[DESCRIPTION BY CONTRIBUTOR ROB FRANKEL] Here’s Part Two, the second hour of Murray The K on WOR-FM from October 8, 1966. Scott Muni and Johnny Michaels join Murray for a few minutes. Joe Maguire was the VP of Engineering at the RKO Radio Networks through the Eighties. Before that, he spent many years at WOR & WOR-FM/WXLO. He shared some of his memories of the early days of the station: “The word has come down — 24 hour simulcasting will end. A separate radio station must be created. Let’s do music.” “What’s that?” Anyway, it was necessary to build a new facility. Music was, after all, recorded stereophonically. Forget the transmitter. Forget the STL. “We need a studio to play music.” “What’s that?” “Find some spare space in the building. Any old closet will do.” Second floor? “Yeah – keep it away from AM.” And WOR-FM came to be. Planning and construction went forward. Equipment was ordered and walls were built. Control rooms (2) were to be about 10 x 25 feet. Studios (2) were about 8 x 10, separated by a narrow corridor, and placed in between the control rooms. Acoustics? Keep the volume down! Wiring was put in to connect to the WOR-AM Terminal Room on the 24th floor so we’d have air monitors and feeds to the transmitter. We didn’t have much time and the GE stereo consoles had not arrived. It was decided to construct one console on our own so we could meet the deadline. We needed a wooden box the exact size of the GE board so we could put the rest of the furniture in place. A blank rack panel with pots and program keys would be mounted in this wooden box so it would actually look like a console. We had to have six cart machines, two turntables, two open reel machines, tie lines from AM, and, of course, two mics. No way would all those Daven pots fit in a 19″ panel. Remote starts wouldn’t fit either. So it went like this: Three carts per pot; open reels shared a pot; turntables shared a pot (cueing off line); one pot for a tie line; and one for a mic. Ok, but now we needed a line level feed and, oh yeah, we had to handle two channels of audio. Enter two RCA field amps (remote mixers). One became the left program channel, the other obviously the right. The field amps fed the 24th floor and a couple of Volumaxes before the signal went to the transmitter. Our first spots were Pepsi and they were either $1 or bonused from AM. They went to $5 pretty quickly. No one took it seriously. Especially at WOR-AM. The rest is history… We went on the air in June forty years ago. In phase? Might’ve been. Balance? Looked ok leavin’ here. Quality? Actually it was pretty good. But it was only music. COMMENTS FOR Murray The K, WOR NY October 8, 1966 Pt. 2