February 9, 2017.
The Old Radio Setup Dies. The Eulogy.
The radio station's block-wide facilities are buzzing. Today, a new 24/7 program takes over the 1350 AM airspace. It is the first time since WSMB signed on the air in 1925 that the station will have a total turnover in its air product. Even the tiniest details of the old station will disappear, making way for a totally new music radio station.
I don't know much about the new broadcast, other than what I learned when I met the consultant who was brought in to create the new package. What I do know all about is the old regime. I have been part of it since July 18, 1988. I have been aware of WSMB since the early 1960s, when my big sister listened to it all the time.
The old WSMB began as a kind of radio vaudeville. There were no networks or recorders back then, so everything was live. The shows would be real shows, with live music, drama, comedy conversation, and news. That lasted until the advent of NBC, of which WSMB was one of the first affiliates. The people might have changed, but the entertainment was steady. It was the jazz age, and everybody was thrilled by the whole idea of radio.
It hardly changed throught he 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. Then network radio faded away, and one by one the shows were replaced by disc jockeys. They were, however, the same talents that had been there all along. A lot of the same guys were still around in the late 1970s, when the on-air voices started doing talk shows. That's what was playing up to the second when the new guys took over today at 6 p.m.
I asked to host the last hour of the old WSMB (which has been called WWWL for almost a decade). The management thinks it's a good idea. I flesh out everything that outline in the paragraphs above. After giving all that history, we roll my theme song ("L'il Darlin," a Count Basie masterpiece). I gave the old station ID as I and dozens of announcers before me had done thousands of times before: "This is 1350, WWWL Radio, New Orleans." I played the National Anthem. It fades in the last second before the new sound stepped in.
Then I left the building. Tomorrow, I will continue my Food Show as I have since 1988, but we will have a new identity. Officially, it's "WWL-FM, HD2, Kenner-New Orleans." We are a subsidiary service of WWL-FM, which on our FM dial is 105.3, with a new transmitter and a lot of power. This solves a lot of problems, the worse of which were the ever-increasing static on AM, and the lowering of effective power at night to protect other stations far away.
But it creates a new problem for me and others on the staff. To listen to our new station, you need a special radio. These are neither hard to get nor expensive. I have four of them in home and office, and all the cars in my family can receive HD2 easily. But people don't like change, and there will almost certainly be some disappointment that one must do a little more than turning the radio on in order to listen to it. This will be my big challenge in the coming months. If I succeed, I will be a genuine pioneer.
More on this in tomorrow's diary, where we do the first show on the new frequency. Spoiler: it goes very well.
