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All and all, Uncle Pete and Louise’s song reflected scripture’s call to help the poor, to keep an open heart and open door. Some will hear that as doing good for goodness sake, others might calculate it as an insurance policy. Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.
How did Uncle Pete and Louise come to he heard on WNEW even though the station had not specially engaged them? For most of the economic hard times of the 1930’s, many radio stations were able to survive by sharing dial positions and airtime. WNEW, for example, came to be in February, 1934 when its owners, bought two New Jersey stations, WODA, Paterson and WAAM, Newark, where Uncle Pete’s program originated.
The stations were merged, and their licenses cancelled as new call letters, WNEW, took over the 1250 spot on the dial. WODA and WAAM, along with WHBI Newark, had shared airtime at 1250 kc. since the late 1920’s and WNEW continued to share air time with WHBI for another seven years. ECB
As extensive as my list of “The Engineers” was in my last posting on wnew1130.com, it just began to list the personnel of the engineering department in the golden days of the 1960s. Here are others, whom I knew less well, but who were nevertheless essential parts of the engineering department:
Engineering Supervisors: Karl Neuwirth, Bill Schmidt
Engineers: Frank Dubiel, Howie Epstein, Ken Haile, Joe Palumbo, Eric Potts, Bird S. Coler Southern, George Speer, Steve Sullivan
Many, but not all, of these fine technicians worked at the transmitters — the AM transmitter in Kearny, the later AM transmitter in Carlstadt, and the FM transmitter on the 82nd floor of the Empire State Building — and rarely came to the Fifth Avenue studios. AF
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Photo link for Radio’s First 75 Years, submitted by Bill Diehl
