Bristol Radio/TV – WBIS and ESPN

These days the city of Bristol is associated with ESPN. They have a 100+ acre campus, over a million square feet of office and broadcast space, and nearly 4,000 employees in Bristol. But ESPN was a new startup company that only began operation in 1979, which is after the time when I lived in Wolcott.

In the decades before then, the only “media” company in Bristol was WBIS, a local AM radio station. Their 500 watt transmitter was only enough to reach residents of Bristol, but for those of us who lived in the extreme north end of Wolcott, because we were on a hill overlooking Bristol we could pick it up. They only operated during the day and with a very small staff who were on the third floor of a building in downtown Bristol. The transmitter was up on the hill on the south side of Bristol and was only two crow-fly miles from my house.

In the early 1960’s one of my friends from the neighborhood was Dana Powell. He and his family had moved to Wolcott when he started high school and they lived in the last house on Idlewood Rd, which at the time was a dead-end road. Dana was a year older than I was. One of his “claims to fame” was that in the fall of 1960 Bob Carroll did his student teaching in the elementary school in Plainville where Dana had come from. When Bob graduated from Fairfield University his first job in the Wolcott school system was as a 7^th grade teacher at Alcott School and I was in his class. Bob then moved to Wolcott High School and I had him again in 9^th grade for Civics and yet again my senior year for Contemporary Issues. So while I had him three times, Dana had him first.

In the summer of 1964, one of the DJs/operators at WBIS was someone whom Dana had known from when he lived in Plainville. Dana was able to get him to invite us to come to the WBIS studio at a time when he was on duty and spend some time in the broadcast studio. We rode our bicycles down the long hill into Bristol one summer morning (I didn’t ride into Bristol very often, because while the ride down the hill was one long downhill of a couple of miles, that also meant that it was a long uphill climb on the way home and all we had were single-speed bicycles).

Since this was a small-town radio station with a very low power transmitter and a limited audience, the equipment in the studio was fairly sparse as well. As I recall there was a swivel chair with a work surface that had a small mixer and a microphone/earphones, two turntables, a rack with a couple of reel-to-reel tape decks, and a teletype machine. The turntables were each about 2’x2’ that were mounted on springs so that vibrations from passing trucks would not make the records skip (yes, the primary media of the day were vinyl records!). The room next to the studio was filled with racks of vinyl records from which the operator/DJ would choose the records to be played during his shift.

What was being played was a combination of pre-recorded shows (which were on tape), music (on vinyl records), and “live” news and weather each hour. But it was this latter “live” portion that was the most intriguing to me.

Shortly before the time for the news, the operator would get up from his chair and go over to the teletype machine (I believe it was connected to the AP (Associate Press) wire service. He would rip off anything that had been printed during the prior hour, scan it and circle any items that looked they would be interesting to the audience. For the news/weather time, he would first put on a record that consisted of solely the sound of a teletype machine (both as a signal to the audience and to give the impression that you were in a newsroom?). The record was pretty beat up since it got used multiple times each day. He would start it off loud, then use the mixer to back the volume off as he began speaking. He would just read, sometimes with a little commentary, what he had circled from the wire service report.

For the “weather” it was even less formal. He would wheel his office chair over near the window that faced west (the studio was a corner office on the third floor with windows facing both west and south, and thus he had a pretty good view of the sky to the west of the city). There was a thermometer fastened to the window frame outside the window. He would glance at it and then look at the sky to the west (the direction from which most weather comes). His words on the air would then be something like, “It’s 75 degrees in downtown Bristol with mostly sunny skies. Looks like a good chance of rain this evening…”. A totally on-the-spot report based on nothing more than a thermometer and a west-facing-third-floor window! I was a little shocked. Compared to today’s professional meteorologists and sophisticated computer models, this was rudimentary indeed.

But such was the technology in small-town USA back in 1964. Little could one suspect that Bristol was going to become the hub of the largest sports media network in the world in the decades that followed.

If you want some additional information, you can read about the history of WBIS here - http://www.hartfordradiohistory.com/WPRX__WBIS_.html.