[Curator’s Note: GREAT MODERN RADIO HISTORY was prepared for a WBT Staff Meeting in 1972. It is representative of the high production value of WBT and of the respect and love that programmer Tom McMurray had for the station and staff.]Magic Happened Here
by Tom McMurray

In the Summer of 1970 I was approached by Blair Radio, the national advertising representative for WBT Radio in Charlotte, North Carolina. WBT, a 50,000 watt Clear Channel powerhouse had historically been the number one station in the Charlotte area of dominant influence (ADI) forever. Once owned by CBS and the spawning pool of many talents such as Charles Kuralt, Nelson Benton, and too many to mention, it had a rich heritage.
How do you honor the traditions of a grand old radio station like WBT? McMurray’s approach was the Where It All Began promotional series, excerpted here.

In the Spring of 1970 the ARB showed WBT as the overall ninth station in the market. No longer could Blair and its powerful Blair radio Network (BRN) feed WBT the national clients. David Klemm, Blair’s secret agent, acted as the CIA of Blair and all the stations they represented. He knew the score and more about every major market radio station in America than anyone, at that time. He was a smart, articulate and brilliant communicator. He was very well liked, respected and a truly nice guy. David’s job, bottom line, was to keep Blair stations number one.

…”it would take hard factual data to get permission from Jefferson Standard to shorten the skirts on their Grand Lady..”

Jefferson Standard Broadcasting was a subsidiary of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company. WBT, its sisters WBT-FM and WBTV-TV, along with some other broadcast properties, had been a virtual cash cow and a place to showcase the parent corporation. Life insurance companies like Jefferson Standard worked as monolithic, autocratic organizations. They understood actuary tables. They for sure did not like change, especially with tradition, and WBT was high on their list when it came to tradition. Getting Jefferson Standard to accept change was General Manager Harold Hinson’s problem. He knew David Klemm was right.

Secretly, working with David Klemm, Harold devised a plan to have a “palace coup”. If WBT was going to change, it would take hard factual data to get permission from Jefferson Standard to shorten the skirts on their Grand Lady — WBT. From August through September I worked totally behind the scenes. I was not even in or near the station. I designed quantitative and qualitative research that was performed by Mel Goldberg’s New York based Magic “C” research company.

The WBT/PAMS Custom jingles used a “new” musical signature christened “Logo One”, and featured a unique vocal arrangement with muted brass.

I had always worked with a specific plan using research in my previous programming, but to have this kind of resource was fantastic. Few programmers had this kind of luxury. With Mel’s help, I devised a questionnaire and survey along with various recordings. The recordings on cassette tape had representative cuts of every conceivable kind of music. I wanted to know if people identified Yesterday by the Beatles as a Top 40 song. Did they even know it was the Beatles? Did they hear Mr. Bojangles as a country song, Top 40, awful noise or what? There were thirty various samples played to see if people knew what music was what and how they identified it. Most importantly we wanted to know what they liked.

Questions also elicited various demographic and economic information, attitudes and preferences on all different kinds of programming. We played all air personalities voices currently in the region and sought to find out if they could identify the personality without hearing their name or station.

Mel and a crew of seven experienced researchers fanned out through 78 counties in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. Thousands of people were personally interviewed. Mainframe computers compiled the data. Mel interpreted the facts, Harold, myself and a professional writer prepared concise white papers for the Jefferson Standard hierarchy.

…”I know of no other PD afforded the time and budget given me by WBT to produce a totally new sound and indeed new radio station…”

Harold presented the research reports, along with the hard data, which was as thick as two New York City telephone books, to Wally Jorgensen, Executive VP of Broadcasting. After digesting the data Wally approved and got Harold an audience with Charlie Crutchfield, the President of JS Broadcasting. That done and with Mr. Crutchfield now a believer, a special board of directors meeting was arranged for the entire Jefferson Standard Life (now Jefferson Pilot) Corporation. This stuff was all beyond my personal view and involvement. In September 1970 the Jefferson Standard board approved all recommendations and I began to build the new WBT.

Veteran TV game show announcer Johnny Olsen was featured on jock intros, show closings, and promos.
I know of no other PD afforded the time and budget given me by WBT to produce a totally new sound and indeed new radio station. I was allowed $200.000.00 to build a new sound, studios and entertainment team. Good, bad and great things happened. 28 people were fired, all given generous buy outs or early retirement. I know of no other broadcaster ever who had been so kind to it’s employees.

Over the next five months three major studios were reconstructed and state-of-the-art equipment installed. A new staff was blended with some of WBT’s traditional announcers so that an evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) sound would first hit the air when WBT changed formats in March 1971. As early as January 1971 two top 40 DJ’s, Rob Hunter and H.A. Thompson were hired, but kept in the wings.

On Monday March 8th, WBT announced that on Sunday March 14th at 7 PM, WBT will become a thing of the past, and that an official announcement would be made at that time by WBT General manager Harold Hinson. It was strongly implied that the station was going off the air.

WBT never in it’s life had done any stunts. It was a graceful 50,000 watt tradition.

At 7 PM on March 14th, an “official announcement” was read, and WBT started it’s new format with the Original Sunday Night Hall of Fame.

The next morning Charlotte had a new radio station. In one of the most courageous moves I have ever seen, WBT sales manager Cullie Tarleton had canceled hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue so that we could have a clean top 40 sound, with no more than 14 commercial units per hour. I literally gutted the old WBT, canceling CBS and dozens of programs and features that were all rating killers, but well funded by local advertisers.

Over the next 2 years WBT attained the highest ARB ratings ever recorded by any station ever or since in the Charlotte metro area.

WBT was Number One in every time period and every demographic. I have never had, seen or felt the magic, fun and success of the WBT years before or since. WBT was one in a million. What to say? “Thanks for letting me be there”.