[Description by Producer John Burwell]This tape was originally put together for a WTMA New Years Eve staff party on
January 31, 1979. It was collected from bits and pieces of air checks lying
around the program director’s office. Some of the quality is horrendous on
a few of the segments, due to the rather primitive machines we often used to
tape the air-checks.
The 1969 introduction was voiced by PD John Trenton
as a sales pitch to Eastman Radio, a national sales rep. My favorite
line is when he speaks of five resident newsmen and one full-time news specialist.
The “five resident newsmen” were actually the jocks!
Featured: Booby Nash, from January 1969. This aircheck was recorded on tape
supplied by the U.S. Navy. They would get us to record whole days of shows, and then they would play them on Charleston-based ships while the ships were out to sea, as a little reminder of home.
John Trenton was Program Director in 1972 when he was taken off the air and made
General Manager. You also hear “Big Boob” substituting for John Trenton, and newsmen
Ray Campbell and Frank O. Hunt, who was hired when the station got serious about news. Billy Smith was typical of the early ’70’s sound of TMA  Screaming and LOTS and LOTS of reverb. By 1976 Keith Nichols left to go out to Oklahoma as a full-time TV weatherman. Steve Russell is a native of Bamberg, SC. and went to work for WTMA straight out of High School. A cut of Lee Richards is from after WTMA “reformatted” to a more “time and temperature” mode. Gery London replaced Booby Nash in afternoon drive when Nash went to WKTM. The Hi-Lo Cash Game was typical of our on-air contests during that time.
At 20:30, you’ll hear actual on-air profanity. (We didn’t use a tape delay.) The idea of the
contest was to guess the name of a song. The “computer”  the Mighty TMA
Music Machine  would reveal more lyrics each time we didn’t get a winner.
There were three carts involved in the contest
- the main cart with the song words
- a “Does not compute” cart for incorrect guesses, and
- a “Correct! -You are a winner!” cart.
Don’t ask me how I did it, but in spite
of what happened, I was still able to punch the “Does Not Compute” cart,
and go on with the show like nothing happened. By the way, there is no
“Green Street” in Mt. Pleasant.
After that, Crazy Bob McLain, Tim St. George and a compilation of the on-air staff in 1979: Magic Mark, Ted Bell, Jack Lundy, JB, and Rick Tracy. Booby Nash was rehired as PD in 1979. As you can hear, his comedic wit in ’79 was just as good as it was in ’69.
“WTMA – always striving to be better!” That is the way that it was.
Here is MORE ABOUT WTMA.
