History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
Ladies, if you ever needed something to play on the stock car radio of your brand new 1955 Dodge La Femme, then Memphis was your kind of town.
Because also debuting in 1955 was radio station WHER. At 1430 on the AM dial, WHER was the first radio station completely staffed, programmed and operated entirely by women. The only Y chromosomes at WHER were there to write the checks and fix the transmitter whenever it got wonky. The women controlled everything else.
A terrestrial radio station with a mostly female staff is still a very rare thing. But in the 1950s, it was extremely rare to hear a female DJ with her own program. The 1950s were a pretty sexist time and the ceiling wasn't glass in the radio industry. Most women in air positions at that time were network voice actresses or they were local socialites who read recipes during the midday show. But most women overall however remained behind the scenes, doing office work. WHER was owned by local record mogul Sam Phillips of Sun Records and Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson. Phillips used the money he got for Elvis Presley's recording contract from RCA Victor records as seed money for WHER.
But surprisingly, WHER played no rock. Probably because of the uncomfortably close link between Sun and WHER (the payola scandals around the country were just beginning to simmer.) The music on WHER was a mix of easy listening, jazz and country swing.
WHER became an instant sensation and inspired many imitators (including KPEG in Spokane, WA.)
An early press release for WHER described the station as this :
“The studio
and offices have been feminized from front door to rear exit. The
disc jockeys are called jockettes, the studio is known as the doll’s
den, the control rooms are called playrooms, the hallway is
mirrored, the equipment room has been decorated with murals
depicting the evolution of feminine clothing, the stationary is
perfumed, the advertisers are listed in a date book, and the exit to
the parking lot is labeled “Bye, Bye ‘Till Next Time”.
You were clearly in their world.
WHER was managed and programmed by Becky Phillips (wife of Sam Phillips) and Dottie Abbott. And from 1955 to 1966, WHER was exclusively operated by women. However after Abbott left, it seemed time to let the guys in. The station changed call letters to WWEE, or "We" radio.
1430 kHz in Memphis today is WOWW, a repeater for country music station "95.3/97.7 The Rebel" WEBL.
All day long, I've been nursing a really bad hangover. And it still feels like a dream. Even though the evidence was all around me, I still could have used someone to pinch me. The Seattle Seahawks actually WON the Super Bowl?
And not only won, but gave the Denver Broncos the most devastating Super Bowl loss in decades.
As of today, January 1, 2014, incandescent light bulbs can no longer be manufactured for the USA. (Contrary to popular belief, you can still sell them - there's lots of old stock still floating around out there. They just can no longer be manufactured anymore outside of industrial use. And once the old general consumer stock is gone, they're gone.)
I have two boxes of 40 watt Sylvanias. And they are my nest egg. There will not be just a mere eBay bidding war, but riots in the streets before I sell out.
It's the end of an era that saw us from the 1870s to 2013. Now the only light bulbs made are those weird curly CFL things and LED lights.
THESE fucking things. When they first came out, I thought they were pretty cool because you didn't have to change them as often. Until I had to see them everywhere.
Now I understand the reasons why we're going this way. Incandescent lights put out more heat than light and you do pay more in your electric bill for it. But my kitchen always seemed a little warmer with incandescents. More home-like. I get in the mood for actual cooking easier with incandescents.
And incandescents can last a VERY LONG time. Here's proof:
I switched to all CFL in my place a year ago and my monthly electric bill went down by $10. But I'm light sensitive and these things are starting to seriously irk me. They glow too white.
It's like an analog to digital conversion. It's good, but too sterile. You can't work your Easy Bake oven with a CFL. And there was such a variety of incandescent lights. All colours and styles. It's going to take CFLs a LONG time to catch up with it all.
The CFL also lacks something else. A warm glow. That's what I miss. And LEDs are almost freakish in their brightness.
And then there's that little mercury problem. Granted it has as much mercury as an average transistor radio. Problem is, some of those radios lasted us for YEARS before they croaked.
My beloved Sears AM/FM transistor radio (1980-1983)....Sigh!
The CFL light bulb is also unpredictable. I put one bulb in a continuously running outdoor light. And it only lasted 5 months The next one burned for over a year. I seem to find that problem a lot with CFLs.
But change happens.
I accept it. But something deep and subtle is always missing....
Don't expect to connect this to your wi-fi and hear your favourite podcast.
This radio was made in the late 1960s. And it's a standard AM transistor radio. That's all. Radios like this were the iPods of their day and your 20 song playlist came courtesy of your favourite local Top 40 radio station (almost all of them on AM radio in those days.)
And at the time, what we would later call the internet was then called "ARPANET" And strictly for military and government use only. Computers in the 1960s were extremely huge (often taking up an entire large room and hopelessly limited and underpowered - by 1981 standards!) and were rarely seen outside a laboratory. The very few civilian computers never connected to anything.
The Honeywell 316 was the world's first consumer marketed computer (1969). It was essentially a $10,600 recipe box and pencil. Exactly the thing you want to give someone who allegedly can't cook very well. It had no online connectivity.
That's not to say people weren't dreaming. Note the "flat screen monitors".
While it's almost spooky to consider someone could use a word that would be so ubiquitous 30 years before it's general use, I think "Internet" just sounded like a fancy hi-tech name for a cheap UK electronics brand at the time this radio was made. (I'd have a hard time with the "time traveler" theory.)
More on the discovery of this radio with a very futuristic name here:
As you can hear, the only other known copy of this record has lots of wear and is barely audible through the record wear and surface noise. The copy sold on eBay is reportedly in pristine condition and the buyer plans to digitally restore the recording.
Radio
stations
are a unique breed. Some
of them sign on the air and gain instant success, some never amount to much. Or until they are bought and transformed by
another entity. And there are those that just simply fall by the
wayside.
Every major city has a few AM radio stations that were once popular 40-50 years ago that have gone through countless ownership/call letter/format changes and now languish as unknown ethnic, religious, Radio Disney, sports or fourth string talk formats. The intentions of the owners were good. A new and untried format. Or a stab at competing with the heritage local station with a different spin on their format. But somehow, fate had other plans.
Let's look at a few of those who somehow just fell apart and their remains still stand.......
WHOW 1520 AM Clinton, IL
Probably the very best (and rare) example of a radio station that
has gone to hell.....and BACK to tell about it.
I don't know what the hell happened in here. But Casey Kasemnever did it this way. Note the ashtray on the console and dig that Radio Shack mixing board .......
Please
note the station had signed off in 2002, about the time these pictures
were taken. Note the lack of computer equipment in the WHOW on-air
studio. Virtually ALL radio stations in 2002 - including most of the smallest, had fully digital computer controlled automation by that time.) Not WHOW.
There is what appears to be an
elderly computer mouse on top of that 1970's vintage automatic record
changer you see in the first picture and it's quite possible all the
computer equipment was taken out from it. But how many stations
played their programming off cassette tapes in 2002? There a LOT of
those you can see there, including cassette player - an ancient 1990s ghetto blaster! Most small stations like WHOW rarely, if ever played
cassettes in 2002. It just wasn't a suitable quality medium for radio programming
In fact, cassettes were rarely used in most
commercial radio stations beyond recording news bites,
occasional public service/religious programs (usually speech), and for DJs to record
"airchecks" (a kind of live sampling of how they sound over the air to
play for radio stations that hire them....or not., with all the
music cut out and just the DJ's monologues and some commercials
recorded.) Even THAT had gone to CD-Rs by the early 2000s in most parts of the
country, as they were recorded onto hard disk and edited digitally by
then.
Today, WHOW is back with modern facilities and runs a News/Talk format with an emphasis on farming news.
There's more....
WISL 1480 AM, Shamokin, PA
Photo by Jim Treese
There's an old gutted tape automation system back there and what appears to be a cart recorder deck and a reel to reel tape deck.
WISL was an Oldies station in central Pennsylvania. It left the air in 2003 after it was sold to Clear Channel and a subsequent sale to another broadcaster who could not afford to keep the station on the air and the station's license expired in 2006. The station was officially deleted from the FCC database in 2008. However WISL remains online as a tribute internet radio station - http://www.wisl1480.com/
KOME in Tulsa was off the air by 1965 (although the Stetson Hats poster in the studio here looks oddly '80s vintage), the KOME call letters were used
a few years later for a rock station in San Jose, CA. However the remains of the KOME station building in Tulsa remain. AM 1300 in Tulsa is now KAKC, an all sports station.
WCHR 94.5 FM Trenton, NJ
WCHR is a religious radio station in Trenton, NJ which currently broadcasts on 920 AM. WCHR originally broadcast on 94.5 FM. But left the FM dial in 1998 and after a number of call letter/format changes 94.5 is now WPST an Adult Contemporary radio station. This is the former WCHR station building.
KSVY 1550 AM, Opportunity, WA
Photo by Bill Harms
KSVY was an Oldies (later Classical) music station located in the Spokane suburb of Opportunity, WA. The photo above is the remains of the trailer that held their transmitter.
Ahhh......the metric system. To this day the US, Burma (Myanmar) and Liberia are the only nations in the world who have not formally adopted the metric system.
While the US has authorized the use of the metric system since 1866, outside of science and a few other places, it was largely ignored. In 1975, Congress authorized a ten year plan for national conversion. Which seemed like a good idea. Canada and Mexico already adopted it
And PSAs like this began appearing. (I remember watching this - my elementary school teachers were (quite reluctantly) trying to teach it and I tried to explain it to my mom and how nearly every country in the world uses it and now the US was changing over. She rolled her eyes and said with deadpan sarcasm "Wow. And all this time, I thought we won the war.....")
Today you find some uses of the metric system. Namely this:
And along the borders for our Canadian and Mexican friends
Speed limit sign in Blaine, WA.....just a few meters over the border.......
And virtually all retail food/drink and household products in America have both standard (or imperial) and metric measurements listed on their containers. Wine and spirit bottles are also metrically portioned. And it's ubiquitous in the illegal drug trade. Foreign imported bikes also use metric nuts and bolts (I found this out with my old Peugeot 10 speed.)
So what happened?
Simple, for the most part, we Americans resisted. In fact, the government gave up around 1982 and closed the metric conversion office when then President Reagan made the first sweeping wave of government cutbacks, ending all funding for a national conversion.
However there are still a few hopeful holdouts. But it's doubtful Americans will ever convert.
Religion can make people do funny things. Like join them.
And in the '80s, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was one dubious character.
For me, It wasn't so much the fact he was this strange little Indian guru who came out of nowhere. I was open to new things even back then.
It was the fact he was simply just every bit of a flaming nutjob as Pat Robertson. And the scary fact there are people attracted to people like these is one I've never been able to live comfortably with.
The Bhagwan came to America in 1981 and shortly located to a remote area in Northeast Oregon. He bought a big 64 acre ranch and decided to convert it into a mini-village for his thousand-strong faithful called Rajneeshpuram.
Naturally, your neighbours up and down the road are going to have a problem with this if you set a thousand-strong strange people out loose wandering around in an area of less than 400 - often driving the Bhagwan around in Rolls-Royces. His teachings were a bizarre mixture of Eastern philosophy, sexuality and material obsession.
I'm automatically suspicious of any religious leader that needs to ride around in fancy new cars while everyone else has to walk.
The extra population boost from Rajneesh's followers (along with the import of several thousand homeless people) eventually was big enough to overwhelm the nearby city of Antelope, OR and by 1984, the City of Antelope became the City of Rajneesh.
City of Rajneesh, 1985
The original residents were angry at the newcomers whom they saw as invaders.
The Rajneeshees also made a series of New Age music albums under the name Basho's Pond.
This album perfectly defines New Age music if you've never heard it before. Note the "audiophile quality virgin Teldec vinyl" and DMM mastering. It was meant to be played on higher end stereo equipment. Which by the time you're finished buying the stereo amplifier, tuner, speakers, CD player, CDs, cassette deck, cassettes, turntable and records, New Age music was essentially an $8,000 wind chime.
You can hear some of it here: http://ghostcapital.blogspot.com/2012/12/chaitanya-hari-deuter-govindas-deva.htm
Now things were really getting weird. And so was the Bhagwan. First he encouraged free love....Then he backtracked when AIDS became a terrifying epidemic. There was no cure for HIV/AIDS (there still isn't.) And virtually nothing was known about it amongst the general population, only that it was only a "gay" disease (it isn't.) Gay people (especially gay men) were targets of persecution across the nation due to the AIDS scare. And there was no shelter to be found in the Rajneesh community for them. Rajneesh preached the same hateful rhetoric as the fundamentalist Christians. He also favoured euthanasia for children born with birth defects.
Things came to a nasty head however when it was revealed Rajneesh's followers were involved in a bio-terrorism plot. Their plan involved contaminating salad bars with salmonella at restaurants in The Dalles, OR in an attempt to thwart the local election in their candidate's favour by reducing local voter turnout. The plan backfired - more local people voted than ever and the FBI and INS quickly began to investigate. It was revealed they had salmonella in vials and a petri dish and Rajneesh and his aides quickly attempted to flee the country. Rajneesh was arrested on immigration charges. But not on the bio-terrorism charges. On a plea bargain, he eventually returned to India, where he changed his name to Osho. He died in 1990.
His ashram in India is still active..
Plaque in Antelope, OR which memorializes the Rajneesh "invasion".......
When audio recording began, there was only one sound source (monaural or "mono"). The horn of a cylinder or gramophone record player. And all was well. For most people.
For others, something was missing.
You see, the epitome of a perfect recording is not just an incredibly good performance artistically, but also how lifelike it sounds.
The first is actually easier to achieve than the latter. The most lifelike sounding and the very best artistic recording rarely come together. Even today.
The very first experiments in binaural reproduction (an early form of stereo) go back as early as 1881 (no joke!) At a theater in Paris. The sound was transmitted through two telephone wires to special headsets that received the audio. This was used in hotel rooms and by special subscription service. But it didn't garner much attention, simply because the tinny headsets and 19th century telephone line quality audio was so bad.
An early two-channel playback system,
developed and sold in the early 1900s, used a two-channel
phonograph cylinder and two mechanical pickups and horns. But it really didn't sound good and the early recordings themselves have been lost to time. To make stereo sound acceptable on a commercial scale, vast improvements in monaural audio fidelity would have to be achieved.
Here's another early attempt at stereo, it's mono, but used a delay effect.
Enter radio.
There were experiments in stereo broadcasting going back to the early '20s. They utilized two radio station frequencies, two radio receivers (VERY rare in most homes of that time) and a special headset that connected into the outputs of both radios and at a time when most earliest commercial radio stations were very competitive, very hard for stations themselves to negotiate (the earliest duopolies of stations didn't happen until the late 1920s.) But again, this was early 1920's AM radio fidelity, while still an enormous leap from the telephone lines of 1881, still had it's own problems. including skywave interference from distant stations, hetrodyne squeal, harmonics from nearby stations and electrical interference.
However, recording had moved from acoustic recording horns to electrical microphones and reproducers. With the dramatic improvements in recording fidelity, the idea of stereo recording was again revisited. In the early 1930s, Bell Labs and RCA Victor made experiments in hi-fi and stereo recording, independent of each other.
Here's an early RCA Victor Mono Hi-Fi recording session with The Paul Whitman Orchestra in 1933.
Here's a VERY early experimental single groove stereo recording made by Bell Labs in 1934
Magnetic tape was also being developed. The first magnetic recordings were made in 1898 on steel wire and the first magnetic tape was invented in 1928. For the most part, they were merely experimental, first because the lengths of wire or tape needed to make reasonable quality recordings were astronomically long. Second, the tapes were made of steel or paper backed magnetic tape, making them prone to breakage. It wasn't until the mid 1930s when German scientists developed the first successful hi-fi tape recordings and it was initially used for Nazi radio broadcasts.
The very first Stereo system offered to consumers was reel to reel tape in the mid 1950s. But they found limited acceptance. Reel tape was awkward, bulky and expensive. Most records however remained monaural - except for a few made by Cook Laboratories. These records were binaural. as mentioned earlier and used headphones instead of speakers for the best reproduction.
They also used two grooves with two cartridges and pickups
Single groove full stereo records were finally perfected by 1957 and were sold by 1958. They were an instant sensation. But there were still millions of monaural record players and the heavier tone arms would ruin a stereo record. So record companies made records in both Stereo and Monaural (aka "Mono") versions until 1968.
Stereo radio was also being developed. First using a revival of the AM/AM experiment of the 1920s. When FM was established in the 1950s, AM/FM radio combos experimented with using FM for the left channel and AM for the right.
Yes, there were actually tuner components that allowed you to hear FM on the left channel and AM on the right. This crude form of stereo radio was obsolete by 1961 when multiplex FM Stereo was invented.....
Stereo sound is great. And when it's recorded with care, it can be breathtaking in it's own sense of realism. But you're still only getting what's coming from the front of you. Not the ambiance from the rear as you would in an actual live performance. In the early days of stereo recording, most of the early stereo recordings tried to emphasize the stereo ping-pong, left to right, right to left sound, which is fine if you weren't particular with the realism of sound, just the physical effect of stereo sound. Something to show off your fancy new stereo and what it can basically do to your friends.
Many early stereo studio recordings (especially those early stereo records from the late '50s and early '60s) were deliberately mixed to highlight these effects. But most pop/rock recordings were originally mixed in mono and later run through a gamut of fake stereo enhancements (echo chamber, reverb, vocals on one channel, instrumentation on the other) instead of going back to the original multitrack studio tapes - if available, and creating a true stereo mix. If it couldn't be done, and in most cases regardless in my opinion, it should have been left alone. It wasn't until the mid '60s when true stereo mixes of pop/rock albums became the norm. The technology and science of stereo recording was improving
And then came Quadraphonic.
Quadraphonic was first used as far back as 1953 (using 4 track tape) in Europe and introduced to the American market by the Vanguard Recording Society in June 1969. Then RCA followed with a Quadraphonic 8-Track tape
In the early 1970s the very first Quadraphonic LPs came out. But there was a problem. There was no uniformly compatible system for making Quad LPs. There were three incompatible systems SQ (developed by CBS Records), CD-4 (developed by RCA, no relation to Compact Discs, which wouldn't be invented for another 10 years) and QS (developed by Sansui).
This created a lot of confusion. And the government wasn't willing to step in and saw this solely as a civil matter beyond their authority (which would be repeated for AM Stereo in the '80s. But what made AM Stereo different was it was a form of radio transmission and that usually automatically falls under government jurisdiction.)
But it was the consumer that suffered the most. Because most labels allied with one system of Quad or the other. For example, if you liked Santana and had an SQ Quad system, you were in luck. Santana was a Columbia artist then and Columbia used SQ exclusively. However, if you also liked The Doors, you were toast. Elektra used the CD-4 Quad system and while those records will play on an SQ system, you won't get Quad sound (and the basic stereo separation of a CD-4 Quad record was not very good on an SQ Quad system. Or even a basic stereo.
Click to enlarge and read
There was no true winning system in the Quad war. But it seemed like SQ had far more advantages than CD-4. SQ used creative phasing, while CD-4 Quad records required a special stylus and since the system was encoded using something very similar to how FM Stereo radio is encoded at a very high inaudible frequency. So there was a serious record wear problem. If the portion of the groove where the frequency was encoded was worn, the Quad separation of the CD-4 Quad record was gone as well.
And what about Sansui's QS system? I don't have any personal experience with QS, but I have heard it said the QS system was very similar to SQ.
And like the early stereo recordings, studio engineers of the time were eager to utilize all four channels sonically in every way possible. Including putting each instrument on it's own channel. They had to. You see, most recording studios are acoustically dead places, so there was no way to capture the ambiance of a live recording. They could add artificial reverb and echo to the rear channels (as with the early fake stereo records), but it would sound AWFUL if played on a conventional stereo. So most didn't. I say most because I have heard some REAL atrocities in Quad.
Usually the very best sounding Quad albums were the classical albums recorded specifically in Quad.. They captured the sense of depth and space far better than most pop or rock albums.
Click to enlarge and read
The Quad fad had pretty much died out by 1978. Mostly out of consumer exasperation with the competing systems. But also the extra baggage of two extra speakers. But multiple-channel sound was revived by Dolby for use in movie theaters in the late 1980s
Today, the children of Quad, the DTS and Dolby Surround systems are used in home theater setups and even as a limited edition CD/DVD series - AGAIN with competing and incompatible systems, SACD and DVD Audio. They were introduced in the early 2000s. But like the Quad LPs of the '70s, they too have largely vanished due to consumer frustration as well as indifference.
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