(NOTE ON THE PICTURE GALLERY: The thumbnails are there, you can click them to see the "big picture" - but as for text descriptive display, "it works in my editor but not in Firefox or Edge" so the quick workaround is to click on the picture, and when the full sized image displays, the description will appear (though some browsers will clutter it with # and % and other symbols). Seems that in 2003 Microsoft made changes to the "photogallery" function (meaning: they screwed it up). So I need to start all over and create hyperlinks for each picture descriptor. Someday. Perhaps one day in this space I'll just list the pictures and descriptors... sorry, but as Microsoft points out, this is a 2003 program and things have changed. Wow. Now on to Tom's excellent article:
Sometime around 1965 I received a phone call from a buddy Tom DeBray, I had
worked with Tom in Fort Lauderdale at several stations. Tom was in school in
Maryland and also working part time for two radio stations in Silver Spring
Maryland. It seems they were building new studios and relocating their AM and FM
transmitter plants and were in need of a project engineer to get the job done.
Tom could have been the man for the job but his education could not be but on
hold. Tom recommended me for the job as he and I had recently built a state of
the art FM stereo studio facility in Fort Lauderdale.
WQMR/WGAY was then owned by Connie B Gay the legendary Country and Western
promoter. Country and Western was the then term used for “Country” now. Connie
had purchased the stations from another legend in the communications and
Broadcasting business John Kluge. The stations were also managed by yet another
legend Ed Winton.
By the time I came on the scene Ed Winton had departed for South Florida to
crank up the OCEAN. Connie installed his son Jan Gay at the station’s GM, Ted
Dorf was the Sales Manager and if memory serves me well Bob Chandler was the
program director and Bill Doty was Production Manager and News director. I
may have the titles confused but there is no question that Ed Winton had set a
great course for these two stations and following his departure the ship
continued to sail on auto pilot with a few minor corrections by the team he had
put in place. Ed was the creative genius and understudy of Gordon McLindon. Ed
did copy much of McLindon’s material like those super, “mood intro’s with the
Dallas Symphony and the “WQMR Concerto.” Where is that Concerto anyway? It is my
understanding Ed himself wrote many of the intros, like:
“a sleek jet liner whisks across the midnight sky…….. 20,000 feet below a
brooding Lincoln keeps constant watch on our Nation’s Capital……. Ushering in
another hour of great music on WQMR….. Washington’s Quality Music Radio
Station."
Ed had hundreds of these. Each one better than the other. Each had
carefully selected music under the words setting the tone of the hour.
These stations were so good the Government had a special line installed to pipe
the station straight from the studio to the White House. Somehow I suspect Ed
Winton had a hand in this. When I was building the new facilities President
Johnson was in the White House, however I think the line was installed first
during the Kennedy administration and then reinstalled at the World Building.
Somehow I can’t picture LBJ tuned in, but you never know who is listening.
Soon after I arrived Jan called all of us into the conference room to tell us
Connie had cancer and was to be operated on. At that point Jan was the Man. Jan
admitted he didn’t know much about radio as he was a lawyer not a broadcaster.
However, Jan did know he wanted to build a showplace for these stations. He
wanted lots of “bells and whistles,” real show Biz. I think the big bucks to
build out these two stations and the Hunington WV stations came from sale of the
valuable real estate formerly housing WQMR/WGAY. This real estate was sold to a
developer to create a large Condo project. I was told it was worth a great deal.
As I recall the original WQMR/WGAY was located on Viers Mill Road and
perhaps in Wheaton. I have included a few pictures of this wonderful old radio
station building and studios.
Most of the equipment was ordered and some being delivered when I arrived so I
had very little say in what was installed. I added all those cute little
switches in front of the controls on the main control board to control the cart
machines, turntables and tape machines. Yes they still used real vinyl records
for all the music broadcast over the air. I also designed the tally light system
above the console on the wall indicating the status of the transmitters, EBS,
telephones and the teletype. I also designed a special extended remote control
metering panel on stainless steal panels in the equipment racks to control the
20 KW RCA BTF 20E transmitter on the roof and the RCA 1R transmitter over on the
Sligo Creek golf Course.
I supervised the construction of the self-supporting tower on the roof of the
World Building as well as the free standing tower at the new golf course site.
Each site had it problems. In order to install the tower on the roof of the
World building it was necessary to mount big I beams on top of the roof and
secure them with additional I Beams directly under the roof. This required
drilling many large holes through the roof about 3 inches in diameter.
Unfortunately the weather turned really bad right after we finished drilling.
The 5 inches of snow was not the problem. It was when the snow melted the big
problems started. I received a call in the middle of the night from a watchman
claiming there was a flood taking place on the top floor of the building in our
new studios. The snow was melting and leaking through the many holes and coming
down through the ceiling and stairs. The water coming down the stairs looked
like a water fall. How to solve this problem? Like the child who put his hand in
the dyke in Holland to hold back the water, we needed something like 36 of those
children. The solution was somewhat the same idea, Thermos corks. You know those
large big old corks that came with the old fashioned thermos bottles. Where can
we get 36 big corks at 3 AM Saturday night. There was no Home Depot then. We
called every drugstore in DC, Maryland and Virginia within a 50 mile radius.
Three here, 4 there, 6 somewhere else. In 2 hours we had 36 thermos bottles and
36 corks. We pounded the corks into the roof and the flood waters subsided.
We did a lot of quick drying of the equipment using hair dryers and blowers.
Fortunately the carpet had not been installed so we didn’t have that problem to
contend with. Actually there was very little damage other than the inconvenience
and lost time. The next problem with the tower was that the RCA vertical and
horizontal antenna system had to be re installed as the labeling was wrong
therefore part of it was installed upside- down. The actual problem was brought
to our attention by an 8-year-old, Charlie Plunket who had taken to hanging out
with us almost every day during construction. Why Charlie was permitted to be
out till 10 at night was beyond us. We all adopted Charlie, so to speak, taking
him to dinner and giving him a few dollars for helping us. I did meet his Mom
and Dad one time. They seemed like normal middle class intellectuals. His Dad a
patent attorney and his Mom a cellist. This kid asked more questions than any 20
children, but he was very helpful as a gofer. As the tower crew from Utility
Tower company were installing the last vertical bay of the antenna Charlie ask
me, “ How DO they know which end to point up? Now that was an excellent
question. Upon examining the drawings with the antenna we discovered they were
in conflict. One said do it one way the other indicated the opposite. I didn’t
know as this was one of the first dual polarized FM broadcast antenna I had
installed. The tower crew didn’t know. They said “we don’t know nothing
about this crap”. “We just try to follow the instructions, but most of the time
they don’t make no sense”. These guys weren’t any Einstein’s but boy could they
work hard when they were on the job. However when quitting time came around they
lived at the bar.
I made a call to RCA. They connected us with their antenna group. The person we
talked to there wasn’t sure either. Finally the answer came. The answer was, we
installed it wrong. The tower crew was not happy, but it got changed. The side
bar to this problem was that Connie had a new station in Huntington WV. This
crew had installed that antenna as well. Two days later Dan Grassi and I worked
all night on top of a tower on top of a mountain in WV zero degree temperatures
changing that antenna.
Next was the transmitter problem. This new RCA BTF 20E was the latest and
suppose to be the best designed FM transmitter in the world. I had worked on the
previous model the RCA BTF 10 D that had a history of fires in the final cavity.
That old transmitter was hard to work on. The final cavity was small and not in
the center of the cabinet. This new one had a much larger cavity with a much
larger shelf and larger tube. It was also easier to work on. However the same
problems that caused the old transmitters to catch fire had never fully been
addressed. Unfortunately soon after this transmitter was installed those old
gremlins reappeared. RCA sent their design engineer to the World Building
immediately. Repairs were made quickly, but guess what? The same thing happened.
They then sent us a low-power standby transmitter to use till a solution was
found.
Unfortunately much air time was lost during the first few weeks broadcasting
from the World Building. Having Jan Gay (Attorney) as the GM was a blessing in
disguise. He may not have known much about radio but he sure knew how to get the
attention of RCA. RCA finally came up with a fix. I rushed back to WV and
installed the fix there first as we were running at low power there as well. The
fix didn’t totally solve the problem, but we were able to get the transmitters
back to full power. Tuning became the critical issue. Tuning for the minimum
smoke was the slang expression as to how to tune one. I learned how to tune this
series of transmitters with no more fires after the fix was installed. If I have
tuned 1 I have tuned 100 of these over the years. Once they were tuned they
generally stayed tuned. There is one other guy who is an expert at the E series
and that is Ed Holiday in Columbia South Carolina. This guy has forgotten more
about the E series than I may have ever known.
Ron Crider