A Few More Memories..

The list of broadcasters I wished I'd met, from the previous post, brought back memories of my first radio job.

I became an overnight board op for WTAL-AM 1450 on October 12, 1979. My job was basically just to keep the Larry King Show, then broadcast over the old Mutual Network, on the air. I
did get to play 30 minutes of music, from 5:30 to 6 a.m., when the morning show officially began.

Within a few weeks, I was assisting in picking out the oldies to play, as every third song in the format was supposed to be an oldie. That not only kept me awake, it gave me my first experience at programming.

When the ratings came out, our hybrid light AC/country/oldies format ranked #8 out of all the stations..13 or so at that time. I added 9 pm to midnight, a music shift, to my schedule for a while before eventually going from 6 to midnight after the Larry King Show was taken off and we signed off at midnight instead.

I have fond memories of WTAL and that format, which I have never heard another AC station that sounded quite like that. The old Mellow 105 came sort of close but wasn't quite the same.

I'm debating the possibility of bringing this format back to life with a 32 kbps stereo stream sometime next year. I have access to all the oldies I need, plus I have the bulk of the old WTAL songs in my personal collection of music, so it wouldn't be difficult to replicate.

This might be my next radio project..