Haverhill High School Intern
Covers Local Sports at WHAV
Hear Camilo Gil’s Reports Thursdays During Local News

Juan C. “Camilo” Gil, a Haverhill High School senior, is interning this term in WHAV’s Edwin V. Johnson Newsroom. He is learning about news writing, broadcasting and announcing.

Gil, 17, son of Margarita Mosquera and Hernan Gil, also appears on air every Thursday when he provides a preview of upcoming games at and between area high schools.

“I got started in communications myself as a Haverhill High School senior, interning at WHAV in 1978. It seems fitting to extend that opportunity to another student,” said WHAV President and General Manager Tim Coco. “It is also quite appropriate that Camilo works in the newsroom that bears the name of Edwin V. Johnson, a long-time Haverhill High School instructor and WHAV news director who passed away in 2003,” Coco said.

Gil is participating in Access 21, an enrichment program designed to provide learning opportunities that will help to address high school, college and workforce readiness and success. Courses are taught by professional educators from Haverhill High and qualified personnel recruited from the community.

Gil became interested in sports broadcasting when he broke his ankle in 2008 while playing for Haverhill Pals. The injury prevented him from playing for the Haverhill Hillies Soccer Team, and he sought another outlet for his enthusiasm. Last June, he returned to the game playing for Seacoast United Soccer Club, a Newburyport-based traveling team.

He was born in Ibague, Colombia, and came to Haverhill in 2005. He also works at Joseph’s Trattoria of Haverhill.

The WHAV call letters have been associated with local broadcasting since 1947. WHAV is today operated by Public Media of New England Inc., a not-for-profit corporation. Since 2004, the call has served the Merrimack Valley’s pioneer Internet radio station at WHAV.net and a number of public access cable television stations in Andover, Haverhill and Methuen, and Plaistow and Sandown, N.H. The station is also heard over AM 1640 in northern Haverhill and Plaistow, N.H.

To listen, or for more information, visit www.whav.net.

Seventy-Third Anniversary of Panic ‘War of the Worlds’ Broadcast Oct. 30
Orson Welles Broadcast Brought Mass Panic in 1938

WHAV airs radio’s most famous broadcast, “War of the Worlds,” Sunday, Oct 30 – 73 years to the day it sent the nation into panic.

Orson Welles and “The Mercury Theater on the Air” based the play on the 1898 novel by H. G. Wells. However, the radio version used simulated news bulletins to announce the Martian invasion of Earth. The result was widespread panic as many Americans fled their homes to escape the Martian “death ray.”

Locally, The Boston Globe reported one woman “claimed she could ‘see the fire’ and said she and many others in her neighborhood were ‘getting out of here.’”

The author of the original 1898 novel, H.G. Wells, was still living during the time of the broadcast. From London, he told Time magazine:

“It was implicit in the agreement that it was to be used as fiction and not news. I gave no permission whatever for alterations that might lead to belief that it was real news.”

WHAV broadcasts the full one-hour “War of the Worlds” program Sunday, Oct. 30 at 10 p.m. It will also be repeated three hours later at 1 a.m.

Classic radio dramas from the 1950s and 1960s are heard at 10 p.m. and 1 a.m., seven-days-a-week. The programs are Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, Sunday; Suspense, Monday; X Minus One, Tuesday; Great Gildersleeve, Wednesday; Our Miss Brooks, Thursday; The Couple Next Door, Friday; and Gunsmoke, Saturday.