FRIDAY AGAIN!

Nice KICK BACK WEEK with
the local media mice doing just
about NOTHING to get excited
about.

OUR fav. MEDIA HISTORY BLOG
Did have some OLD audio of Dave Young and
a former WKGN afternoon, award winning,
fine looking, well groomed, always bathed,
deep voiced, generous, kind, thoughtful,
obedient, trustworthy, honest, loyal, rehabbed
guy on his first day at the old WETE!

Naturally it caused the
memory jog that often hits
elderly radio kids.

So to bore you a bit, lets
take a look at WETE shall we?

In the beginning the earth cooled and
the dinosaurs died, but that isn't important,
what is important is WETE used to be
WATE. Yep, good old channel 6 had
a radio station and before they had it
it was WROL. Bored yet? No? Hang on
we can take care of that!

WATE was the station your parents had
on in the Packard when they picked us up
up from school. At noon it had a
really cool talk show host (national not
local) called Joe Pine. Joe was a wild man and
he only had ONE leg. I always thought his last
name was a lame joke about his peg but who knows?
Joe was just fun, not like Rush is fun but well
like a Baptist Preacher on meth is fun.

He would have on the highest ranking official
of the NAACP and right across from them
the highest ranking NATIONAL member of the
KKK! On yea, Joe Pine was a MUST HEAR show!

In the morning Hop Edwards played the crap
your parents liked and toward the end of WATE
had a feature called WATE ON THE LAKE.
I think he was out in a houseboat near the
sewage treatment plant about lunch time but
I never really got a good fix on his location.

ANYWAY..WATE was sold to Hall Communication
and they changed it to WETE. WETE's big claim
to fame was Iron Man Jim Humphrey..who set a world
record for a continuous broadcast. I think he was
in an RV (near the Fresh Market) but
I never got over to see for sure. Like all of Knoxville
I sure did tune in though. Those who were his designated
handlers said after a few hundred hours he started to
hallucinate and if they didn't keep an eye on him he
would wonder off. Upside was it happened very early in the
morning, downside was several times he made it the middle of
Kingston Pike. In dem days the folks driving the Pike at
2 AM had the Ford wide open and often the blood alcohol level
pushed the meter passed drunk all the way to HEY WATCH THIS!

Jim lived, the record stood and WETE moved on. It also
was the FLAGSHIP STATION of the Vol network and that
so urinated off Robert Denton. Causing anyone at Dick Broadcasting
to even NOTICE another station let along irritate them was
about as big as setting that giant continuous broadcast
record!

Anyway to make a long story even longer...WETE became WRJZ in 1976,
everyone was fired except the two worms who worked
mornings and afternoons. Reportedly they went on
to achieve some fame in the morning on the new
62 but the grandchildren of the bodies they
left behind never went to college and many of them
are growing old in a Westinghouse box under
the Gay Street Bridge.


Have a good weekend
and if you are bored be
sure to come out tomorrow (Saturday)
to hear the old man band in
Murvle! details right here!