 Welcome to the Sheboygan County Historical Society and Museum for another third Saturday program. Welcome. My name is Bob Harker, the director of the Sheboygan County Historical Museum and today the third Saturday program is all about radio history and radio personalities from Sheboygan County. You're going to be meeting lots of folks. You're also going to be seeing a collection of very old radios made in Wisconsin as well as part of our day to day. So enjoy the day. It's third Saturday. Radio history and radio personalities, Sheboygan County. My name is Adam Smith and I'm an intern here at the Sheboygan County Historical Society and I put this teaser exhibit together as a highlight for the radio and radio personalities third Saturday program that the museum is putting on today. This instrument here is one of the first broadcasting equipment here in Sheboygan County. It was at the WHBL radio station and it was one of their first transmitters that they had there at the station and you can see how radio transmitting equipment's definitely changed a lot over the years. This is a fairly large piece of equipment and now they're a lot smaller today. We also put together a large number of different radios that we had here in the museum's collections to kind of highlight how radios have changed over time. We have some of the smaller radios such as transportable radio that they could have taken to like the beach or to other areas of town and we also took one of the radios in Atwater Kent that we could take the cover off to show what some of the equipment inside the radio looks like. So you can see how it's made up of balls and all the different wiring in there as well. We also have a large Filco radio that is in the collection to show how the size of some of the early radios and how they would have fit into a person's living room, how they would have served as some of the decorative elements in a person's house or home. Then we also have another smaller Filco radio that would have just showed how its size of those radios changed over time as well. Okay, my name is Greg Hinold. I live in Plymouth, Wisconsin and I've been a collector of antique radios since around 1993 or so. I got into it because I've always had an interest in radios. I always kind of liked the old radios that my grandparents had that I played with as a kid. And then later on, as I got a chance, I began to find them in stores and buy one or two and originally bought radios from all different times, but I really became interested in the early 1920s, which is what my collection now focuses on because not only did I find the radios very interesting, but it was a very interesting time because the onset of radio and the proliferation of radio in the American public just completely transformed the way people lived. A medium of mass communication that was nothing like it before. It's similar to the transformation that the internet has wrought since. But so it's the radios in the context of their times that is what is really most interesting to me. So these radios that I brought for today on the left are examples of early crystal sets. Crystal sets use a tiny crystal as a detector and before, originally before vacuum tubes were used and then even after vacuum tubes were used because they were very inexpensive because they didn't require any power and they worked all the time. These are examples of vacuum tubes that were used in radios of the period 1921-1926. Nowadays in the computer there will be millions of transistors on a chip and each one of them you could think of as being like one of these tubes and these were the batteries used to power the old battery sets as most of the radios of course before electrification were all they were all battery powered except for the crystal sets that didn't need any power. Most people made their own radios in the early 1920s. There were some for sale some that were fairly expensive and a lot of people found it more economical to just buy and build their own radios and this is an example of home-built radio and the sort of books that people would buy to get instructions and how to do it. The first radio that was made for home use was the radio or the Westinghouse RC model RC or the radio RC came to be known as RC it was marketing for Westinghouse was part of the radio corporation of America but this was the first radio that was actually made for home use. I wanted to feature Wisconsin made radios and the first of these is the Western Coil and Electric Model WC-10 which was made in 1923 down in Racine, Wisconsin. Western Coil was in radio for a long time and made very high quality equipment and this is an example of one of their products. To the right of that are examples of three speakers all the radios that you see here except for the very last one used external speakers and they were originally horn speakers such as this Atwater Kenhorn and this is actually another type of horn speaker in front and then cone speakers like this Crosley Ultra Musicone. The sound of these was by you know comparatively weak in the bay high range the treble and bass pretty well pretty good in the mid-range and the better ones of these reproduce music pretty respectfully given the limitations of the technology at the time. On the left is Crosley Pup small radio small cubicle radio with the tube sticking out of the top this was sold in the 20s 1925-26 is a very inexpensive popular sort of starter radio for people but it actually worked quite well Paul Crosley was the owner of the company in Cincinnati Ohio sold Crosley cars, Crosley refrigerators, and a whole variety of other Crosley products. The next radio was the Globe model 770 the Globe Electric Company in Milwaukee Wisconsin was a big producer of radios for a period of time in the 20s from around 1922 to 1926 or so as an example of one or their tuts and the next one is a Wells radio Wells from Vandalac Wisconsin who were in radio from 1922 to again to around 1926 an example of one of theirs and the final Wisconsin radio is the Empire Model 5 that was made in Beaver Dam Wisconsin. Many towns including Plymouth and I'm sure Sheboygan had small companies making radios as companies were jumping into the market to take advantage of the great interest that was developing in radio. A lot of them didn't last as the bigger companies gradually through mass production were able to price them out and then of course with the onset of the depression. The final one is a Philco Model 70 which is a 1931 radio it's a classic example of what's called the Cathedral design and design of the cabinet. A lot of times when you think of an antique radio or somebody suggests what an antique radio was it's the radio of this sort that they will point to a radio like the Philco Model 70. Okay I'm Julian Yetzer and I started in radio in Sheboygan area back in 1958 officially got into things about radio before that but started in 1958 and off and on for 42 years I spent a lot of time at WHBL also worked at WKTS eventually bought WKTS and then built a new radio station in Plymouth Wisconsin called WXER an FM station there and retired from radio in about 2000 so spent 42 years in the broadcast business here in the Sheboygan area and loved every minute of it and Steve wants to show you here a couple of things and on display there's some photos and things from the old WHBL years we we had a party line program that was run on the station and it was normally run by a gentleman called Dick Rulo on the air his name or his regular name was Dick Hellhake and he would do recipes and get recipes from callers and they would it was a very popular program was on every morning for several hours and a lot of a lot of the ladies would get involved we also did some interviews with a lot of people when you were just looking at was an interview that we did for photography in the area Mark Eilis from Gene Sound and Camera appeared along with Frank Wright and myself and I was back in the 1950s late 1950s early 60s the party line program ended up with a number of recipe booklets and that's a little picture of one of them also all of our commercials back in the 1950s were played on what we called acetates that was a black record you were just looking at those are called acetates and those were cut by the engineer on duty after he would make the commercials on tape and then to play the commercials on the air we would play them like a record and if the commercial would run several times then we would have to make a number of tracks on that acetate because they would wear out very quickly so that's how we played commercials and right now that this is some pictures of the WKTS studios those pictures there were taken of the studio when it was above the old Walgreens store on Athon, Wisconsin Avenue that would be about 1977 1978 the studio was later moved to to Union Avenue and then after that after the FM was built back in 1990 the next pictures you see will be the studios that were built for that station those pictures were taken at the WKTS and WXER studios that were in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin and that was during the 1990s through about 2006 let's go back in history a little bit this goes back to the 1920s through the 1950s at WHBL and many stations across the country they used chimes just like NBC did for many years to announce station breaks and also also to announce when the news was on especially in Sheboygan here the 12 noon news and the 6 p.m. daily news always started with these chimes and i'll play them for you when people in the Sheboygan area heard those chimes then they knew it was time for the news and in my day it was with Paul Skinner when the news with Paul Skinner came on that was like receiving the Sheboygan press for the day everyone got all of the local news that was the only way you could get it there was no cable television back then i'm Jim Riesenberg back in the 60s 67 68 working at then WPLY as Jim Rogers i i left the navy in 1965 got a job in the post office for a little while pushing up some money and in 1966 January i went to Brown Institute of Radio Broadcasting in Minneapolis i stayed at Brown Institute i finished my course of study at Brown Institute in June of 1967 and was waiting for a job placement in a station that specialized in country music eventually i think it was in October the placement office called and said they had an opening at WPLY in Plymouth 500 watt peanut whistle type operation sunrise to sunset i said i'll look into it i drove over here on in an october met with the station manager mr hilly and the staff i'll take the job so that's where it happened a lot of things have changed since way back then we had a staff announcers we had three had a station manager a general manager and an engineer on call i grew up in listening to country music in my five four years in the navy three of those were in san diego and especially influenced by what we call west coast country there are three at that time probably three segments of country music the hill style of nashville the shuffle style the western swing style of texas and the west coast sound the murall haggards and the buck Owens were just moving in but i made it a point to know exactly what was going on in country music all the time my mentor at that time was eddie briggs and i found that if you know if you know a little bit more people honestly and truthfully that you're sincere in what you're talking about so you can see from the from the publications that are available here that i have in my personal collection they're really the the reason that i knew as much as i did and while i still continue to collect the old country in 1974 when the grand old opry left the rhyman auditorium and moved into opryland the station had a bus going down there i still have my ticket stubs the swatch of curtain from the old rhyman curtain and george wallace's autograph on the program a lot of things have changed in country music since back then and it's probably understandable but i listened to country music today and it isn't it's not the same as it was back then the presentation is different today to me anyway it's nothing more than rock and roll with with cowboy boots and a big white hat but be that as it may time times change and life goes on and from from a management point of view i suppose you either change and move on or get caught up in the backwash and nothing else is going to happen and that's where you're going to sit would i get back into music today if i could play what i played back then you bet i would it's not available in very many places anymore especially on the radio dial there are several uh i don't believe there are any live there's very little live radio anywhere in any uh medium anymore and those stations that do play the old country you can find them on the push buttons on my car radio but most of those are all syndicated shows and they pretty much all follow the same format and and and i have a collection i have probably several hundred CDs and a couple of hundred of the old 33 and a third albums that are basically from i think probably the newest one of v 1972 and and i guess beyond that uh i i would like to see it come back but i don't think it ever will that music uh all gen generations of music go through a specific cycle and and when when hank williams died and the music changed uh ray price took over the band and managed to bring it back and it keep that style of type of music uh alive and active and but it's it's never going to be the same if if you if you see the shows today uh you don't hear too many you don't hear merle haggard on the radio anymore on today's country stations you're probably lucky the oldest one you might hear would be willy nelson and i don't know who he would team up with to get that on but those those are the the things that i remember and those are the things that i like the best about the country music that we had way back then fortunately a lot of it's been preserved i got a couple of dozen reels as well in addition to the cds in the and the albums but it is probably uh i'm going to have to find a way to convert it to a disc or something because uh there's no place to play records anymore i'm larry bar from 14 20 a.m the breeze i've been at the breeze probably for five or six years and uh very happy to be there we play american standards and the great american song book and things like the mills brothers and harry bellafonte frank sinatra tony bennett things like that we've also got some some oldies that fit in it's just a very good station to listen to it's very uh well there's nobody's going to object to it it's very decent family programming uh i used to well actually i started at a very young age in 1972 at w p y and i worked at every station in the county center a couple of stations out of the area like indianapolis and new walkie and uh one of the things i just wanted to bring up that i think is kind of interesting to some of this originally things started off being pretty much coming in on records and if we had to record any commercials this was a little before my time but everything had to be recorded on a disc uh from there it went to tapes and i'd say that transition happened probably in the late 60s missing something between cassettes kind of took over for just a few years and then it was cd's so we get a lot of things right now with cd's but lately we're also getting a lot of things through the internet and uh digitally so there's a lot that just comes in that way and this is almost gone by the wayside too used to be that somebody had to be at the station all the time push all the buttons and hit all the switches commercials and some songs used to be recorded on these which released their cards it's just magnetic tapes something like this but just in a much more convenient form this is an old ribbon microphone that used to be used at wply just happened to have it here at this at wjub and this most stations are have transmitters now that are solid state however this is a final tube this happens to be from whbl but it's exactly the same kind that used to be in the transmitter at wply so things are much more dependable don't need to be changed as often that used to be have to be changed like every nine to 12 months or so my name is bill horsch i currently serve as the general manager of 14 20 a.m the breeze and 91.3 FM the message radio the message radio is a christian radio station and what we do is we program 24 hours a day 365 days a year praise and worship music we've been on the air now about eight years and the idea behind the station when we started it was what type of christian music is not being heard in shabuagan county and we actually drove around and looked at church marquees those are signs out in front of churches and found that many churches were offering now contemporary services in shabuagan county and by contemporary services they simply mean praise and worship music so that's what wstm is 91.3 FM it's all praise and worship music and some good biblical teaching programs during the day and also we have a translator station and was in shabuagan which is 103.3 so for those people that can't hear 91.3 in shabuagan they can listen to us at 103.3 we also own under the corporate head of jubilation ministries 14 20 a.m the breeze that was our original acquisition back in the early 1990s we acquired we bought the existing WPY and it then became WJUB it was originally our christian station but then when we acquired our FM we converted what was WJUB 14 20 a.m we converted that into a station that is now called the breeze that plays the great american standards music which is of course Frank Sinatra Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole and some of the more current artists like Michael Buble and and so on and so forth my radio career actually got started in college and after college i came to shabuagan to teach at shabuagan north high school i actually started at south high school and then was transferred over to north high school where i became the advisor for wshs radio the high school radio station i served as their advisor for well over 20 years and worked with the students there teaching the broadcasting classes teaching them what it meant to become a good broadcaster doing sports talk shows and the music programming and doing live broadcasts of the radio basketball and football games and things of that nature so i taught at shabuagan north high school for almost 30 years was the advisor of the radio station all the time i was there and then at that point started jubilation ministries and started 1420 am the breeze and 91.3 fm the message and that's where i am today and the picture behind me is a picture of susie nordike and susie is the operations director for 91.3 fm the message it is her responsibility to keep that station going on a on a day-to-day basis and she's been with us since the very beginning and she's also the afternoon voice on 1420 am the breeze so she wears two hats as well hi i'm tom lang and i'm currently doing the contract engineering for ws hs fm 91.7 i've got started in electronics as a boy where i would build a small electronic pieces and i was heavily influenced by my neighbor at the time chris bower so that's how i got my start in electronics i then went to went through high school went to a lakeshore technical institute after that got a two-year associate degree in electronics technology eventually a few years after that i got involved with one of the local broadcast stations is a fill-in broadcast engineer that was at the time wkts 950 and then after that chris bower had also expressed some interest in having me fill in for him at the whbl when he was on vacation in order to do these things of course he had to have a first-class fcc radio telephone license which i got in the mid 70s so i was able to do these things and as time went on after a while when now this is going ahead in time a number of years the ws hs uh came on the air was taken one one definite uh key figure in that acquisition of ws hs with the building of it was charlie mace here which would be you know you'll have some things to say as well obviously he's the key player in the radio station but um a few years a number of years after that i was contacted as to do the electronics work at ws hs on a contractual basis so that was i believe in the late 80s at the time they went through they were going through a power increase and other facilities upgrade so then i i maintained that station on the contractual basis shortly after that i there was a position opened in the electronics department at the ordinary school district so i applied for that and and got that and charlie can tell you oh that came about but of course once i was on the staff but one of my duties was maintaining the technical operations of ws hs um about a year ago i retired from the district and once again i'm doing the just the radio transmission equipment that would be known as the rf side of it for ws hs on a contractual basis and so that's about it and time to time it requires designing special circuits because there's just nothing available commercially and i think anybody in broadcast engineering will tell you that so i've been able to do that which is kind of fun to be able to design circuits and implement them and have them work so my name is charlie mace i was actually involved in the original inception of the radio station way back in the early seven days as seen in that poster over there the the idea of the radio station began in in 1971 and that's actually when i graduated from high school um the idea was was developed i worked part time at that time for the school district summers and while i was going to technical school and after i completed technical school the district had a full-time open and at that time we were in the process of the radio station was actually up and running and i had worked with an individual called walley primizek in developing the station so we were actually uh the leaders in in actually getting fm radio in shiboy again actually in the state of wisconsin how that incurred is we visited a radio station in illinois uh was in southern chicago an fm educational fm station um the unique i don't remember much about the trip the only thing i remember was a very influential school district uh the kids all came to school in limos so we were kind of impacted and we showed up in this little van one went after one morning and decided to see what their radio station consists of and basically their operation was donated by by corporations in the chicago area and that's how they got fm educational fm radio going we looked at their basic model and that's how we developed our station we decided we had to go out and secure money so we took out a loan was a the parent organization actually funded the radio station for a number of years and as it grew and developed we eventually turned it over to the school district i said i i began with the school district and actually in 72 i'm in my 40th year with the district so i've been involved in all the physical construction and some of the operational pieces of the effort radio station through that time period hi i'm steve gallimore and i'm here with my mom mary gallimore at the presentation for the radio program and we're here just exhibiting a short little exhibit but one from the 30s and 40s mom can you tell us what my father was an actor and about uh with the community players as it was called then back in the late 30s and early 40s and uh they um i don't know how it happened but they put on some of their programs sherlock holmes mainly on whbl and so i thought this was kind of important and uh my son found these articles and uh which are behind me and uh my father's name was art cost and uh well let's see sherlock watson dr watson i'd forgotten dr watson and uh the fellas i don't know how many years they did this but uh i fell by the name of al chop who is still living to this day uh did all the writing of the scripts and things for this program he currently is in the retirement home over here and uh but my father uh basically died very young he died what in 40 40 yeah so he was in this from about 38 39 until he died in 42 and he was 41 but he was a heavy set man and he very jovial and i guess the fellas had a real good time doing this you know uh as long as they did yes right it was called community players for many years uh the the uh theater group now that was changed more in recent years the name was changed but it's the same type of thing w hvl was at that time in the um building on 7th street the 7th and center or something uh where the shabuigan press building is so that the radio station was upstairs and they did their broadcasts uh from there so i i'm sure they probably did yes definitely uh al chop as i say he was he wrote the scripts for these shows and uh so they um they followed that oh yes i tried to get information through the the uh radio station they had no archives uh except for some uh articles that were on the wall but bob already was had asked for those but they weren't anything like this specific and then i i went to the i went to the uh press building so i got up they said go upstairs on the second floor and all they have really is um the same articles you know in all the newspapers but it was there weren't any pictures that that's what surprising i couldn't find any recordings now somebody might have some recordings uh i i checked with the al chop's family his daughter she looked among some archives that she has but somebody i think may have some some family um i'm going to check with i just discovered another of the family of one of the actors might have something you know i might be able to yeah yeah because it seems to me they're worth i just think it uh it's it's pretty significant i think it's i wish we had more to show for for this period of time you know for this event but it's fun i mean it's fun bringing it all up again this display is about don mcneill and don mcneill grew up in the shabuigan area i think he moved his family moved here when he was about three years old but later in his life he moved to chicago went to chicago and started a radio program there the don mcneill breakfast club it was an incredibly popular show every morning during the week it came on the air it had some music it had uh don mcneill of course but it had and fanny had a whole bunch of other characters which were part of the show they were on the air for from 1933 to 1968 it is also a well-known fact that this radio program this variety show this talk show of sorts was a leader in the industry in terms of this kind of programming sometimes they took the show on the road they went all around the country and on the one big picture here talks about they came back to shabuigan in 1945 and did a show here in shabuigan as well like i say they traveled all over the country to do the breakfast club shows there were breakfast club fans there were breakfast club clubs all around the country as well and there was a point in his tenure with the breakfast club that mostly for fun he was running for president as well so you'll see perhaps some of the pictures about that adventure too this station is to represent a like a radio station in the shabuigan county area so we can replicate and show people how make it feel like they are on the air as well especially for kids of all ages so they can um reenact kind of what it's like to be on the radio so what we're going to do is we're going to play a read a short segment we'll record it on the tape player and then play it back so they can hear themselves on the radio let's face it there's not many lonely appliance repairmen out there the truth of the matter is appliances do break down and when your appliances need an overhaul mike's appliance repair of plinth is a place to call providing professional service on all major brands of kitchen and laundry appliances gas and electric serving all of shabuigan county since 1985 mike's appliance repair of plinth mike may not be a lonely repairman but it'll always make time for you and then we just rewind it back and we play it so that they can hear themselves uh kind of on the radio the truth of the matter is appliances do break down and when your appliances need an overhaul mike's appliance repair of plinth is a place to call providing professional service on all major brands of kitchen and laundry appliances gas and electric serving all of shabuigan county since 1985 mike's appliance repair of plinth mike may not be a lonely repairman but it'll always make time for you hi my name is nineth alabash i'm here at the museum talking about my radio days uh my radio career began when i was in college lakeland college in shabuigan i started attending at my friends were all involved in something called wvlc which was the voice of lakeland college and it wasn't hard to get involved and before i knew it i was spinning records back when they had 45s so i did i was the dj and that was so much fun because i grew up listening to the djs on wls and and all the chicago stations where i grew up and of course am radio back then played top 40 music so that was fun and then um i found out about a news job because i was more interested in journalism i was taking journalism courses at lakeland and i found out that w hb l in shabuigan was looking for a news reporter so i went over there for an interview uh the head of the news department then was a man by the name of ted charles which i found out later wasn't his real name but it was a perfect radio name he met me he said yeah you'll do you can be a stringer i'll just um hire you for part-time stories but nannette bulabash that'll never do no no no let's let's give you a new name hubba gene williams yeah gene williams that's a good name people remember it so from then on i was gene williams i remember those first stories i was very nervous i had a microphone of course and an old tape recorder we did everything on cassette and then we transferred it to reel to reel in at the state at the studio so i would i would go and interview people with my either mini recorder this big lunky thing with the handle and i would put my microphone up to ask whatever questions one of the first stories i remember was lee drafus i don't know if you remember but he was um running for governor then he had been a chancellor at uw steven's point i want to say um and he was running for governor he was he was touring the state of wisconsin i bet this would have been 1976 or 1980 probably 76 um and he was 75 when he was still running he's touring the state with this this group of college kids of course he was from uw steven's point so college kids and like this big bus but it had an open top so these college kids with their instruments are playing music he's down he's interviewing people he knew he could tell i was a reporter because of my equipment so i go to answer him some questions and i'm this young innocent reporter um uh candidate mr drafus um tell me about yourself of why should we vote for you and i'm real nervous he of course was the consummate professional he's he looked at my microphone and he grabbed it with my hand still holding it and held it up right close to his mouth which is what you have to do otherwise you're not going to get good audio and so i'm like holding it with him holding it next to his mouth and that's how he did the whole interview him holding my mic and um so he could get good audio then i went back to the station and of course ted charles was thrilled because we got a great great um audio version of his voice i don't i don't think my questions were very good but over time they got better later on i did the police beat um sheriff department you went in the morning to all the different places to find out what happened overnight if there was a fire you'd stop at the police at the fire station full-time fire department but they didn't have many fires it always smelled good the fire station because they were great cooks i think they still are and you went to the police speed i was usually the only woman reporter among the crew we all met together i put up with a lot of what would be called sexual harassment now um i was too young and naive to know that i even had a right to question that i just put up with it i think most people in those times did even covering city council i covered flumma city council shaboy and city council school board meetings county board all that even those people they were almost all men they they um yeah they you know oh blondie or when you got a what's under that microphone i'm just horrible stuff horrible stuff that i would not tolerate now but back then i did and i bet early radio women in those times and in any kind of journalism sports reporters now they still put up with it but now we're smarter we know how to speak up but those were tough times most of my radio memories are very very happy the pay was awful awful awful awful at least four reporters i think i was news director of wh bl i was making five dollars an hour and this was you know i had a college degree but i did it i because i love radio i loved it i went on to do other things newspaper reporting i'm a librarian now but i missed those radio days i would do it again in a heartbeat even for five dollars an hour or less just because it was a lot of fun and if you listen to the other people today and talk about and hear their memories they all are full of wonderful stories hi i'm dick romain i'm from the 1960s era at uh wh bl in shaboygan from 64 to 70 i worked in the news department where we did the morning newscasts and i worked with ralph norman who was the uh morning announcer at that time and one of my colleagues was dick hellhake dick hellhake uh was not the name however that i used on the air when i was broadcasting on wh bl i used the name and started at wh bl in 1957 and worked there till 65 so i had the good fortune of working with dick romain for for over a year we were talking before dick and i about what we call it the golden age of radio before it became all talk and there were actual personalities on the radio and we had several outstanding personalities at our at our station and of course uh julian yetzer was uh one of the engineers and kind of kept that station going on the air but it was a it was a great time to be in radio well it you mentioned uh the golden age i think it was the golden age for for local radio stations and wh bl was really quite exceptional paul skinner who uh bought the station from uh broton charles broden bought was the owner and uh paul came from wtmj with a great radio background and he set very high standards for wh bl uh in his announcing staff and uh in his his new staff we were probably the only small market station that had three full-time newsmen and that that was really quite quite unusual that a small local station would put that amount of emphasis on news broadcasting and uh several of the people that worked at the station went on to greater things uh bob wittes who was the news director that was just prior to you coming on i think uh dick bob wittes went on to uh the uh journal sentinel and became the editorial editor of uh of the uh milwaukee sentinel and john grams of course who was one of the announcers on the station went on and got his doctor's degree in radio broadcasting and became a doctor of broadcast history and taught at market university so we had a rather remarkable group group of people anything else that comes to your mind well a couple other names built wire i don't know if anybody recalls that name anymore but he started out at hpl and he later became the sports editor i believe it was the los angeles times so there were quite a few people and joe gulig of course was in the news department when i was there he came on as a part-time person and it's still with the shavuigan press so there were a lot of a lot of great people that were on the staff at the time so i i consider it a great opportunity to be able to say that i worked in radio for about 10 years and hpl was kind of a highlight of my career well i uh i started in radio in in the very early 50s right after getting out of the army and uh worked in wasa worked in uh fort madison iowa w uh or kxgi and then a station in illinois before coming to whbl and really uh it was an impressive change to come to a station such as paul skinner was was running at the time we had a great deal of freedom the announcers in the music that we chose and in putting our shows together so that each show sort of reflected the personality of the individual announcer my show was different than ralph normans or julian yetzers or john grams we we all had unique shows and personalities and within the program guidelines that paul skinner had set we had a great deal of freedom in presenting our our music so it was a good time and i i left radio to find greener pastures uh in uh in the world of business but uh i can say that they were uh some of the most enjoyable memories that i have and uh over the years i've made and kept some very dear friends well for me uh whbl was a stepping stone to another career in public information i left the station in about 1970 to work for lake shore technical college at that time it was had another name at that time but later became lake shore tech and it just happens my the boss who hired me was just by the table here fredney rote so that was a start of a new career for me hi i'm kevin zimmerman and i've been with whbl since 1976 i got my start as a part-time announcer there uh working weekends and within about a half a year was offered a job to take over for frank right who was leaving our station so i said sure i'll do that my very first full-time day on the air was program we used to do live every first wednesday of the month at wisconsin power and light company they had a theater downtown and it was a cooking demonstration with irine burbach and i would moderate that so my very first full-time day i lasted 15 minutes before laryngitis seized my voice and i had to sort of i made it through the rest of that but after that it's an auspicious start but since then i took over the morning drive which is the sign-on duties a few years later and continued that until 2001 back then uh and we went through a number of different changes mike walton who's over my shoulder there had purchased the station in 1972 and owned that till the mid-80s when it was sold to a group called central states broadcasting out of chicago they owned us for a couple of years and then mike walton bought the operation back and he eventually sold that to duke right which is an operator duke right is out of wasa and owns a group of over 40 stations located throughout the midwest so we're a member of that group right now back in 2001 i uh when duke bought the station i was offered a position which is called creative services director so my duties right now are to write and produce and schedule the commercials for our four stations whbl and our fm stations which are wbfm wxcr and whbc so my day right now is uh mostly spent behind a computer doing audio productions a far cry from the days and i don't think too many people still do radio like it was back in the day where you would be a person behind the microphone and you'd have a telephone a couple of record turn tables a couple of tape playback machines and basically you were responsible for every second of the day that's what i said in a little article i wrote for the event today that during those times if you asked me what i was doing on a wednesday at 945 in the morning i could tell you exactly what i was doing because i had to know and there was no second uncovered uh it makes for a rather quick day and a very interesting day radio was always one of the best jobs i can imagine having for information because the news of the world would come through there is your job to get it from the sources and pass it along to the listeners it could have been something as mundane as uh there was a wreck on a street corner and that would be closed off for a while or it could be big events uh when i was on the air things like the pulpit being shot ronald reagan getting shot the hostage taking in iran uh mount st helens erupting huge the the space shuttle uh columbia all these events you can recall having been behind the microphone when the word got out there's a big event we're going to be covering this now and so everything from the mundane to the spectacular would come through and as a result of the repetition it would stick in the mind there was a program i did for many years called party line which is sort of like a domestic information program people would call up with a question and if i didn't have the answer uh we'd get the answer from somebody and i made an assembly of teeny little notes that i kept in a note box eventually i could go through alphabetically recall that and pull out my little teeny slip of paper that had the solution to the problem so i did that for many years and it became second nature uh radio isn't the same anymore nobody does quite that sort of uh long sequence of programs of a variety like we had back then everything now is much more specialized there's a lot more syndication so the business has changed quite a bit i've been fortunate to have spent what i consider uh much of the heyday of radio of those programs the interactive local where you had a lot of people uh to talk to and uh deal with uh during maybe the best years of that i enjoyed that very much and now that i'm writing and producing the commercials my time pressure isn't quite the same i don't have to have something ready every second of the day but boy i've sure got to have the product ready for the next day so it's still a very uh stimulating and interesting business i'm margaret goldman my mother was the milla shek they called her milla and she's saying had a program on whbl when i was small was the early 1930s i don't have a date but i know that uh the man who became my stepfather and i would walk down to the press station because the studio was above the whbl was above the press and we would walk down and wait for my mother's program to be done and she'd come down the stairs and we'd go home and i once in a while we could listen to her on the radio but she used to sing uh some of the newer songs she had worked at the fisher city news depot on north eighth street where part of the nemshaw building now stands and she worked there and when new sheet music came in she would play it and sing it so that when customers came in and wanted to know what the music sounded like she would do that well then mr fisher got her into singing and going to the whbl to put on about a 15 minute program and so she would take some of this newer music and play it and sing it so that people could you know could hear what it sounded like and she did this for a number of years and she signed off every program by singing good night sweetheart which was made famous by rooty valley back in the 1930s i still have the sheet music so it is interesting but i had to come and see what things were like so how long she sang for how many years are all i have no way of knowing because as a little child who was interested in all of this stuff so i never asked them but i had to come down here today just to kind of reminisce and remembering that she did sing on whbl