This audio from KNFB in Nowata (Oklahoma) will bring a smile or make you grind your teeth depending on your experiences with small market radio.

The occasion turned out to be my last field trip for Harris. Along with a few others, I was installing a MicroMac audio console and doing some other upgrades to this station that was hoping to grab a share of the audience in the larger market of Bartlesville.

The MicroMac was an analog console that employed a microprocessor (8085 if I recall correctly) for handling all its functions. The slide pots were actually linear encoders. Gain adjustment or switching was passed through the processor instead of being done directly. The console would occasionally require a reset to restore operation. The MicroMac never caught on very well in the broadcast industry but was probably a good learning experience for the committee that designed it.

The microprocessor operated air console represented a big change for the folks at Nowata as is evidenced by the first portion of the audio clip. The “Swap Shop” excerpts that follow were produced in the older facilities of the station while we were doing the wiring of the various upgrades.

KNFB Nowata OK 30-17 September 1983

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Here is another blast from the past. This is eighteen minutes and forty-four seconds of radio dramamercial for TM Productions of Dallas (Texas.) If you were involved with radio programming during that time you are likely to recognize the characters and situations from the scenes scripted here. (If not the production might be quite boring.) Tomorrow Radio is where the radio format “punk country” was first described.

Things were different in 1978. The Harris radio program automation system was powered by an Intel 8080 processor. Cetec Schafer had introduced their terminal operated system a little later and were using the Zilog Z80. MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) was not to be established for another ten years. Program sources were largely reel to reel tape decks loaded with music tracks on 10 – 1/2 inch reels. Start and stop of tracks was marked by “sub-audible” tones. Commercials were aired from tape cartridges that had a separate cue track for start, stop, and EOM (end of message ) tones. The microprocessor controlled switches that started and stopped these mechanical players and placed the audio on the program output bus.

TM Productions/Century 21 was one of the major players  in programming for this sort of second generation radio program automation. They shipped the large reels of recorded music to stations around the country – replacing them as material was added to or removed from the playlist. It all seems so incredibly inefficient now.

Tomorrow_Radio_TM_Productions_1978_18-44

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As I was collecting some notes on this bit of treasure, I ran across a better quality copy of this parody of the NBC “We’re Proud” marketing campaign song. What’s posted here does not have the flaws present in my 30+ year old cassette dub.

The musicians are the same as on the “We’re Proud” version that aired on the NBC television network around 1980. The copy I had been storing was from a radio network feed that went out between a couple of early morning  news and actuality feeds. The parody version was aired just once by Don Imus which prompted Fred Silverman to order the collection and destruction of all copies of this one minute of audio. The distribution was far too wide by then for this to happen.

A Google search of Fred Silverman will get you all the background if you don’t have your own memory of television in that era.

We’re Loud

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This audio clip, about seven and one-half minutes, requires a bit of explanation. The easiest explanation is that it is the South Milwaukee equivalent of Firesign Theater.

Stan’s adventures were a regular feature found on Jeff Peterson’s mid-day air shift on WQFM in Milwaukee (Wisconsin.) Jeff was known as Mr. Midday. Tom Hooper was a well known television personality on Storer station WITI-TV, who worked to solve problems pointed out by channel 6 viewers in a program called Contact 6. In this bit of radio drama, Stan Lubowski (sp?) performs the same sort of service for a ‘QFM radio listener. The accent and speech is that of Milwaukee’s “sout’ side, hey.”

Contact_Stan_7-31_20-Apr-84

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