Joel Rubin wrote:
On 23 Feb 2005 03:24:41 GMT, "Blue Cat" wrote:
There are some that I came upon:
WGY 810 kHz, Schenectady, NY "G" for General Electric, "Y" last letter in
Schenectady.
KGO 810 kHz, San Francisco, CA "G" for GE, "O" last letter in San
Francisco. GE owned both stations many years ago.
WROW 590 kHz, Albany, NY "Row!" (like a dog growling) "Watchdog of the
Capital District".
WPTR 1540 kHz, Albany, NY (back in the 1960s), Patroon Broadcasting Corp.
WROV 1240 kHz, Roanoke, VA (back before 1990s) "RO" for Roanoke, "V" for
Virginia.
WSLS 610 kHz, Roanoke, VA (Before 1980), Shenandoah Life (insurance) Station
WQBA 1140 kHz, Miami, FL (Spanish speaking) Q, pronounced "coo", BA as in
"bah". Said together, it is "Cuba" as said in Spanish.
WEAF (later WNBC, WRCA and WFAN) was next in sequence after the call
letters that the FCC originally offered and the owners rejected -
WDAM.
WEVD (now WEPN) stood for Eugene V. Debs, the labor union leader who
helped found the Socialist Party and was jailed for criticizing World
War I.
WCFL (I'm not sure what that is now) was Chicago Federation of Labor
The WCFL refered to above is now WMVP and is owned by ABC and is
ESPN Radio
WLS (then owned by Sears) was the World's Largest Store
Also in Chicago, there is WMBI, Moody Bible Institute
WGN which stands for Worlds Greatest Newspaper (Chicago Tribune)
WIND does not stand for Windy City, but stands for Indiana where it was
first licensed.
Downstate in Champaign-Urbana, IL there is WILL which is licensed to the
University of Illinois and stands for Illinois.
In South Bend Indiana WSBT stands for South Bend Tribune and
WNDU (now only TV) stands for Notre Dame University who owns it
through a commercial subsidiary.
KYW doesn't stand for anything but it has an interesting migratory
history, having originated in Chicago, then Philadelphia, Cleveland
and back to Philadelphia.
WJZ is another call associated with AT&T and Westinghouse which has
done some migration. Originally the NBC Blue Network (later ABC) call
in New York, it is now the call for the Westinghouse (later CBS) TV
station in Baltimore.
I don't think you can actually buy a call from one station to use on
another station but Ted Turner bribed the MIT student radio station
WTBS (Technology Broadcasting System) to change its call to WMBR so
that the call WTBS would become available to his TV station.
Also, are there any sets of calls in which the AM/FM and TV stations
are hundreds of miles apart other than for KCBS?
There is an AM & FM in Michigan that are about 175 miles apart.
WKLZ-AM, Kalamazoo and WKLZ-FM, Petosky. They are not commonly owned.
KCBS is in San Francisco. KCBS-TV (originally KNXT, from KNX for the
Los Angeles Evening Express) and KCBS-TV are in Los Angeles.
Early call letters and their meanings can be found at the top of the
page at Jeff Miller's Broadcasting History site at
http://members.aol.com/jeff560/jeff.html
Charlie
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