The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 319

Call Letters: Some Flew on Waves of Air Others Sank, We Know Not Where improvised and not the best quality. Programs were dependent upon the voluntary contributions of sometimes not-too-talented amateurs. Money was needed for Baltimore to benefit from the free radio publicity other cities were enjoying. The local broadcasting community was full of schemes to get financing. Contributions from the audience were suggested, so was subsidy by the city government.

Then, in the summer of 1925, the Consolidated Gas, Electric Light and Power Company of Baltimore announced it would build a "super station," professionally staffed, to help promote the name and fame of Baltimore to the fast-growing national radio audience. Thus, WBAL was born, using the first syllable of the city's name for call letters. Other stations followed this example in succeeding years: WMAR, WANN, WHAG, WTOW and WCUM. The last of Baltimore's "old-line" stations went on the air just before World War II. Thomas Garland Tinsley, scion of an old Baltimore family, had been working in New York radio in the 1930's when he decided to start a new station in his hometown.

He wanted call letters that would be easy to remember and came up with a word: WITH. After World War there came a deluge of new stations and a flood of new ways for them to choose their call letters. First, there were those that followed Tinsley's lead and used words. Frank Matrangalia, a Baltimore radio engineer, put WTOW on the air in 1955. Three years later he sold it to the Booth Broadcasting Group, which changed the letters to WAQE.

(It seems unlikely that this meant anything. If so, it's been a well-kept secret.) In applying for an FM station in 1958, Booth asked to use the call letters WYNS; but the station went on the air as WAQE-FM. When Robert Sudbrink bought the stations in 1970, he separated them: the AM station reverted to WTOW, the FM became WLIF. Some Baltimore stations use words for call letters that are based on names. There's WAYE, from the last syllable of the name of the first owner Guy Erway.

And WSID, from the nickname of its original licensee, Sidney Tinley. Richard Eaton, veteran area broadcaster, who now owns WSID, once had a TV station in Baltimore identified as WMET. His WSID-FM, which is now WLPL, was, for a brief period in the early Sixties, known as WYOU, another "word" By THOMAS II. O'CONNOR OU'RE listening to AM 86," 'This is Z-96," "98 Rock" or "Music 104." What's going on here? What happened? Didn't the names of all our stations used to start with a Relax! The "W's" are still there, but a new generation of managers believes these call letters more easily identify their stations for the knob-turning listeners. Some Baltimore stations have acquired their call letters after a series of "identification others have had the same letters since they first went on the air.

What these station identifications are goes back to the early days of radio. The first letter is assigned by international agreement so that a broadcast can quickly be identified by country of its origin. Canadian call letters start with Mexican ones with The Unites States has for stations east of the Mississippi and for stations west of it according to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) assignments. There are some exceptions. Obviously, you can't use the same set of letters assigned to another station.

And, although the FCC first gave out three letters, now four are required. At first a station had no choice; it had to take letters assigned to it by the U.S. Department of Commerce (under which the antecedents of the FCC operated). That's the way it was for Baltimore's first radio station when Caiman Zamoiski broadcast as WKC from his home on Madison avenue in 1922. The letters meant nothing and it had not yet occurred to anyone that they could or would.

Baltimore got its second and third stations in 1922, too. WEAR was operated by the Baltimore American, a daily paper (mornings and Sunday), then owned by Frank Munsey. Those four letters spelled a word, but it was always W-E-A-R, never "wear." WCAO also started in 1922. There's an apocryphal story and it was a favorite of Ted Phillips, whose roofing company was an early advertiser with a program of poetry readings and Hawaiian music. He insisted that C-A-0 stood for C.

A. Otten-heimer, because his "refrigeration company sponsored its broadcasts." It's a good story that they stand for Ot-tenheimer, but it didn't work that way for two reasons: one, the aforementioned as signment of letters and, more importantly, there were no advertisers when WCAO first went on the air. An unsubstantiated story surrounds the origins of the call letters of WCBM, which was licensed in 1924. Charles Purcell, the patriarch of Baltimore broadcasting, insists that those letters originally stood for "Where Christ Blesses Multitudes." He worked at the station when it was owned by Charles Swartz, who, he says, bought the original equipment from the Seventh Baptist Church for $750. It is assumed it had broadcast its services, but there's no record of the church ever having been a licensed operator.

FCC records clearly show that Mr. Swartz was the first licensee to use those letters, with studios at his Chateau Hotel at Charles street and North avenue. What WCBM's call does prove is that by 1924 the authorities and the licensees were accepting the idea that a station's identifying letters might stand for something. If WCBM doesn't have the religious connotation, it certainly could stand for "Chateau, Baltimore, Maryland." Another station went on the air in 1924 and its call letters were picked to mean something specific. The Jones Electric and Radio Manufacturing Company had sold hundreds of radio receivers and had installed the original equipment for WEAR.

Winters Jones decided to build bis own station. For call letters he chose WGBA, to match his new station's slogan: "Watch Greater Baltimore Advance." The station was rather short lived. When the Fifth Maryland Regiment went into broadcasting, it hand-picked its call letters, WFBR. Some have guessed they stood for William F. Broening, mayor of Baltimore in the 1920's, but actually they were an acronym for "World's First Broadcasting Regiment." By 1924 Baltimoreans were busy making crystal sets, adjusting make-shift antennas and marvelling at what they could hear through the static in their earphones.

Radio gave them, as it did to other Americans in other places, an awareness of the vastness and variety of their country. Baltimore listeners now "knew" people in Davenport, Atlanta, Kansas City, Nashville, Cincinnati and Schenectady places most of them had never seen and maybe never heard of before. That all this free fame and nationwide publicity was going to other cities and not to Baltimore disturbed some city leaders. Baltimore stations were low-powered (50 or 100 watts). Their equipment was often identification.

Why did he pick these? "I liked them," he says. More words: Tom McNulty's WWIN and James Brown's WEBB. McNulty's original Baltimore station was WMCP-FM, a call based on the initials of the last names of those involved Harry West, McNulty and Bernie Peter. McNulty was a tireless evangelist for his station and for FM radio. Wherever two or three gathered he was available to tell his story, and he soon noticed that nobody who introduced him at any meeting ever got those call letter right.

"PCM," "CMP" or "MPC" he heard every variation. His "clever" call never made it; neither did the station. But when WCBM changed its frequency to 680, NcNulty was on the spot with an application for an AM station at his old place on the dial 1400. This time he was determined to have the simplest, easiest-to-remember call letters he could find. With WWIN he's had a wwin-ner.

WEBB was planned from the beginning as a station to serve Baltimore's black community. The original owners were inspired to use their call letters to immortalize Chick Webb, the city's nationally famous black pop musician. Unfortunately, as the years have passed, fewer and fewer people remember Chick Webb, and fewer yet seem to realize that the station was named for him. There are stories connected with the call letters for Channel 13, too. Originally the station was known as WAAM.

Baltimore had been assigned three VHF television channels 2, 11 and 13. The owners of 13 knew that in any listing by channel number they were sure to wind up in last place. So, they chose the double to guarantee themselves first place in any listing which was alphabetical. They needed a fourth letter, sounded best. If those call letters were carefully chosen, how now WJZ? The answer comes from the past.

West-inghouse, which bought the station from the original local owners, was a broadcast pioneer, putting the first station on the air, KDKA, in Pittsburgh, and following with KYW in Chicago, WBZ in Boston and WJZ in Newark in the days when three-letter calls were still allowed. It sold WJZ to RCA in 1923, which moved it to New York to became the flagship of NBC's Blue Network. Years later there was a massive switch of call letters for the New York stations; the WJZ call letters were dropped. Then, when Westinghouse bought WAAM, the.