Glories and quirks of AM radio, back in the day

My kids don’t even know what it is. How shocking!

Let’s look at a few based on their call letters.

1. WLW, Cincinnati, the Nation’s Station, with ten times the wattage than permitted today. It lighted a barn a mile away. Back in those days, it had its own staff musicians.
2. WOR, New York, with comedians Bob and Ray as the drivetime crew and storyteller Jean Shepherd in the evening. They originated on WHDH in Boston.
3. WSN, Nashville, home of the Grand Ol’ Opry.
4. WWVA, Wheeling, West Virginia, Country Jamboree.
5. WCKY, Cincinnati, with a very directional nighttime signal that plastered the South with its WCKY Jamboree country programming. It also made Reds baseball highly followed far into Dixie.
6. WNOP, Radio Free Newport, an eclectic daytime jazz station broadcasting from Kentucky to the captive peoples across the Ohio River, or so they proclaimed.
7. WAVI, the daytime big-band station in Dayton revolving around retired trumpeter BJ, who always signed off decrying the “arcane rules of the FCC in Washington that make us give way to a station in Philadelphia that can in no way serve the Greater Dayton area.”
8. WJR, Detroit, with a full mix of original programming, including Adventures in Good Music with Karl Haas, the Redwings, and the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays.
9. WBZ, Boston, with its all-news format when I arrived in New England.
10. If you’re of a certain age, you can add your own fond memories of a local station’s wild rock ‘n’ roll DJ or two who fed your adolescent rollercoaster with machine-gun delivery and often took requests in addition to a Top 40 countdown. Sometimes he even mentioned you by name. In my hometown, that was WING.