Vince Says! From Vince Sweeney WBRE 28

Recently I received a wonderful e mail from Vince Sweeney from WBRE TV 28 in Wiles-Barre. Vince and I got to know each other back in the 1970's when he worked at WWPA in Williamsport. In the e mail he shared a lot of his memories of "Quality Radio-WWPA" also known in later years as "The Twin". It is with his kind permission that I share his thoughts with you!
Thanks again Vince!

I'd come in the Fall of '74 to replace Bob Reynolds, who, as you know, eventually ended up making a career for himself at WNEP-TV. Back then, WWPA was up on the second floor along Government Place, and it was a dump. It had the look and the feel of a radio station as you'd imagine it looked and felt on the day the bells went off announcing the attack on Pearl Harbor. And it sounded equally as dumpy, despite the never-ending efforts of Frank Barber, who was PD at the time. Frank and I swap an occasional e-mail, he's still in radio, working in Tiffin, Ohio. Great guy, always thought the world of Frank. From a quality standpoint, WWPA sounded extraordinary, thanks to Carl, but programming-wise, forget it. In fact, you might remember this, the station billed itself as Quality Radio-WWPA.

It was astounding to see Woody Ott's name in print on your blog. By the time I got there, Woody's health was in serious decline, the place was essentially being run by two of his surrogates, Phil Lane and Cecelia Shick. WWPA was heavily block-programmed at the time, with a ton of superfluous CBS stuff, and an equal amount of local crud that Phil Lane had managed to sell. It was classic "program what you sell," rather than "sell what you program."

Thinking back on it, I have no problem remembering how depressing it was to be at WWPA, at least for the first few months, especially after realizing that there were some "real" radio stations in town, namely WMPT and WLYC. I so wished I'd managed to land a job at WMPT. Instead, there I was in a dingy antiquated studio, playing drab music that's hard to describe. We were JACK, long before JACK was invented. WWPA had an enormous LP library, and we could play just about anything we damned well pleased, and that is pretty much what I did. Interspersed with obscure album cuts, you'd also hear current singles, which Frank Barber was bound and determined to get on the air one way or the other. Frank just would not give up in trying to make some sense of the sound of the station, and to some extent, he succeeded.

An example of the craziness at the time would be Ken Sawyer. Kenny did mornings, 5:30-9:30. At 9:30 it was time for Here's Elaine, starring Elaine Rauff, a local woman who somehow they'd managed to put on the air for a half hour each morning. Elaine was a lovely, lovely woman, but just how she ended up doing a radio show was a complete mystery. Then at 10:00, it was back to Ken Sawyer, who'd do a talk show until noon. If that talk show had a name, it beats me completely, I have no recollection that it did. The delay was achieved by recording the show on one Ampex, but winding the tape down and playing it back on the Ampex below it, if you can get that image. Frank was on noon to 2:00, then it was me from 2:00 'till 6:00. But I wasn't quite finished yet, no sir. I'd come on back at 6:15 and read a ten minute news cast, THEN I could go home. As was standard, we all worked a six day week. Oh, they paid me $140 per week, which for Williamsport wasn't half bad at all. And full BC/BS, along with hefty Christmas bonuses, cash bonuses.

Everything changed when Woody died in, I believe, late '75. His son Bill, probably to his never ending regret, left a big job with NCR in Dayton, Ohio, and came back to run the station. Bill had a vision, and he immediately set out to make it a reality. Quickly, he morphed the place into a full-service AC, including a name change to Twin-W Radio, The Twin as it came to be known. (Although some would challenge me on this claim, I am the one who came up with the name The Twin.) In the middle of drawing up plans for a relocation over to Market Street, the place burned on a Saturday night. More accurately, the floor below burned, the station suffered mostly smoke and water damage. That damage chased the staff out of Government Place and over to Genetti's until the new studios/offices were finished high atop Market Square, a name we tried to force on listeners, but it never did catch on at all. No one wanted to call the corner of Market and Third, Market Square. While the office staff had split, we continued to broadcast from The Ruins, as we wasted no time in nicknaming the place. An already dumpy building had been made even dumpier, and the air-staff all went to work there every day for what had to be six months. By that time, two other names had joined the line-up, one of which is likewise synonomous with Williamsport radio, Gary Chrisman. The other guy, Jack Frost(Paul Mowery), did evenings, and sad to say, I doubt most folks would have even the faintest memory of him.

We then made the move over to Market. What a gorgeous facility it was. So much so that Broadcast Management and Engineering magazine made The Twin their Station of The Month at one point, a copy of which I have somewhere. We were all tickled by that.

For all his vision, and for all the hard work by a lot of people, maybe even me, The Twin never got the recognition it deserved. Within the business, yes, it did achieve a bit of a name for itself as being a great little radio station. But in terms of audience, nah, it just never happened, at least not while I was there, which was until late 1978.