Head South Part 3, The Final Chapter

My role at WMPT, as I mentioned before was pretty much as "catch all" position. I did Sales, the Public Affairs show, called "In-Sight", wrote commercials, did production, and finally after Bob Evans decided I didn't "totally suck" on the air, did some fill in airshifts, and TONS of remotes!

If I had to pick a time in Williamsport Radio History that was exciting, this would be one of them, WLYC or course was under different ownership, WWPA came out of the "dark ages" programming wise, and WMPT was really promoting. The market was hot for radio and my fellow staff at WMPT was looked upon as one of the best, even by some of the competition. Vince Sweeney who was at WWPA has commented many times how he wished he would have been a part of it all in South Williamsport.

The biggest downside of that era, was a pretty steady staff turnover. Greg Isadore left, as did Bob Jackson, Jim Sortman, and quite a few sales people. In either late 1975 or early 1976 we hired Cliff Horton (Cliff Edwards on the air) to the staff. He and I clicked, and did many remotes together including the now famous Corvette Club Remote on VERY HOT summers day at John Powell Chevrolet. Notice the words "VERY HOT", now Cliff and I were in the air-conditioned show room, so we were nice and cool, but being a "VERY HOT" day the female attendees of the show were in short, short shorts, and halter tops! To say the whole event was very distracting would be a classic understatement. Our job was to promote the Corvette show, and there was a great crowd, well over 100 cars to view, I remember Cliff saying, "well Kel, there are a lot of classy chassis here today." My reply, "sure are Cliff, and the cars aren't bad either!" that was the end of it, we were both pretty worthless the rest of the remote. One reason we had hired Cliff is he came from Canton, Pa, and Dave and I were planning on building a station there, we felt Cliff would be a natural add to that staff. As it turns out, he didn't want to go to Canton but was a valuable part of the WMPT staff later leaving to replace Bud Berndt at W.A.C.C. as a broadcasting instructor.

Other staff during this time included Sue Andrews, who was a winner in our "Guest Disk Jockey" Promotion, along with Steve George, who came back with me to the "South Side", Pete Brown, Bob Ramsey in sales, and Glenaire Snyder in the office. It was also during this time that a group of young people started "the Citizen's Press" a weekly newspaper and daily radio news feed, unfortunately it didn't last, possibly because of their high staff turnover and being a bit ahead of their time. If I rememebr correctly they furnished news feeds to both WMPT and WRAK something that was totally unhead of in those days. Also during this time Dave and I hired the services of Paul Douglas who was a student in meteorology at Penn State in the class of Dr. Joel Meyers the founder of Accu-Weather. Paul came to us and I remember Dave saying something to the effect of "well, let's have you do forecasts for a week and see how good you are." I remember that Paul accurately predicted a "dandy" snowstorm when everybody else missed it. The biggest hitch in having Paul was we could not call him a Meteorologist, seems when we started to use that term, Dr. Joel and WLYC, Accu-Weather's station in Billtown, strongarmed Paul and to save him, changed how we referred to him on air to Weather Forecaster. Eventually Paul wound up at WNEP TV 16 in Wilkes-Barre, and then on to the Satellite News Channel during it's period of operation.

During this time, WMPT had its 20th birthday, Gary, Cliff and I spent a lot of time putting together a pretty good promotional package, if I remember we gave away 20 prizes a day for 20 days, a lot of fun and a good audience builder. WMPT through this period was #1 in the Professional Research Surveys in age 18 plus, something that did not set too well with the folks at 4th and Pine in Williamsport, in part because each time the Arbitron would come out we would counter the limited research of that survey with a comprehensive market survey.

Part of WMPT's community participation was participation in the Boy Scout Explorer Program with Post 99.3. At one point we had upwards of 15 young men and women in the program with Bob Evans as the Leader and help from myself and others on the staff. The post had a show on the air each Sunday night and were schooled in broadcast operations including how to obtain their F.C.C. license, required in those days.. A couple of the people, Nancy Faye (Place), and Mike Doyne went on to work in the media. One interesting sidelight from this era, Dave had a firm policy that did not allow voices from other stations to be on any of our commercials. That was pretty much the policy in all the market, I do rememebr that I was on WRAK and WWPA with commercials for the First Ward Fire Company Carnival. I guess they were treated differently since it was a non profit organization. During that time also there were a few free lance people around such as former WWPA Personality John Archer. John did commercials for a political party and once in a while for some other people. I never minded having John's voice on the air as he was one of my early radio heros.

In 1976 Dave and I announced plans to build another radio station, a new FM in Canton, Pa. my home town. I will look at that station in detail in a future entry.

I think that this time in South Williamsport was my most productive time working for Dave, at times a lot of fun, exciting, and frustrating. I often think fondly of the good days I spent at WMPT and being a part of Williamsport's Radio History.