WABC-AM in New York City is celebrating 100 years. Red Apple CEO John Catsimatidis says WABC will celebrate its history throughout the next year, starting this month. The station has also created a 100 years webpage HERE.
Listeners will be treated to re-broadcasts of classic programs hosted by hosts including Dan Ingram, Bob Grant and Rush Limbaugh. The special retrospective series airs every Sunday in October, from 3 to 4 pm.
Listeners are also invited to vote for their favorite WABC air personality from the past into the 77 WABC Hall of Fame, “The Talk Radio Years” and “The Music Radio Years” (HERE).
The original WABC call letters in New York actually belonged to CBS. That station was founded in the Richmond Hill section of Queens in 1924, with the call letters standing for “Atlantic Broadcasting Company”, the original licensee. Its alter ego was WBOQ, “Borough of Queens”. WJZ began operation 100 years ago from the Westinghouse plant in Newark, New Jersey. It moved to New York City and became the flagship station of the NBC Blue Network. In 1943, the FCC made NBC divest one of its two networks with its O&O stations, so the Blue Network and WJZ were sold to Ed Noble, owner of the company that makes Life Savers candy. Eventually, Noble changed the name of his company from The Blue Network to the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). This caused call letters confusion in the ratings diaries that New Yorkers filled out in those days. If a listener wrote “ABC” in a diary, did that mean WABC, in other words, CBS? Or did it mean the ABC network, in other words, WJZ? So in 1948, CBS changed the call letters of its WABC to WCBS after paying a small station in Illinois $1 million to give up those call letters. The Illinois station became WCVS, no relation to the drug store chain. On March 1, 1953, Noble changed the call letters of WJZ to WABC to better represent his network.
The WJZ call letters later resurfaced in Baltimore. In 1957, Westinghouse bought WAAM (TV), channel 13 and changed the call letters to WJZ-TV under a grandfathering provision of what is now Part 2 of FCC Rules. In 2008, the WJZ call letters returned to radio in the same market on 1300 AM and 105.7 FM. Ironically, the WJZ stations were owned by CBS at that time. Although Audacy now owns the radio stations, the WJZ call letters remain.
There is a lot of history behind the original WJZ which is not on the WABC website. WJZ was the second station that Westinghouse put on the air and it was the second U.S. station to broadcast at 50 kW when it moved its transmitter to Bound Brook, NJ. Notable programs are not limited to the Musicradio 77 days nor to the current talk radio days. WJZ/WABC originated an excellent jazz program from Birdland in New York City in the early 1950s.
Of course, hordes of boomers remember Seventy-Seven W-A-Beatle-C and all those transistor radios at the beaches, all tuned to WABC.
Yes, WABC-AM dates to 1953, however before that it was WJZ-AM and that is what WABC and John Catsimatidis are celebrating.