So I’m sitting at home, watching the Halifax Rainmen play the Rochester Razorsharks in a streaming online video feed from the Premier Basketball League, when I saw an e-mail in my personal account.
And talk about a shock.ย A blast from the past.
Walt Adams, one of the deans of broadcasting in the Capital District, wants me to be part of his radio show this week.ย And it’s all based on a post I wrote in this blog.
For those of you who haven’t read my column of late, from 1987 to 1988 I was an on-line personality at Schenectady’s top 40 radio station, 3WD.ย WWWD, Schenectady, live from Center City and all.ย I even blogged about it a few months ago.
Well, apparently Walt Adams got a hold the blog.ย And he’s asked me to join his radio show this week, which took me all of about 3 1/2 seconds to say heck yeah, that’d be great!
And the kicker is – Walt Adams’ morning radio show is on WVKZ – which shares the same Schenectady 1240am frequency as did 3WD so many years ago.
Some background.ย What was once 3WD actually began as WSNY in the mid-1940’s.ย By the mid-1970’s, it revamped itself into a Top 40 “hot hits” station with the call letters WWWD.ย In 1988, the station and a sister FM station were rebranded WVKZ, and were one of the first stations in the area to have their entire programming delivered via a remote satellite location.ย It may ahve sounded like a DJ was in that tiny Center City studio; it was in fact being fed from a location in Houston.
Eventually WVKZ bounced through several different formats – country, sports, beautiful music – today it’s part of the “True Oldies” network, and you can hear the station streaming through your computer – a far cry from the 1980’s, when the tiny AM signal could barely be heard in Schenectady County.ย It’s also owned by the Anastos Group, a company that also owns WABY in Albany (the station where “Pick-a-Show” host David Allan works as an on-air personality).
So the plan is for me to call in Wednesday morning, some time between 6am and 9am on Walt Adams’ morning radio show.ย I look forward to talking with Walt about the old days at 3WD and reminiscing about broadcast radio in the Capital District.
Let’s put it this way – 3WD wasn’t WKRP in Cincinnati, but you could have written a few episodes based on antics at the station and nobody would have questioned it.
Chuck The Writer 
Great…now Chuck gets to talk about himself on the radio, too. Yawn.
When does Woo Hoo get a TU blog?
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Writing about memorizing Wikipedia isn’t as captivating as reading Chuck write about talking about himself.
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It’s more like this. Working in broadcast radio was something I dreamed about as a kid. I thought it would be so cool to go on the radio and play records and talk to everybody over the air. Then I actually did it for a year and it was absolutely NOTHING like what you would imagine. But it was still a chance to take, because if you’ve only got one life upon this earth, you gotta take every chance you possibly can.
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I listened to WVKZ when they first switched to the oldies format, strictly 50’s & 60’s. The problem I had with them was no DJ’s. No identifying records and artists. But things got really bad when they “outsourced” to some “streaming radio” thing. I stopped listening. With a local presence in Walt Adams I can at least listen in the morning. Hopefully it is still a 50’s & 60’s format. Otherwise it’s just an AM WTRY. And that ain’t a good thing.
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Back in the mid 80’s, I took a non-credit raadio class at SCCC, taught by Mike Harris- started me on a long love-hate re;ationship with working in broadcast. Best times of my life. Back them, 3WD was on Liberty St.
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