Radio call letters: What do they mean?
 

On Fri, 1 Jul 2006 at 03:05 -0000, David Eduardo scribbled:
-Here is a link to hundreds of call letter meanings
-http://nelson.oldradio.com/origins.call-list.html

Thousands, not hundreds! That's a really big list! However,
many of the 'meanings' seem to be slogans that were probably adopted
after call letters were assigned.

One case warrants comment: Sure, the letters WNOP presumably
were derived from the city of Newport, Kentucky, to which the sta-
tion was licensed. But they didn't make any on-air use of this
acronymistic tie, at least not in the 35-plus years after they
adopted their famous wacky "format" of (mainstream) jazz and com-
edy cuts in 1961.

This was the radio station that reputedly served as the real-
life inspiration for the TV sitcom, "WKRP in Cincinnati." All
kinds of funny sayings, cuts from comedy records, and assorted noises
were broadcast from their base in Newport, across the river from
downtown Cincinnati. In fact, for many years in the '70s and '80s
WNOP's studios were *IN* the Ohio river! -- floating in the river,
which happens to be almost completely "owned" by the state of Ken-
tucky.

One of their wacky trademarks was a collection of station IDs
recorded by comedian Shelley Berman, where the letters WNOP would
stand for crazy things like (for example) "Where Nobody Oversizes
Potatoes." They used many variations, but never something so dull as
merely saying "This is WNOP, which by the way, stands for Newport."
This was, after all, a station dedicated to the offbeat, the true
hipsters, the 'real' original, laid-back counter-culture. It was
cool when cool was still cool. It was where the put-on was normal.
This was a station with its own recorded sign-off song which ended
with the line, [we] "...hope you... don't... die... tonite!" and then
after a pause, "from Doubleyou... Enn... Oh... Peee... NEW-PORT!!"

(No complaints about bad taste, please. Their resident copy-
writer, who went by the handle of Bunky Tadwell, might've read your
complaint on the air, no doubt accompanied with sarcastic barnyard
sound effects, and said you just don't "get it.")

WNOP is gone now. RIP both 1950s' slang and Newport's legendary
Jazz Ark. After the longtime owner passed away it was sold off and
now there's a religious station on its 740 AM channel. Slogans and
all, it will be missed.
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david moeser -- erasmus39 on yahoo
Censornati, Ohio - USA
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* "DSFA" = Doesn't Stand For Anything! *