In This Issue
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Network Radio’s Last Day 53 Years Ago
WHAV Submits FM Radio Application
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Program
Highlights
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Open Mike Show
Tim Coco is host of the
more than 50-year staple of democracy, Open Mike Show. The
two-hour program is also seen on WHAV.TV.
The program is brought
to you by Northern Essex Community
College, Merrimack Valley
Economic Development Council and generous listeners.
Mondays, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Community Spotlight
Someone You Know is on
WHAV! Merrimack Valley non-profit organizations are invited to submit
news of events, fundraising appeals and other community calendar
announcements. Use the form on the News
page
to submit your information. Only local radio can bring you this level
of public service, but only WHAV does.
15 past every
hour.
Wave Weather
The Boston media
doesn’t always understand unique Valley weather conditions. Acclaimed
WHAV Meteorologists Rob Carolan and Gary Best and the rest of the team
provide Merrimack Valley’s most accurate weather forecasts every half
hour, 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week.
Every 30 minutes.
Democracy
Now is an award-winning investigative news magazine highlighting a
grassroots perspective and efforts to ignite democracy. Hosted by Amy
Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, the program pioneers the largest community
media collaboration in the United States. Interviews take place with
politicians, celebrities, muckrakers, academics, artists and “just
folks.”
Thom
Hartmann is the nation’s top progressive radio talk show host,
according to Talkers Magazine, and is listed among the trade
publication’s “Heaviest Hundred: the 100 most important radio talk show
hosts of all time.” He is a four-time Project Censored-award-winning,
New York Times best-selling author of 22 books in 17 languages on five
continents.
Produced by Dr. Michio
Kaku, Explorations in Science features news and interviews with leading
scientists on science, technology, politics and the environment.
The David Pakman Show
is a news and political talk program, known for controversial
interviews with political and religious extremists, liberal and
conservative politicians and other guests. The show, which has been
involved in a number of controversies involving challenges to
homophobic and racist
guests, focuses on the politics and news of the day, technology and
energy development, business, religion and other topics.
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Listen Anywhere
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Web
WHAV.net
WHAV.TV (Open
Mike Show only)
WHAV.org
Cable TV
•
Andover: Channel 8
• Haverhill: Channel 22
• Methuen, Channels 8 + 22 (Comcast) &
32* (Verizon Fios)
• Plaistow,
Channel 17
• Sandown, Channel 17
* Methuen
Channel 32 is heard statewide in communities with Verizon Fios cable
television service.
A special thanks to the
boards, management, staffs and members of the public access television
stations above for bringing not-for-profit WHAV to those without
Internet access! If you would like to hear WHAV on your cable
television system, call your cable company or public access station.
For more information, call (978) 374-2111.
Radio
1640 AM
Cell Phone
Visit www.WHAV.net with your smartphone and be automatically directed to a page specially formatted for your small screen.
About WHAV
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.
Public Media of New
England, Inc.
WHAV
189 Ward Hill Ave.
Haverhill, MA 01835
Business Office: (978) 374-2111
On-Air Line: (978) 374-1900
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Share Your Memories of Radio Drama on Open Mike Show
Network Radio’s Last Day 53 Years Ago
By Tim Coco
President & General Manager (volunteer)
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Amos & Andy |
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Ma Perkins |
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The Couple Next Door |
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Irna Phillips, soap creator |
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The Second Mrs. Burton |
Almost anyone in America who was alive and old enough to remember knows where he or she was Nov. 25, 1963—the day of President John F. Kennedy’s funeral. Do they remember, however, the same day three years earlier?
Most of what we now know as old-time radio came to an end on the CBS radio network 53 years ago when several soap operas and the venerable Amos and Andy Show aired their final episodes. A discussion of “Network Radio’s Last Day” takes place during the Open Mike Show, beginning at 6:30 p.m., Monday, Nov. 25. The program includes audio from each of the shows cancelled that day more than a half century before.
“This is our 7,065th broadcast, and I want to thank you all for being so loyal all these years . . . If you write to me, I'll try to answer all your letters. Goodbye and may God bless you,” Virgina Payne, star of the soap Ma Perkins, told listeners.
Besides Ma Perkins, the serials were The Couple Next Door, Right to Happiness, Whispering Streets, Young Dr. Malone and The Second Mrs. Burton. The Couple Next Door, starring Massachusetts resident Peg Lynch, still airs in reruns on WHAV Friday nights at 10 and early Saturday mornings at 1 a.m.
Ma Perkins was the longest running of the soap operas—so named for their sponsorships by detergent companies. The show had been on the air since 1933 and Payne made sure to provide her listeners with that heartwarming goodbye. She invited them to write to her
at the simple address of “Ma Perkins, Orleans, Massachusetts.”
Don Page, Los Angeles Times radio columnist, wrote “CBS is going to rub out a nice, little old lady.” Payne told him, “We just finished doing the 7,000th broadcast. I can’t believe it will end. It is one of the last bits of Americana left.”
The Right to Happiness and Young Dr. Malone both ended after 21 years, The Second Mrs. Burton after 14 years and Whispering Streets after 8 years. Interestingly, the original Dr. Jerry Malone was played by Alan Bunce. At the time of the CBS cancellations, he starred opposite Peg Lynch on The Couple Next Door. The Couple Next Door began on CBS in 1957, but had its roots in Ethel and Albert, a radio program dating back to the 1940s.
Dr. Malone, played by Sandy Becker since 1947, also read a sentimental farewell.
Drama Fades as DJ’s Role Brightens
The year 1960 began with CBS championing its radio line-up. As the months passed, CBS slowly began scrapping its dramatic programs. The soap opera, the Romance of Helen Trent, ended June 24, 1960. Trent sets out to show “when life mocks her, breaks her hopes, dashes her against the rocks of despair; fights back bravely, successfully, to prove what so many women long to prove, that because a woman is 35 or more, romance in life need not be over, that romance can begin at 35.” Or, at least until mid-1960.
By summer, Bob & Ray, Andy Griffith and Burns & Allen would also be axed. As fall approached, CBS was under pressure from local stations to give them more airtime for local programs, especially the now-popular and lucrative radio disc jockey formats.
“It is understood the proposed changes were initiated by stations affiliated with the CBS network. Many affiliates believe airtime they now allot to certain network programs can be utilized more profitable through local programing,” according to the New York Times, Aug. 11, 1960. The Times suggested more than 50 radio actors, directors, writers and producers would lose their jobs.
When CBS finally decided to cut the remaining serials, writers were faced with a deadline for wrapping up their complicated plots. The producers and writers promised logical endings. The Los Angeles Times reported:
“The dramatis personae will not simply be hustled into a bus and driven off the nearest cliff. Old debts will be paid, marriages performed and families reconciled. ‘The Right to Happiness’ will be unequivocally reaffirmed. After three decades of trouble and grief, the public is entitled to at least this much. Organ music, up and out.”
The Right to Happiness was a spinoff from The Guiding Light. Both were the inventions of Irna Phillips. Over 43 years, she would create or co-create 18 radio and television serials, including As the World Turns, Another World and Days of Our Lives.
Whispering Streets was a melodrama with a twist. One of its hosts was Bette Davis, playing storyteller Hope Winslow. Each installment presented a link to both the previous episode and a teaser to one or more characters in the next episode.
On The Couple Next Door, the finale reunited Peg Lynch and Alan Bunce with the Wicked Witch herself, Margaret Hamilton, who played Aunt Effie.
During the early evening, the long-running Amos and Andy series came to end. The show had been on the air in one form or another since 1928. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, Amos and Andy, said their good byes.
At the end of the show, Amos and Andy talked about a comeback. It would ultimately come in the form of the actors providing voices for a cartoon, “Calvin and the Colonel” the following year. It featured Colonel Montgomery J. Klaxon, a shrewd fox and Calvin T. Burnside, a dumb bear. Their lawyer was Oliver Wendell Clutch, who was a weasel, literally.
Do you remember these shows? Call the Open Mike Show Monday night and share your memories. The program is heard live at www.WHAV.net and seen at www.WHAV.tv and Haverhill Community Television Channel 22.
New FM Station Would Be Heard at 98.1 if FCC Approves
WHAV Submits FM Radio Application
WASHINGTON—Public Media of New England Inc., owner of Internet and cable radio station WHAV, submitted an application last week to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a new FM radio station at 98.1 MHz.
WHAV’s application is presumably one of thousands submitted during the first Low Power FM (LPFM) filing window opened by the FCC in 13 years. David J. Doherty of Skywaves Consulting Inc., Millbury, provided engineering services, while Howard M. Liberman and Lee G. Petro of Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP, Washington, provided legal representation.
“The restoration of hyperlocal radio service to Greater Haverhill is now another step closer to reality,” said Tim Coco, WHAV’s volunteer president and general manager. “For nearly 10 years, WHAV has provided programming 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week over the Internet and public access television stations throughout the Merrimack Valley and Southern New Hampshire. FM service will help WHAV reach many more residents, especially during emergency times.”
WHAV’s FM application comes nearly 70 years after pioneer plans for a FM station in the city were first proposed. In 1944, famed WOR broadcast engineer Jacob “J.R.” Poppele (pictured above) conducted a survey of possible FM radio sites in Haverhill. As it turns out, WHAV’s current engineer, Doherty, and his father both knew Poppele. A year later Frank I. McIntosh, who would develop the iconic McIntosh audio amplifier, provided engineering service for the proposed Haverhill station at 46.5 MHz.
“FM, relatively new in the realm of radio, was developed by Maj. E. H. Armstrong and is generally accepted by radio engineers, by the radio industry, and by persons who have heard FM broadcasts as superior to the familiar amplitude modulation type (AM),” The Haverhill Gazette newspaper reported at the time.
Haverhill’s implementation of FM, however, was stalled when the FCC moved the FM band to where it is today, forcing an AM station to be built instead in 1947. After establishment of WHAV-FM on the new band in 1948, a lack of radio receivers forced the closure of the station by 1953. WHAV-FM was revived in 1959, but ultimately the call letters were dropped and the city of license changed to Andover.
Besides Coco, members of the board of non-profit Public Media of New England Inc. are William D. Cox Jr., a Haverhill attorney, and Anita M. Purcell, a former banker and real estate broker.
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.
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