September 12

Airwaves: September 12, 2008

Scully Gears Up For 60th Season

Legendary Dodgers announcer Vin Scully announced late last week that he will be back for an amazing 60th season, now that his wife Sandy said it was OK.

Scully had been announcing Dodgers games in their previous home of Brooklyn, New York for ten years; when the team made the move to Los Angeles in 1958, he made the move right along with them. As did my father-in-law Roger, who denies to this day that he didn’t actually follow the team.

This is the last year of a three-year deal Scully has with the ball club, and there had been rumors earlier this season that he would retire if his wife wanted him around the house more.

You can hear him announce the games, of course, on KABC (790 AM).

History

Fans of Old Time Radio and the various stations that existed in radio’s golden age have a few websites to peruse, courtesy of SPERDVAC (The Society to Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety and Comedy) and the group’s Radiogram newsletter.

The August issue mentions some great sites, including JJ’s Newspaper Radio Logs, which features over 45,000 radio program guides from 1930 to 1960, compiled from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Chicago Daily Tribune and the Washington Post. They are high-quality scans that can be read using a standard pdf file viewer (or the Mac’s Preview program)and can be found at www.jjonz.us/RadioLogs/.

Betsy W’s Old Time Radio site spotlights the careers of OTR actors, a new one every two weeks. There are also contests to find the Mystery Actor; go to www.wrisley.com/otr.htm.

Finally, Radio Out of the Past at www.radiooutofthepast.org, a site featuring chat sessions with radio veterans, symposiums, interviews, and a few shows. This is one of the first US sites that also has information on Canadian Old Time Radio. Eh? (Sorry, couldn’t resist).

Bigger Breakfast

Breakfast with the Beatles is the longest-running and once of the most respected show of its type in Southern California. Host Chris Carter presents a vast knowledge of the group along with familiar and rare music every Sunday morning from 9:00 to noon on KLOS (95.5 FM).

Now Carter is about to launch the same show on Sirius Satellite Radio’s Channel 25 beginning this Sunday at 6 AM Pacific. If KLOS keeps their show -- Sirius says they get their own version and KLOS hasn’t announced dropping it -- Beatles fans can have breakfast for six straight hours!

Changes

KCSN (88.5 FM) has altered their format a bit, keeping classical during the day but dropping its nighttime specialty shows in favor of an automated format called Americana.

And while many fans of the former nighttime talk programming are no doubt up in arms, I think this might be a good time to remember one thing: KCSN is on a university campus (Cal State Northridge), has a license issued to broadcast as an educational station originally for the benefit of students, yet doesn’t have any students working there.

Personally I think the station should be returned to the students who once ran the station, as should all stations licensed to colleges and universities. In the case of KCSN, the station was student-run until the mid 1970s when it went “professional” and became irrelevant to the student population. Time to right that wrong.

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