WBCN On the Way to Work

Taking the T to Work Copyright (c) 1971, 2009 William J. Spurlin

WBCN interference

The transmitter room on the 29th floor of the John Hancock Building was littered with empty nitrogen tanks, old racks containing dead tube equipment from another age, sections of burned out three inch transmission line and haywire circuitry representing the failed experiments of my unknown and unsung predecessors.  Fluorescents lighting the whole sorry collection flickered aimlessly.

WBCN’s transmitting equipment amounted to a collection of junk.  Woo-Woo had ordered a new transmitter to be installed atop the Prudential Tower, and it was my job to nurse along the old machines until the new equipment arrived and we could make the move.  We had a 25 kilowatt Visual main transmitter and an ancient 10 kW Western Electric as backup.

This was high powered broadcast equipment operating at several thousand volts and around ten amperes; badly maintained and extremely dangerous.  When I think how lucky I am to be alive I tend to remember surviving various alcohol and drug induced disasters rather than the intimate contact I maintained with these creaking, arcing, dying high voltage behemoths.

Woo-Woo showed me the clip leads bypassing the safety circuits of the Visual and told me to take them off.  You were not supposed to be able to tinker with the insides while it was running.  I removed the clip leads, but soon put them back after I realized there was no way to really tune the Visual without reaching inside the car-sized cabinet with a stick to bend things around.

The Visual was prone to “chicken-scratching”, a reference to the plot of its output power on the studio chart recorder.  There was supposed to be a steady line traced on the paper chart as it ticked slowly along.  Instead, a dense collection of dots appeared in a band, as if chickens were feeding on the chart, showing that the automatic power correction circuits of the Visual were seeking and hunting constantly, never able to stabilize the power.

When the Visual failed, after chicken-scratching for a few hours, perhaps once a week, it was possible by remote control from the studio to activate the Western Electric.  I say “possible”, because only about one attempt in four was successful. Mostly there was just dead air. Ask radio station management how much they like dead air.  To cope with the frequent outages Woo-Woo had gotten me an early beeper, a squarish object about the size of a large dildo.  I enjoyed showing it off in the bars.

The Western Electric had been built around 1950. Replacement tubes for it had not been available for years.  Probably it had never worked very well.  It had a glass door through which, when I was able to coax it into running, blue filamentary sparks were visible running up and down mysterious plumbing in the final amplifier stage .  These sparks were also audible on the air as a kind of grating noise in the background of Max’s show, which was when I usually played with the W. E.

One day I decided I was going to fix the Western Electric.  But first I had better explain the mental state that led to that decision. The night before I had been to a record party put on by some record-turkeys at the Orson Welles.  I forget which label.  Kenny Greenblatt and Max had encouraged me to go, as if I needed any encouragement.

I took the T to Central Square and walked to the Orson Welles. It was a March night and I still didn’t have a winter coat. I got there early because I was hungry and the spread did not disappoint, consisting of tables laden with choice meats and fish, tastefully and freshly prepared, with hors d’oeuvres, fruits, vegetables and salads to match.  There was also, of course, an open bar.  A band was setting up, and the record-turkeys circulated among the employees of WBCN.  A friendly record-turkey woman approached me.  She stood very close.  She was probably about 22, with brown hair falling in ringlets over her bare shoulders.  I noticed that although it was winter she was wearing a dress that would have been appropriate for cocktails on the veranda at Maui.  (I had not been to the Hawaiian Islands at that time, but I had been to the Yacht Club at Acapulco – close enough).  I am quite tall, and thus usually have to look down, (in a literal sense, Jamaica Plain Jane!) when a woman stands that close to me, and so I was able to notice, by peering through the top of her dress, the record-turkey’s lack of undergarments.  I delayed as long as possible telling her I was not a D. J. She went to the bar and came back with a drink for herself and another one for me.  Although there were plenty of joints, in little bowls on each table, enough for everybody, we passed them from person to person, mouth to mouth, as was the fashion, rather than smoking them individually like cigarettes.  Then I blacked out.

It must have been about four hours later. The Orson Welles was dim.  The party was ending.  I was in love.  I cannot remember her name.  Her boy friend, Steve N., stood across the room, watching us, muscles flexing under the Superman shirt that he habitually wore. He believed that this costume would aid him in his perpetual campaign to become Mayor of Cambridge. Her hair was auburn, profuse, accenting her robust yet slender mammalian physique.  “Will you go home with me.” I asked, forgetting that I had no car.  “I would like to,” she said, “but Steve would not like it”.  I was crushed.

So I went out on Mass. Ave., alone.  It was two in the morning and the T had stopped running.  The temperature was about 15 degrees F.  I pulled up my denim jacket around my neck and headed for home through the back streets of Cambridge.  It was fucking freezing and I didn’t know where I was and I was drunk.

Somewhere around Hancock or Lee Street I noticed a brownish ‘62 Chevy parked under a street light in front of a 3-decker.  Something clicked inside me … could it be?  My hand was on the driver’s side door…locked…around to the passenger side…open!  Quickly inside sliding across the cold vinyl bench front seat, I grasped the empty ignition switch and it turned!  One of GM’s biggest blunders of the era, only eclipsed by the deadly front suspension of the 1959-62 Corvair, was the ability to remove the key from a Chevrolet while the switch was still in the On position. I turned it a notch further and the engine turned over and started.  Slowly, now, no reason to attract attention..no lights until I get around the corner..this thing feels like a six-cylinder…good! It’ll warm up faster.  What is that stuff in the back seat? Ahhh, here comes the heat.  Turn it up, turn the fan up a notch.  Where the Hell am I?  Ancient twisted streets of Cambridge and Somerville, a labyrinth…

Hangover. Sunshine came through the dirty window onto the day bed. 7:30. I would never have gotten up this early had it not been for the headache.  I remembered way too much of the night before – the Superman shirt, the Chevy.  Creeping toward the kitchenette, hoping for coffee, I noticed something I had never seen before, or didn’t remember seeing:  A brown, soft plastic box about twice the size of a shoe box.  I picked it up – heavy.  I put it down and opened the clasp.  It folded open into two displays containing row after row of little brass cylinders and small disc-like cases.  I extracted one of the cylinders and pulled off the cap, revealing a tiny purplish lipstick.  The small cases contained make-up: Avon make-up samples.  I had stolen the Avon Lady’s car.

I called the Cambridge Police to report a stolen car.  “Where was it stolen from”?  “I don’t know.  Near the Orson Welles”.  “Whaddya mean you don’t know?  You don’t know where your own car was”?  “No, no, you don’t get it – it’s not my car – I’m telling you where a stolen car is. It’s in Somerville …”.  “Call the Somerville Police”.  I called the Somerville Police, who told me to call the Cambridge Police.  I gave up and decided to go to work.

Al and Carla

Copyright 1971, 2009 William J. Spurlin

Copyright 1971, 2009 William J. Spurlin

WBCN Beautiful

Saturday night, April 3.   Elton John was playing at the Orpheum theater.  I was backstage listening, entranced.  We were broadcasting the concert live on WBCN.  Al Perry, the Program Manager, had set it up. Elton John’s band had not showed up, and, as he briefly explained, neither had his luggage, but the Steinway grand on stage was in tune, and that was all he needed.  He sat down at the piano, on time, and began his performance in a soft, powerful voice.  I scarcely felt any emotions at that time.  I did not want what feelings resulting from pain, loss and disillusionment I occasionally had. I smoked pot, after all.  But Elton John , playing entirely his own material, was able to project, even to me, and, as I hope and believe, to all youth up and down the North and South Shores and to the West for many miles, both sadness and hope.

Al  had told me more than a week earlier to order the 15 kc stereo pair from the Orpheum to the studio, but I had of course forgotten to do it until the last minute. I was smoking joints, you see.  The day before when Al asked me if the lines were ready I hastily called the Radio Board and was able to convince the technicians there to put the circuits in.

A 15 kHz – I MEAN kc – stereo pair was a beautiful thing, as long as the phase shift could be minimized between the two pairs at the higher frequencies: very low noise, no artifacts.  Good analog will always be better than good digital, all other factors being equal, as Steve Colby demonstrated to me long ago.  The compact disk brought uniform, very good audio to the masses, and displaced the vinyl record for economic reasons, not because of any inherent superiority in fidelity.  Vinyl played on the best equipment has no quantization noise, has less overshoot and degrades before clipping more gracefully than a CD, particularly an early, 16-bit CD.  Even better is 1/4 inch tape recorded at 15 inches per second.  But play your tapes now, dear readers, because they are not immortal like digital.  Mp3’s, avi’s, even these posts all have the potential to be duplicated endlessly, error-free, forever.  But your tapes are deteriorating.  The oxide is separating from the Mylar.  Print-through is steadily increasing.  Even if you can find a functioning 1/4 inch machine, when you mount the tape you may find that it crumbles before it can be heard or digitized.  Bake it in an oven at 180 degrees F for 12 hours.  That will cause the oxide to temporarily re-bond with the backing so that you may be able to play it once – just once, maybe.

Besides being Program Directory Al was a disk jockey, but his real love was the live broadcasts he was continually setting up.  He had a good relationship with the owners of Newbury Studios, and we were able to broadcast Canned heat from there when that very loud and up tempo band was recording a session.  I was first exposed to then-state-of-the-art recording technology at Newbury Studios – 16 track Ampex recorders, a Neve console, real soundproofing, a large sudio, decent microphones, etc.

Al would sometimes bring live talent to WBCN for a broadcast.  We didn’t have enough room for a band in either of the announcing studios so we had to set up in the front office where the beautiful and efficient Carla Epple worked scheduling the announcers and performing every other kind of support function.  We would push the desks out of the way and cram in a band.  A recording exists of a Youngbloods session from March, 1971.  It is not of particularly high quality, reinforcing my memory of the occasion.  Hound Dog Taylor and his band somehow squeezed himself in.  Hound Dog did not want to stop playing.  Max pleaded with him during commercials to stop, but he would not, and played on and on from the afternoon into the night.  Woo-Woo was not pleased.

I stll regret an an incident that occurred after Gary Burton came into the studio one early summer night to broadcast, solo.  I set up the best microphone we had and he payed eerily for about half an hour, talked to Charles quietly for a few minutes, and left.  The next day I grabbed Al – “Come into the production studio, Al, I want you to listen to something”.  Al was busy and annoyed, but came in to listen.  I was proud of the Burton recording  I had made the night before and wanted to share it with Al.  I hope it still exists somewhere.  Unfortunately Al’s reaction was”What’s the matter?  Are you trying to show me we need a new microphone”?  It was tough being Program Manager under Woo-Woo, who would not spend a dime.

Now it was summer and I felt a little better than I had when I first started working for WBCN.  I was eating better and had gained a pound.  One Friday I asked Carla where to go to the beach, and she told me where, but I will not tell you where exactly, dear readers, because the place is as unspoiled today as it was in 1971, and I do not wish to share it with a crowd.  She laid out accurate directions, giving the location of some radio towers (clue: a 4-tower directional array) as a landmark, and suggested that I might see her and Al there.

Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote “Do you think it odd that I talk all the time about everybody’s being beautiful or handsome?  It was a different age — people really were good-looking then”.  I’ve already shared my impressions of Max’s beauty and I was also quite good looking in those days, in an emaciated way.  Debbie was beautiful; Tommy, Andy, Charles and John were quite handsome, and you will be able, discerning reader, to see for yourself when I post two photographs of Al and Carla from a summer day in 1971, how well they looked.  We did go to the beach that Saturday, as cloudless a day as that corner of New England can be, where the tide retreats quickly leaving behind pools teeming with life, the simple forms of kelp, tiny fishes and hermit crabs.  Late in the afternoon when the sun had warmed the pristine waters we swam, close to the shore. Further out it was still too cold.  Finally we retreated up the bluff into the shadows, Al and Carla to get into their car and I into mine, to drive back to Boston.

1968, 1969, 1970 and 1971 in my country were violent years of protests, assassinations and bombings. Most of the beauty we had, created and experienced in those days has been destroyed, some at the time, some later, probably forever, perhaps not.  On October 14, 1970 there was a bombing in the library of the Henry Kissinger – created Center for International Relations in a building at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge. (later, in 1972, when my drinking and incessant pot smoking landed me in a mental hospital, my room mate suffered from a paranoid delusion that the FBI was spying on him for having perpetrated this very bombing).  When the damage was being assessed the next day (no one was injured; the bombers, allegedly among them Bill Ayres, had set the bomb to go off at midnight) the managers of the Center discovered, behind a bomb-shattered partition, a large trove of tens of thousands of priceless nineteenth century photographic prints and glass negatives that had been accidentally walled off, lost and forgotten for about seventy years.

In my later career, when I was working at Harvard as an electronics engineer, I was asked to consult on the Millman F. Parry collection of approximately ten thousand aluminum 78 RPM discs recorded by Dr. Parry in Yugoslavia in the 1930’s, folk songs that Dr. Parry analyzed and used to prove his theory of the folk origin of, among other things, the Homeric poems.  I set the Collection up with the necessary equipment to transcribe the discs to digital format, but aluminum corrodes,  unfortunately, faster than the transcriptions can take place.

Maxanne Sartori, WBCN, 1971 Copyright (c) 1971, 2009 William J. Spurlin

WBCN – Charles

The night man, Charles, had his Third Class Radiotelephone License in the air studio on the wall next to the others.  It was a blue paper rectangle about half the size of my first class ticket, posted nearby.  Somebody had altered the birth year on Charles’s ticket from 1938 to 1948, in ball point pen.  When I asked Max why Charles didn’t get a new copy from the FCC with the “right” date, 1948, she only rolled her eyes.

Woo-Woo did not like Charles.  To anyone who would listen Woo-Woo would repeat “A twenty minute drum solo! A twenty minute drum solo!”.  And I guess Charles did play a long drum solo, probably while he was talking on the phone.

Charles played a lot of peculiar stuff.  Woo-Woo, always threatening overtly or otherwise to fire Charles, shifted him from the evenings to the afternoon, back and forth several times, trying to find the slot where he would do the least harm. Woo-Woo wanted to sell time and follow through on his commitments to WBCN’s advertisers, and Charles’s experiments not only tended to alienate potential Slack Shack customers, his insensitivity to commercials resulted in their being delayed or not played at all.

There was a lot of classical music around, in the record library and on 1/4″ tape, and one day, for some reason, I mounted a ten inch reel, containing some Rachmaninoff, that had not been rewound.  Rachmaninoff played backwards is not very interesting, but when I began to rewind it I discovered that by depressing the tape lifter I was able to play it in the right direction, and wildly vary its speed by dragging my thumb up against one of the reels.  This sounded pretty good – like motion sickness for symphony orchestra, and it got Charles’s attention.  He put it on the air for about ten minutes.  We got a lot of calls (this was mystifying for 1971 – the techies out there couldn’t figure out how we were doing it), but when Woo-Woo found out there was more trouble, and Charles was shifted back to the night.

I didn’t blame Charles for not letting me into the studio to watch him cue up records, operate the “board” or control console, and talk on mike, even if the other announcers did let me in, because I was somewhat in awe of his talent, or at least his bravura.  I recognized that DJ’ing required a lot of concentration and that I would distract him.  On the other hand, others were let in, especially  20 year old DJ’s from the local college stations, whom Charles needed in the same way that Alcoholics Anonymous needs new alcoholics.

I enjoyed Charles on any shift.  I listened to him at nights from home.  By this time I had moved in with the News Dissector, and Danny had a real stereo, transistorized – it even had a stereo indicator light.  One night about 10 as I listened to Charles’s rather hypnotic delivery between sets there was a sudden change in tone.  First a clunking noise, and then in Charles’s normal or non-radio-persona voice:  “Oh my God. I just knocked a cup of coffee over right on the board”.  Then a muted hum.  Then a very loud hum.  Then silence.  There was probably five minutes of silence or “dead air” before Charles, with my help over the telephone, was able to get back on the air from the production studio.

In 1971 all across America small station radio managers with blond bowl haircuts and dark glasses, sport jacketed and tassel-shoed, had parked their Cadillacs outside the Rotary Club and were slapping backs inside, trying to sell radio spots:  “Whatt’y say – any time you want, buddy, eleven bucks a holler”.  Dead air was anathema.  What was a listener supposed to do who turned the dial to a station and heard nothing?  Nothing at all, not even static?

Through this incident I discovered the potency of coffee with cream and six sugars to destroy electronic equipment.  The only more powerful method is to use Coca-Cola.  Try it sometime. If you need to disable your boy friend’s cell phone, dip it in Classic Coke (the kind with the corn syrup) for about 15 seconds.  A quick rinse with tap water and dry with a paper towel, and he will not be the wiser.

Somewhere out there Charles’s broadcasts still exist.  And I don’t necessarily mean in John Voci’s collection of five inch reels or other moldering air checks scattered around.  These signals were radiated, and 100 MHz radio signals are not attenuated appreciably by the atmosphere, so they are still expanding outward, as I write, 38 light years away, and have already passed several nearby stars.  And even if the beings on those stars were not tuned to 104.1 it possible that we still have a chance to hear WBCN live, assuming a reflector out there in interstellar space of sufficient dimensions and appropriate geometry, perhaps an unusually intense burst of solar wind from millenia ago, a spherical pulse of expanding, reflective ionization, just the right size and shape to reflect WBCN back at us.  Let us go to the far side of the moon with large antennae and listen to 104.1.

In my collection I have a cassette tape that I recorded when I was living in Cambridge in the 70’s, off-air from WQXR AM 1540 in New York, sky wave, at night, of Hindemith’s Mathis der Mahler. I don’t want to put down Hindemith or the Mathis, which I love, but I have to say that it is vastly improved by the fading, distortion, and random, swelling unpredictable noise.  Listen to your radios at night, when you are driving down the road, lonely and bored.  Use your steering-wheel mounted frequency selector carefully, to select one AM channel at a time. Listened to what is buried there. You will be suprised, comforted and delighted.

WBCN – 4

It’s about the music, of course.  Nobody would have listened otherwise. When Maxanne publishes her memoirs we will know more about that. She was the one who recognized and sponsored creativity in the Boston bands of that pre-climate-change era, and gave them air time.   See here and here. She taught me how to spell “segue”. She introduced me to Sanae and the Root One, Macrobiotic places where we could sit down with the other brown ricers and I could enjoy one cigarette after my meal. She made a certain amount of money (She and the other line announcers made $160 a week.  Charles got $200.  I made $120) and knew how to spend it.

Periodically there were crises in which Charles was in danger of being fired. During one of these we all drove to his apartment in Cambridge to have a council. By this time I had a car I and left the studio before Max and took my ancient 3-cylinder Saab down Marlborough Street and Mass. Ave. to Harvard Square.  When I got to Charles’s place Max was already there. “How did you get here so fast”?  “I took the Massachusetts Turnpike for twenty-five cents”, was the slightly disdainful reply.

Max was a very striking, handsome woman.  See her on stage with Thundertrain: the zoom at 5:12 into the video.  I will post some of my original images of her, too, when I have gotten around to censoring them.  For some reason, probably because I accepted that she was my intellectual superior in most ways, and in spite of what appeared to be the opportunity, I did not follow my natural  inclinations in her direction, a tendency that I have followed into a world of hurt and joy so often, especially in those days.  In other words, I admired her, and respected her.  I am very glad that she became my friend.

A woman on the radio was a New Phenomenon in 1971.   The idea that a woman could control that stream of power was enough to shake my male-centric, woman-in-the-kitchen prejudices, and reinforced the very power of the medium itself.  In the late 1950’s I had been a frequent listener to Radio Moscow’s English service on shortwave, and I had the same reaction to Lidia Petrova and the other female announcers, who greatly enhanced Radio Moscow’s credibility and appeal, which were already very high in those days after the 20th Congress of the CPSU (the so-called Khrushchev “Thaw”).  So, subtly, Communist propaganda, happening to be largely true, penetrated the soul of a teenage suburban 1950’s American.

Later in 1971 other women joined the on-air staff:  Debbie Ullman, Dinah Vaprin and Marsha Steinberg.  Each had their specialties and strengths, but none had the authority or the calm, warm, friendly and highly knowledgable on-air presence and musicality of Max.

WBCN Snow

It was 6 degrees F. on the morning of January 20 1971, but it was the Boston vice squad, not the weather, that had made the prostitutes invisible on the streets, although everybody knew they were still there, in the bars in in the Combat zone. But today it was so cold even the street alcoholics were nowhere to be seen, probably allowed to stay indoors after 7:00 AM at the Pine Street Inn. As I climbed up from the subway at Boylston St. it was starting to snow and the barrel of the great vertical neon hypodermic atop the John Hancock Building was flashing its red foul-weather warning. The spike of the hypodermic, 497 feet above street level, held the antenna of WBCN.

Woo-Woo had explained the changing radio-frequency geometry of WBCN in Boston to me. The 747 foot Prudential Tower, in the Back Bay half mile to the West of the John Hancock Building, was not close enough to WBCN’s transmitter on the John Hancock Building to significantly impair our signal. WBCN got out just about as well to the western suburbs and the North and South Shore after the Pru was built in 1964 as it had since T. Mitch first rented transmitter space on the John Hancock Building spike in 1959.

Corporate rivalry was about to change the geometry of radio-frequency shadowing in Boston. The John Hancock Mutual Insurance Company could not tolerate a taller insurance company building than its own in downtown Boston. For decades lesser insurance companies had acquiesced in the Hancock’s supremacy. Everybody knew that the Liberty Mutual Insurance company, doing business in its forbidding, Stalinesque building on Berkeley Street next to its acknowledged superior, was a second rate company in a second rate building. The erection of the Pru had upended the old order, which had to be reestablished in the only way that would make a statement of the necessary emphasis: the erection of a taller building. And not only would the building be taller, it would overshadow the Pru. No onlooker would be able to see one without seeing the other; and no one would fail to notice the superior height of the John Hancock Tower, as it was to be called: 779 feet.

Compare these two buildings to the end of the Korean War. The stalled armistice talks at Panmunjon were jump-started by an agreement to cease erection of the world’s two tallest flagpoles. The Communists and the American – led forces had been able to agree on nothing for over a year.  Meanwhile World War One style trench warfare continued, as touchingly depicted in the 1960 film Pork Chop Hill.   One day in 1952 the North Korean side erected a small flag  on their side of the truce table.  The next day a South Korean flag one meter taller appeared on the other side.  Soon successively taller structures were being built on each side of the trenches.  By mutual argreement a halt was called to the flagpole race, and a truce agreement followed within weeks. The North Korean pole, or tower, is located in the “Peace Village” at http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.945278,126.655556&spn=0.1,0.1&t=h&q=37.945278,126.655556 .  The South Korean structure is one km South by West away, across the armistice line.   The shadows of the North Korean and South Korean flag poles, each more than 100 meters tall, are clearly visible.

The Hancock Company chose a site for its Tower immediately between the Prudential and the old John Hancock Building. Now WBCN was in trouble: The skeleton of the new Tower was already going up a quarter mile away. The dimensions and proximity of the new monolith meant a significant degradation of WBCN’s signal to the West. When I arrived T. Mitch and Woo-Woo had already made arrangements to leapfrog the new building and move the transmitter to the top of the Prudential. The resulting shadow to the East could be tolerated, as there was nothing in that direction but hookers, drunks, Chinatown, Filene’s Basement, Logan Airport, Deer Island Correctional Institute and the sea.

The new installation atop the Pru had already been engineered and a new transmitter ordered. My job was to nurse along the unreliable old transmitter and its ancient backup transmitter until the new equipment arrived.

Woo-Woo had sent me to WHCN in Hartford for a crash course in maintaining high power FM transmitters. The WHCN (“Hartford Concert Network”, of course) technicians drove me to the top of Meriden Mountain. Listen to “night on Bald Mountain” by Moussorgsky to share an emotional sample of that ride up hill in the dark, on a narrow strip of ice, in the wind, branches overhanging and slapping at the Jeep, until we arrived at the transmitter building where a signed transmitter of Major Armstrong still existed, quiet now, in a corner near the malfunctioning heating plant, revered by the technicians and engineers.

Now that I had at least seen a few examples of the bunker-like FM transmitters of the day and their associated plumbing, known as “transmission lines”, Woo-Woo was introducing me this January morning to the transmitter atop the Hancock Building. We did not enter through the bronzed-columned and doored main entrance of the Hancock, but through a service entrance near a loading dock, although we could have gone through the ornate lobby. I don’t think it was my ragged appearance that influence Woo-Woo; we usually went the back way.

The main elevators ended at the twenty-sixth floor. There was a smaller elevator to one side for which Woo-Woo supplied a key. Up another four floors and out to a narrow, high passage of uncertain architectural purpose, befitting the interior of a Pyramid. At the end of the passage a brown painted steel door and another key. Then up four flights of stairs to a door leading to another passage and two more doors. At one end, the transmitter room; the other way to the antenna. By now we were both sweating from climbing. Woo-Woo and I entered the transmitter room to leave our coats on one of the stacks of incomprehensible junk and went out to the passage to the antenna.

We entered the base of a hissing, spitting column of flashing red neon. We went up the spiral staircase in the center. The white and blue neon tubes were quiescent. The high voltage AC to the red tubes hissed and the connectors clattered as the 100 foot tall, 20 foot wide beacon flashed about once a second. Even in heavy snow it could be seen from miles away.

Woo-Woo showed me the transmission line. It lead through a hole in the wall from the transmitter room at the base of the neon tower and snaked up alongside the spiral staircase to the top, where it exited to the antenna proper. Woo-Woo pointed out damaged sections of the transmission line, where it had overheated due to incompetent maintenance or the complete lack thereof and begun leaking the pressurized nitrogen gas that was supposed to keep it dry inside. The line was a metal pipe three inches in diameter with a black plastic coating. Near the leaks the plastic had melted a bit. Someone had tried to seal the leaks with clear plastic wrap and duct tape, but this had laeked too: the transmission line was damaged in several places with molten and then solidified black and clear plastic dribbling down.

The hissing noise of the neon and clacking of the connectors made it difficult to be heard. Woo-Woo had to shout as he explained the damage and what to do about it: manhandle nitrogen cylinders up the steps to the transmitter room as often as necessary – perhaps twice a week, in an effort to keep some pressure in the line so that more moisture would not seep in and cause arcing and further damage.

Woo-Woo seemed to grow more excited as we mounted higher. He was taking the steps two at a time and sweating, his face alternating a terrifying red with his normal slightly greenish pallor at intervals of one second. He reached the top ahead of me and shouted down through the spiral stairs: “You know, sometime I’m going to drop trousers up here and just take a big shit right down the middle”.

Dressed lightly as we were, and because the wind might snatch us off the base of the needle, we could not stay outside on the circular platform more than a few seconds. From my two days at WHCN I was able to recognize the  antenna on its central mast: “bays”, they called them, attached to the mast, one garbage can sized arabesque above the other in an array of eight, where whatever amount of radio frequency energy that remained was radiated away, finally, above the snow swept office buildings, hotels, townhouses and Public Garden, over the emerging, menacing black steel skeleton of the Hancock Tower, to the horizon, for the benefit of young people for many miles to the North, West and South, who, oppressed by the greed and ostentation of corporate America and furious at another war against Communism in Vietnam, listened to their music and the disk jockeys they knew as friends:  Diamond John Brody, Andy Beaubien, Tommy Hadges, Maxanne Sartori, Norm Weiner (“Old Saxophone Joe”), Jim Parry, Ed Perry, Sam Kopper and Charles Laquidara.  There was also Danny Schechter, the News Dissector and a small corps of part time and assistant D. J.’s.

WBCN images: Arnie Ginsburg, 1971

Don’t be too hard on Woo-Woo for smoking (tobacco).  All of us except for Andy and Tommy smoked something.

Woo-Woo driving a convertible. Copyright (c) 1971, 2009 William J. Spurlin

Note the price of gas: 38.9 cents a gallon.  Woo-Woo has just filled up for $2.70.  I made $120 a week to start, which I thought was incredibly generous.

Woo-Woo filling up. Copyright (c) 1971, 2009 William J. Spurlin

WBCN -2

Within a few days of working at WBCN I was introduced to its history. I learned that BCN stands for Boston Concert Network and that at one time there had been five stations in the Concert Network, in New York City, Providence, Hartford and Riverhead, NY as well as Boston. The Concert Network was founded in the 50’s  by T. Mitchell Hastings, who kept an office at 312 Stuart Street when I worked there.

The Concert Network existed in a reduced form by 1971. Besides ‘BCN only ‘HCN in Harftord was left. The other stations had been sold or shut down over the years, unable to compete in an era of increasingly commercialized and syndicated radio. There were also stories about T. Mitch’s incompetence and extravagance.  Old-money Mitch, according to Kenny Greenblatt and others, had financed his network with his own money and then when that ran out with his wife’s.  Short of money again, the wife conveniently died, and T. Mitch was able to finance his ventures further with the money of a new wife.   The Concert Network was one of several of Mitch’s ventures and avocations, which included the manufacture of the world’s first portable FM radio as well as a persistent interest in seances and other paranormal phenomena.

I glimpsed T. Mitch moving rather feebly in and out of his shabby office.  He seemed very, very old to me, but he was probably around 60.  His mostly bald skull was marked by two shallow depressions about an inch across, surrounded by liver spots; the marks, I was told, of more-or-less successful brain surgery.  Wearing sports jackets that appeared to have been styled in an earlier era, hunched, bespectacled, we could occasionally hear him in his office in a high, whining voice, talking to Woo-Woo.

Mitch’s radio manufacturing business had come to a bad end.  On December 16, 1960 a United Airlines DC-8  and a TWA Super Constellation collided over Staten Island.  Both airliners crashed and 134 people were killed, the worst airplane accident until that time.  The DC-8 had navigational problems – its navigational receivers had behaved erratically, and one had failed completely.  When it collided with the TWA flight it was more than 5 miles off course.  The flaming wreckage fell in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, where six people were killed on the ground.

They pulled one of T. Mitch’s little radios out of the wreckage.  To save money and space Mitch had chosen the super-regenerative design (as opposed to the superheterodyne of Major Armstong).  The super-regenerative is amazingly efficient and compact.  A very effective receiver can be built with one tube and a 22.5 volt dry cell that will drive a pair of headphones and get all the local FM stations.  There is only one drawback:  the super-regen is also an amazingly effective miniature transmitter, on a frequency identical or very close to the one it is receiving.

The commercial FM broadcast  band is just below the frequencies used by VOR, the then recently-introduced VHF aeronautical navigation system.  Civil Aeronautics Board investigators theorized that the little radio was on and had been slightly mistuned, a little bit high, and had interfered with and disabled the DC-8’s navigational systems.  Although the CAB did not release a definitive finding (see CAB-SA-361.  If you cannot find a copy on line let me know and I will send you one), by the fall of 1961 a new regulation was introduced:  no portable electronics equipment could be used aboard an airliner in flight.  Mitch’s radio business folded the same year.