At times in the late 1950s, it seemed that the little stone farmhouse on Brookville Road marked the precise divide between the old and new worlds of broadcasting. In one studio, for example, were the props of WWDC's morning man, Art Brown. These included several caged canaries and an organ. Brown, a large, rumpled gray haired lump of a voice, would alternate current recordings with traditional tunes -- which he played on the organ accompanied by the canaries. Years later he would reveal -- or claim -- that he could control when the birds would sing because they would only warble in the key of A flat.
Brown had already been in radio for 25 years when I met him and had enough clout to get away with refusing to play rock and roll. If a listener called to complain, he would point out that there were 16 other spots on the dial.
Meanwhile, however, the commercials for this archaic program were stored in experimental tape cartridges that WWDC engineers were helping to develop. Every 30 or 60 seconds of advertising had its own continuous play cartridge that could be simply slipped into a machine and started on cue -- an immense improvement over tapes that needed to be rewound and manually lined up.
In the late fifties WWDC was the area's top rated station, but it maintained this status with substantial help from the exclusive broadcast rights to the Washington Senators games. Absent baseball, WWDC dropped to second or third in evening listening, behind WTOP and WRC, although keeping its lead in the daytime.
The new single format radio hadn't quite reached Brookville Road. While WWDC was known as a top-40 station, emphasizing the two score most popular records of the day, it still pursued a relentless eclecticism ranging from singing canaries to the most modern local radio news operation in town. And while we were expected to write our newscasts with journalistic dignity, it was also true that on my arrival each morning, I would be greeted not only by Art Brown's birds but by a jingle that chirped: "Good morning to you in the land of the free This is Washington's Double-U, Double-U DC . . . May your skies above all be sunny and blue WWDC says good morning to you! Good morning, good morning, good. . . [fade]"
For such reasons, WWDC was sometimes known as Bubbly Bubbly DC. The song had come from a jingle house, one of the new parasites of the business -- a firm that provided stations with customized musical fillers. Knowing that the same jingle, slightly reworked, was being used by stations all over the country was a reminder of the illusions one could create in a medium where no one saw what you were doing.
There were many new illusions being created in those days. The radio contest, for example, was coming into its own, contests like the one in which new dollar bills were placed in circulation each week with a payoff every time the announced serial numbers were matched. Taxi drivers would keep lists of the serial numbers attached to their visors; clerks taped them next to the cash register. There was also an insidious contest in which the winner was whoever correctly counted the number of times the station's call letters had been mentioned in a two hour period.
Between about a dozen commercials every half hour, WWDC played its songlist, inserting more traditional music after every third or fourth current hit. Although such programming clearly pleased the audience, surveys confirmed what some observers suspected, namely that the new radio was appealing to an easily influenced but small segment of the population: the record-buying teenager. Stations thus were not only deceiving themselves but their advertisers since sponsors were trying to sell things a teenager would never buy. Someone described radio at the time as "a bunch of 12-year-olds trying to keep up with a 14-year-old audience."
A few years after I left WWDC that description fell apart. As Beatles Again explains:
15-year-old Marsha Albert of Silver Spring, MD, viewed The Beatles performing "She Loves You" on the CBS news and like what she saw and heard. Marsh wrote a letter to her favorite radio station, WWDC, referring to The Beatles' appearance on the news and asking, "Why can't we have this music in America?" DJ Carroll James, who also had seen The Beatles on the news, arranged to have a copy of the group's latest British single, "I Want to Hold Your Hand", delivered to him by the BOAC airline.
On Dec. 17, 1963, exactly one week after the CBS broadcast, James had Marsha Albert come down to the station to introduce the song on his radio show.. . According to James, the station's switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree with eager listeners phoning in to praise the song. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was immediately added to WWDC's playlist and placed in heavy rotation.
It didn't take long for Capitol to learn that a Washington station had jumped the gun by playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" four weeks prior to its scheduled release date of Jan. 13, 1964. Capitol telephoned WWDC and requested that the single be pulled off the air, but the station refused. Capitol then hired New York entertainment attorney Walter Hofer, who represented Epstein, The Beatles and the song's publisher, to contact the station and demand that WWDC "cease and desist" playing the song. According to Hofer, James told him, "Look, you can't stop me from playing it. The record is a hit. It's a major thing."
Realizing that they could not stop WWDC from playing the record and believing that this was an isolated incident that would not spread elsewhere, Capitol decided to press a few thousand copies of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to send to the Washington area.
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| FRED FISKE INTERVIEWS TAB HUNTER [Washingtoniana Division, DC Public Library, Washington Post] |
Jack Rowzie had a mellower, almost ministerial voice, drove a pastel purple Mercury convertible, ended his show with a hymn or gospel number and, whenever I hopped a ride with him, spoke of the need to turn to Christ. Years later, when Jack was 84, we talked on the phone about the old days. About fifteen minutes into the conversation, Jack asked, "Now what I really want to know, Sam, is what you're doing for the Lord."
I hadn't run into anyone like that before. Nor like Steve Allison, "the man who owns midnight." Allison was a pioneer of the radio talk show. In Boston, and then Philadelphia and now Washington, Allison had set up in a restaurant late in the evening, and interviewed stars coming out of their shows or the politicians trying to stay in office. My father had been one of his guests. He
began at WWDC the summer I arrived.
Allison had left Boston under a cloud and Philadelphia after an indictment. I had read in the Boston papers how Allison and nine others had been charged with participation in a vice ring involving teen age girls as young as 15.
When Allison arrived at WWDC, I introduced myself as my father's son. Allison grabbed my arm and pulled me into the empty hall. "Look," he said for openers, "all I did was put my cock in the mouth of some under-aged girls. Show me a guy who hasn't done that and I'll show you a queer."
Together it created a curious blend of the traditional and the contemporary, the sentimental and the cynical. But then Washington radio had always been a bit different -- ever since a local morning man named Arthur Godfrey started making fun of his advertisers on the air. At least one of them, a furrier named Zlotnik, the man to see "when your wife is cold," became famous mainly as a result of Godfrey's comments about the dirty stuffed bear in front of his store.
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