Yup...WWWE was very cool to get started in the business! Some interesting personalities were there when I was--Gary Dee, the first "shock jock",
I don't know. I saw a letter to the editor in the Winston-Salem Journal which said Gil Stamper of that city's WAIR was the first shock jock. Now I remember an old man named Gil Stamper doing the weather on weekends on WBTV in the 60s--could it be the same guy?
I want to add some more to what I said because there were some details about my radio listening that I left out.
I was driving my grandparents' old car during the 1990s. I had no AM in that car unless I was very close to the tower. So if I went to the town where my last Paul Harvey station was located, I listened to the station there. I wasn't a dedicated Paul Harvey listener to begin with, but sometimes I would get lucky and happen to be in the car when he came on at noon. More like 12:30. Other days I would be in the car during the big band show that aired before noon or the beutiful music show that aired during the noon hour. I also remember weather radio at noon which was very irritating. I'm talking about exactly what you hear if you have a weather radio which comes on for weather bulletins. There was also a local issues talk show. But I listened if I got the music or Mr. Harvey. They also had oldies in the morning and all sports in the afternoon. I don't remember preciesly when I started listening to "The Rest of the Story" daily, but I did go out to the car on September 11. Since Paul Harvey was on, I figured things weren't that bad. Little did I know. I actually didn't know much, but my Timeless Classics station was the first place I heard a small plane hit the World Trade Center. I pictured something like what happened to the Empire State Building in the 1940s. Then I went in the library and got on the Internet to read comic strips that wern't in the newspaper. It was slow! And I heard updates and people gathered around to look at photos. Every place I went in that would have had music on the radio had news. But I didn't know how bad things really were until I turned to a Timeless Classics station going home. No, no music that day.
I had been listening to Paul Harvey in the morning. This began with my father and I having to drive a long way to get groceries, and we listened to the local news/talk station. We had discovered Rush Limbaugh when there was no music worth hearing on the way home from visiting his aunt in the nursing home. After that we started listening to him on those long trips, and on the short ones too. But on the local station I heard the morning low and the previous day's high. I asked how I could listen and get that information. It was on the morning show. Charles Osgood was there. And while he could be interesting, the morning low and previous day's high were not done at a regular time, and I especially hated the job listings. The DJ was a pro, but the job listings man was not. But I woke up every morning with the clock radio. Including Sundays, when there was this wacko preacher who said the greatest sin committed by Christians was worshipping on Sunday, when that was not the Sabbath. A close second was celebrating Christmas and Easter. Passover, on the other hand, was proper to celebrate.
Music ranged from The Beatles to big band. The man planned to add a Stardust affiliate because he had two AM stations mostly doing the same thing. That didn't work out due to another one being so close, but its signal was directional. That didn't matter, said those in charge. AM Only, the man said, was inferior. So he did soft AC on his other station.
At some point, I thought of Paul Harvey. It may have been because I heard him on EZ 102.9 when I served on a jury and had to leave earlier than usual. I found out he was on WFMX and changed to that for waking up (and thereby got rid of the wacko preacher). It must have been before the O.J. verdict because I listened to him make a point of downplaying the significance of the verdict, making some trivial story the top story. I knew the time of "The Rest of the Story" there because they announced it. I also knew about that show because when listening to the other Paul Harvey station when they went all-Christmas, we found out Paul Harvey was on at 3. But I didn't like the music there as much as I liked WFMX.
I started listening to Charlotte's Mix 106 as soon as I found out about it. It was similar to what WISE had been doing at night, but I had heard the format during the day and already AC and oldies had become part of it. It was co-owned with and simulcasting the station with the directional antenna. They didn't call it Mix 106 at first but it was a mix. They hired some people from Mix 104.7 who put a chimpanzee version of the format on there (yes, that's where I got my name, because that's who I said to them had to be doing it) which didn't last long. And it was very much a standards station at night. A few years later, Timeless Classics was doing pretty much the same mess. The station had DJs Joe Lacina, Ron Baxley and Eddie Hubbard, who were great.
This station had Paul Harvey at noon for a while, but I had already gotten the idea to listen to him. Besides, I wanted music at noon at the man talked for 15 minutes. It was only a few years before Mr. Harvey left us that he advised us to be sure and listen on Saturday, and I made an effort to, and soon got in the habit. Not long after that WFMX was gone and I came here looking for a place to rant. But the other Paul Harvey station, which was a lot like the new Timeless Favorites because their old format was the new format for Timeless Classics stations, sort of, was now much more conservative as Dial Global standards, so it worked out. Sometimes in the car I would listen to that garbage which became Timeless Favorites, because it could be good sometimes. I had been listening to WFMX on a clock radio in the kitchen tuned to WFMX which cut itself off after two hours--though by that time country music was really going downhill. I had a second clock radio set for The Rest of the Story. No, make that two. The new owner of the other station had moved the show to 7:30 AM so I had another clock radio set for that show, just in case. WFMX sometimes had racing coverage.
Some DJs I liked in recent years were Wes Jones of WIST in the Greensboro area, which was Timeless Classics and then Country Legends, Ken Conrad--mainly on WAVO, because he seemed to like oldies too much on Mix 106, especially after the demise of Magic 96.
