I used to write for newspapers, when they were ink on paper, and people cut out what you wrote and folded it into their wallets or stuck it between the pages of their Bibles.
There was permanence in that, and still these years later I hear from folks who come across an old clipping from their glory days or their saddest days, and hold that link in their hands and in their hearts.
But radio’s not like that.
Radio is right now. It is a stream of electrons, blasted through the air or bounced off a satellite or wifi’ed into your Alexa. It’s a medium of the moment that sears and fades and lingers, if at all, as a general sense, a feeling, a reverie. There are no clippings, only memories, not ink on paper, but impressions on the mind.
In radio, you don’t look back, you just speed forward.
So being retrospective is hard, over these 100 years, since WHAM radio in Rochester, New York, signed on. Nineteen twenty-two was the great pioneering year for American commercial radio. Less than 18 months since the first station crackled to life, the cities on the nation’s technological and economic frontiers unleashed miracles of their own, in town after town, with Rochester taking its rightful place in the fore of radio’s high-tech wave.
To me, a lot of that is mumbo jumbo. I’ve seen pictures of giant microphones and musicians in cowboy hats, announcers in suits and ties and schedules that looked like a night at the opera. Stories about George Eastman and a succession of call letters, 50,000 watts and 38 states and Canada, and people from Finland writing in for QSL cards. It all looks like it would make an interesting museum exhibit.
But for me, it’s always been a top-and-bottom-of-the-hour thing, a listen-to-my-friends thing, a schedule around which I built my day.
Like in the Army in Indiana, going out to the car in the parking lot next to post housing in the evening to hope for a clear signal and a newscast and some place names from home. Some few years later coming through the Can of Worms, hurrying to an appointment, to catch Dean Edell and then some new guy named Rush Limbaugh. Driving home and being certain to be in the car and on the way in time to catch The Rest of the Story at 5:35, and then, drifting off at night, with Allan Harris complaining about something or the other.
For me, WHAM has always been a friend, a companion on the radio, and now, Clay and Buck and Joe and Joe on the app, little voices of familiarity and common sense and news. The doings of the day and the spirit of the place.
And, for me, for about 30 years, it has been a work home, a place to hang with friends on the other side of the microphone. It started as a stunt, a way to make a good impression on my mother. She didn’t care I wrote a newspaper column but she did listen to talk radio, late at night from Boston, and I thought it would be fun to fill in on the radio for her to hear. So I pestered the program director to let me come on, and he did and I did and it wasn’t that bad. So I kept at it, when the regular host took days off. And then he was gone and I filled in for most of a year while they searched for his replacement. When the replacement flopped, I got the nod, and on January 3, 1995, I started fulltime.
It was a staff of giants and a schedule brilliantly executed. I marveled to be around the people I still listened to as a fan. Beth and Chet and the two Bills, the great Bob Matthews, a string of newsmen and women, people like Dave McKinley and Bob Longo, Sheri Smith and too many others to remember or list, a parade of great people in great moments in broadcasting.
I’ve watched it all, and seen the changes, in the town and at the station, new worlds and new realities. New days and new opportunities. Various bosses and various owners, but always one station and one town and one ethic, to tell the story and to tell it first and best. To be dependable and trusted. That’s what WHAM has been as long as I’ve known, and that is what WHAM is today.
And that is a rare thing in American radio.
WHAM has a live, local morning news show. It has a live, local talk show. It has a live, local evening news show. It has newscasts at the top and bottom of every hour. It has a series of live, local weekend shows. It truly is what it has been for 100 years: The voice or Rochester.
And it truly is what it has been for 100 years: The best place for advertisers to find the customers they need to prosper their businesses and the Rochester economy.
Today’s 100th birthday is a sweet milestone, but radio is a medium of the moment. And this moment is when we live and serve.
You can’t hold a radio broadcast in your hands, or put it in your scrapbook. But you can treasure it in your heart, and I am grateful for the place WHAM and Rochester have in one another’s hearts. It is a partnership, a pairing of broadcasters and listeners. It has been that way for a hundred years, and it will be that way for a hundred more.
On this centennial anniversary, we are what we have always been – Rochester’s first, biggest and best radio station.