Friday, March 02, 2007

Double-U Bee Are AITCH!


WBRH
90.3 on your FM dial

I HAD FORGOTTEN that I'd even taken these 1981 photos until I recently went through old large-format negatives stashed away in a three-ring binder from a long-ago college photojournalism class.

I passed, by the way.

Apparently, I must have been killing time after my classes at Louisiana State University were done for the day that summer session in '81. And, obviously, I had my university-issue Yashica twin-lens reflex camera with me.

Not the greatest camera in the world for fast-paced, run-and-shoot photojournalism, but a FANTASTIC camera if you have a little time and crave detailed images. (Those 2-inch by 2-inch negatives allow fine detail and can be enlarged like nobody's business before the print starts to look grainy.)

SOOOOOOOO . . . that summer afternoon, I swung by Baton Rouge Magnet High School to say howdy to the folks at WBRH-FM, where I'd pulled my last student air shift a little more than two years earlier. When I was at 'BRH, the station operated with a "booming" 20 watts of effective radiated power at 90.1 MHz.

Sometime around when I took these pictures -- but don't quote me on that after 25-plus years -- the station was moving just up the dial to 90.3 FM and increasing its power to 200 watts. (Now the station runs with 20,000 watts and has a sister AM station, 1260 KBRH.)

And everything -- as you'll note from the photos -- was glorious analog. Tape, carts and vinyl. Period. CD players wouldn't hit the market (or the first radio studio) for another two years.

Now, WBRH has a format of "smooth" jazz during the day and classic jazz at night, with specialty programs on the weekends. Back in 1981, student DJs like James Edwards, shown here, would play classical and jazz during the morning and early afternoon, then rock out in late afternoon and at night.

WBRH is going to mark its 30th anniversary this September. Which will be the 29th anniversary of beginning my tenure there. (Sigh . . . didn't work up the nerve to take radio broadcasting until my junior year.)

MAYBE, JUST MAYBE they'll let me come back for one more DJ shift, so I can play Chicago Transit Authority's "Free Form Guitar" on the WBRH air just one more time. Or not.

Can anyone see from the last photo whether they'd finally taken down my joke promo copy for Painful Rectal Itch, the fictitious weekly progressive-rock program, sponsored by the makers of Preparation H? It used to be on the control-room window, above the mixing console.

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