[BC] OLD WABC 860 in Wayne NJ; WJZ 760 in Bound Brook NJ

[Dan Strassberg]

When I said that the OLD WABC might have had its transmitter near Bound
Brook, I was groping for the name of the town (Wayne) and couldn't remember
it--but I DID remember Bound Brook, which was home to WJZ (which later took
the WABC calls almost a decade after moving to Lodi and seven years after
what is now WCBS gave them up). I haven't looked at a map, but IIRC, Bound
Brook is pretty far south of New York City, far enough that even a 50-kW
station on 760 with a half-wave tower would not deliver a very impressive
signal to all five boroughs--especially to the Bronx, where I grew up (in
the borough's northwest corner) during the '40s. Isn't Bound Brook just a
few miles from Zeraphath, which was home to WAWZ, the 1380 station that
shared time with (then) WBNX? By the time I became aware of WAWZ, it had
pretty good facilities for a noncommercial (religious) share-timer (5-kW-S
DA-2, IIRC). WAWZ had a really rotten signal in the part of the Bronx where
I lived (just a few miles from Maj Armstrong's Alpine Tower, which I could
plainly see from my bedroom window). The poor signal might have been at
least partly a consequence of the directional patterns. The distance (~40
miles, IIRC) as well as the patterns and the high frequency all entered into
it, but I think that 50 kW ND from a half-wave tower on 760 could deliver
only an OK signal (my guess: about 5 mV/m) to my QTH. I remember that a huge
amount of hoopla surrounded the WJZ Tx move. There were "car cards" in the
subways and buses shortly after NARBA advertising WJZ--now louder, clearer
att 770 on the dial--and the station made a lot of it on the air. Without
question, WJZ's Tx move dramtically improved the siignal where I lived. The
next time I remember anything like that happening in New York radio, was
when WINS, then just recently acquired by Powell Crosley, increased its day
power to 50 kW (it remained 10 kW at night for a couple of years). Crosley
set up a feed from co-owned WLW and a few programs made their way from "the
Nation's Station" to the Big Apple. (Was it yet known as the Big apple in
those days?) One of the programs was hosted by the woman who wrote the
perennial Christmas favorite, "Here Comes Santa Claus." She later tried to
emulate her own success with "Here Comes Peter Cottontail," but it wasn't
nearly as successful. I guess you could say that, relatively speaking, the
Easter bunny song, umm, laid an egg.

--
Dan Strassberg, dan.strassberg at att.net
eFax 707-215-6367