By Thomas Mulvoy, Jr.
October 3, 2004

I know that radio station WEEI took its call letters from the old Edison
Electric Illuminating Co. way back when. Do stations like WBZ and WNAC,
(which was a radio station, too, once), have any such corporate
connections? -- Mary L., Boston.

There's only one person to go to with your question, and she is Donna
Halper, a media historian and instructor in the Journalism Department at
Emerson College. Says Halper:

"Well, the short answer is some do have a unique history, but in Boston,
most do not. Back in the old days, before the FCC, the Department of
Commerce assigned the call letters, usually in sequential alphabetical
order. First, they had three letter calls, and when those ran out, they
moved to four letters, with W for stations in the east and K for the west.
Some call letters originally had belonged to ships at sea -- after the
tragedy of the Titanic, the Radio Act of 1912 said all ships had to have a
wireless station on board in case of emergencies. WBZ, for example, used to
belong to one of those ships in the era before commercial radio. Sometime in
the early 1920s, a few station owners asked the Department of Commerce to
give them special call letters that stood for a slogan. WGN in Chicago, for
one, was owned by the Chicago Tribune newspaper, which had as its slogan the
'World's Greatest Newspaper.'

"Although some myths have sprung up, WNAC in Boston (which went on the air
first as 'The Shepard Station' in late July 1922, owned by the Shepard
Department Stores and John Shepard III) didn't stand for anything. It was
assigned in alphabetical order (WNAA, WNAB, WNAC, etc).

"Greater Boston's first station, the pioneering WGI in Medford Hillside
(where Tufts College is) was sequentially assigned, too, also in 1922.
Before that, it used ham radio call letters, 1XE (the X stood for
experimental, because the government thought radio was going to be a fad).
The great old call letters of WBZ, which first went on the air in
mid-September of 1921 in Springfield, not Boston, didn't stand for anything,
either. And although the story exists that WHDH stood for 'We Haul Dead
Haddock' (the station originally went on the air in Gloucester), it, too,
was another set of call letters that didn't stand for anything in particular
when it was assigned in 1929.

Interestingly, the Gloucester station that was its predecessor did have call
letters that stood for something: The owners, the Matheson family of
Gloucester, originally went on the air in 1926 and requested the call
letters WEPS (for Ethel Pearl Stevenson, the maiden name of Mr. Matheson's
wife). Briefly, in 1927, there was a home shopping station (really!) in
Boston, owned by the Shepard Stores, and it used the requested call of WASN
(All Shopping News).

"In addition to WEEI, which was a requested call letter and did stand for
the original owners, Edison Electric Illuminating Co., there were others of
the same ilk. WNBH in New Bedford, for example, stood for the New Bedford
Hotel, where its studios used to be. Still, Ms. Halper said, most Greater
Boston stations just took whatever call letters the Commerce Department, the
Federal Radio Commission (after 1927), then the FCC (after 1934) handed out.

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