the bases", but she was so successful, she won a lot of loot...and had to pick it up in different family's names, like her sisters and her mother's names.  In fact, one of the biggies was WABB (now defunct, so I guess the statute of limitations is over!), which was where Wayne Moss worked for a bit.  I'll have to look back at the timeline and see when she was calling the station, but I think Wayne was long gone before then.  And another tning- the hospital was only two city blocks away from WABB!

Thanks, Doug!  Keep the interesting stuff coming!

Bud S. (staceys4@hotmail.com)


Friday, January 15, 2021

Undated Herman's Hermits Photo

 Thanks to Barry Mac, from his post on Facebook:



Per Barry: "I don't think I've done this one before, but if I have, it's been quite awhile - Herman's Hermits and a lucky KAAY listener! And based on the expressions I see, Peter Noone is pretty much the only one putting on a really good face here."

 

Thanks, Barry!

 

Bud S. (staceys4@hotmail.com

Sunday, January 10, 2021

Barry Mac's Birthday 2016, with Doug Virden, Oct. 2016

 


Per Doug Virden:


"Picture with Barry Mac at his birthday celebration this past weekend. Gave him a vintage KAAY sticker from the 70's. Glad I had the opportunity to celebrate his birthday with him. The 2nd pic is the phone that was out at the transmitter building for years. Barry got to take it home when he was out at the transmitter building last year (2015)."


Thanks, Doug!  Barry and I are only a few days apart, I can't remember who's gt the lead, but I ain't fussing!


I am weeding through some e-mails that Doug has sent me, when I was in a bad period of my life.  Things are much better now, an I am able to play catch-up.  I apologize for the delay on some of these posts.


Bud S. (staceys4@hotmail.com)

Old KAAY Transmitter Remnants From Doug Virden

 Folks, when I visited the transmitter in April 2012 with David B. Treadway and Jerry Sims, we could have carted away a truckload of stuff in the junk pile, if we knew we wouldn't get in trouble.  Good friend of this blog Doug Virden visited the transmitter site back in 2017 and grabbed a couple of items and shipped them to me.  At the time I received them, there was a lot going on in my life, so I didn't get to mention them and they went into storage.  Here's what Doug said in his e-mail to me:


"Let's not forget the reason I was able to visit the KAAY transmitter building, the reason being was to pick up a remnant from the old RCA transmitter for Bud.  I  ended up taking a meter and some tubes which I sent Bud a few weeks ago.  I  got to take me home a meter and some tubes too (see pictures below).  I will let Bud do the honors of posting what he received, here are pics of mine."

 

I need to be ashamed of myself...and they got here safe and sound.  Here are Doug's:

 



 These pictures are of part of a pre-driver power deck (the tubes) and modulation meter (percent of modulation) that Doug has.

The pictures below are the articles Doug sent me, a kilovolt meter and more driver tubes:



These tubes are sitting on a little different deck than Doug's tubes...


The tubes in my picture are "813" tubes, and are high-wattage tubes many of us Amateur Radio operators "(Hams") use in our high-wattage amplifiers.  Our amplifiers for our service are limited to 1,500 watts of power, so I think these had to have been driving the much larger tubes for full 50,000 watts potput.


The kilovolt meter is just that: it measures how many thousand volts are flowing to a particular part of the system.  It's no wonder safety switches abound in high-power transmitters, if you touch something in error, you're history!


Thanks, Doug, for sending these to me!  I apologize for taking so long in getting them posted...


Bud S. (staceys4@hotmail.com)

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

Info on Buddy Carr/Tom Bigby, per Doug Virden

 Folks, some sad news on Tm Bigby from Doug Virden:


"One of the original DJ’s at KAAY has passed away.  Tom Bigby passed away Monday January 4th (2021, bs). 
Not long after KAAY launched he was kicked out of the studio by government officials to bring the people of Cuba information concerning The Cuban Missile Crisis.


He later rejoined Mike McCormick at WLS in Chicago.  Are there any of the original DJ’s from KAAY who are still alive?"

 


 https://www.allaccess.com/net-news/archive/story/203183/tom-bigby-veteran-radio-programmer-passes-away

 " ALL ACCESS hears from several sources that TOM BIGBY, the sports radio programming pioneer who developed stations like WIP/PHILADELPHIA into powerhouses, died MONDAY (1/4)(2021, bs) in TEXAS. He was 76.

BIGBY spent 15 years as PD at WIP, shepherding the station's caller-driven "guy talk" format into national prominence, and programmed KRLD-F (105.3 THE FAN) and WXYT-F (97.1 THE TICKET)/DETROIT before adding corporate duties as VP/Strategic Programming for CBS RADIO. He also programmed KRLD-A and KLUV/DALLAS, WIFI and WPHT-A/PHILADELPHIA, WNEW/NEW YORK, and KFI-A and KOST/LOS ANGELES, and served as OM at WYSP/PHILADELPHIA before retiring and launching a consultancy in 2011."

 So many of The Greats are heading to Radio Heaven recently...rest in peace, Tom....


Thanks to Doug for this news.


Bud S. (staceys4@hotmail.com)

Monday, January 4, 2021

Wayne Moss airchecks from 1976 & a Beaker Street anniversary promo

Happy 2021 Everyone!

Here's a couple of new aircheck posts, courtesy of Russell Wells.  He obtained these and posted them on a KAAY Facebook group, and approved the re-post to this Blog.

The first is a composite aircheck of Wayne Moss doing middays on KAAY on various days in 1976, some of them from August 29 of that year.  Wayne is in his usual good form here.  The aircheck includes two promos of interest, celebrating Beaker Street's "8th anniversary on September 10".  That would indicate that Beaker Street began on about that date in 1968.   Other accounts, including one written by Clyde Clifford, have put the beginning of the show as late 1966.  So, was this promo in error on the anniversary year?

Here's the entire aircheck:
(or download here)

Here is one of the promos: (or download here)

---Greg Barman