Friday, 7 March 2008 00:38 by
Dave Yesterday marked an anniversary that I doubt anyone in Loudoun County noticed.
But 50 years ago to the day, Loudoun County got its first and only radio station. On March 6, 1958, WAGE signed on in Leesburg at 1290 on the AM dial. Engineer John Gill had received a telegram in the middle of the previous night, granting approval to broadcast. His voice, testing the WAGE equipment, was the first heard on the station.
Soon afterward, Ed Meyer took the microphone, and was WAGE’s first radio personality. He would later go on to WMAL, working with the likes of local broadcast legends like Harden and Weaver. Following Meyer would be a cast of thousands who got their start in broadcasting; some stayed for only a cup of coffee, while others were addicted with radio the rest of their lives.
A few years later in the mid-1960s, a young man named Bill Torrey would come to work at WAGE. He had a talkative and impulsive little brother named Paul. At the age of 10, Paul followed his big brother around the radio station, and picked up the addiction. On Jan. 6, 1971, at the ripe old age of 14, Paul did his first on-air show for the station. Paul and WAGE would forever be joined in the memory of a lot of Loudoun County folks over the next three decades, as the notion of one without the other seemed unthinkable.
If you weren’t careful, you might not even notice Bill and Paul were brothers, as they did not share the same last name. Bill’s father had been killed in a tragic car crash when he was little; his mother moved the family from New Jersey back to Loudoun County soon afterward and would eventually remarry. They welcomed a son into the world, but instead of Torrey, this son’s last name was Draisey.
Paul Draisey and I have worked Comcast high school broadcasts together for the past two years, and he’s become a close friend. He is WAGE. From 1971 until last April, when the owners of the station eliminated most of its staff and replaced all of its programming with network feeds, Paul had either been on the air, or not far from it, just about all the time.
WAGE has seen it all. It has played rock and roll, country, news, talk, just about everything. It’s been the place where everyone used to turn at the first hint of a snowflake, where they got their local news, and where they got their local sports. High school football and basketball, for the majority of those 50 years, have been broadcast live on WAGE, and if a team made the playoffs, you didn’t have to wonder who won. Odds are, WAGE was airing it.
No more. WAGE has no staff, other than board operators and a salesman. They read local headlines off local news websites from a studio in Falls Church. They picked up some high school football games last fall, but didn’t’ do any basketball this season. This year’s Dulles District tournament, for the first time in memory, had no live radio.
It’s doubtful that will change in the future. Radio has changed, and many stations are struggling. There was a time, for example, when people listened to radio in their homes. In my house alone, you can choose from cable, satellite TV, satellite radio, high speed internet, an Ipod with every song I’ve ever liked in my life on it, a CD player or DVD player for your diversion. AM radio is pretty much the domain of the clock radio first thing in the morning, or in the car. And cell phones eat into a lot of that car time.
But in its day, WAGE was that good friend you’d known for years. Not much to look at, but reliable and always there when you were in need. Paul tells many a story of folks who called the station seeking help for everything from “when is my power coming back on?” to “can you help me find my dog?”
One day last year, power knocked WAGE off the air, and as then-operations manager Chris King was trying to sort things out, some stranger walked into the control room and asked if everyone was OK. “Used to happen all the time,” Paul said. “People cared.”
So happy belated birthday, WAGE. You finally made it to the big 5-0.
Rest in peace.
Currently rated 4.7 by 12 people
- Currently 4.666666/5 Stars.
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Wednesday, 5 March 2008 08:00 by
Dave No one’s really asked, but in case you’re wondering what the heck we’re trying to do with this site, I’ve added a page you can click on in the left-hand margin unimaginatively entitled “Welcome to DullesDistrict.com”, which should answer that question
I bring this up because one of the reasons for this site is the opportunity to play with technology. The page even warns that “if you see a video embedded somewhere for no particular reason, the answer is “because I can.”"
So today’s gadget involves embedding audio into the blog. We’ll get back to talking about Loudoun County sports tomorrow. But for today, I need to stream some audio. And what better audio could there be than a few promos from the “Good Morning Loudoun” show on WAGE in Leesburg from the past two years?
For about a year, I got to work with the likes of Ron Kitzmiller and Tim Jon every morning, and at times we gave new meaning to the term “knucklehead.” We had guests we would talk to and laugh with, and we would try to capture some of that in a series of 30-second promos.
One of my favorites was when we had the folks from Cedar Lane Elementary in Ashburn on, testing us a la the “are you smarter than a 5th grader” show on Fox. As you can hear, the jury’s still out on Ron:
Tim Jon turned out to be quite the history buff in those settings, but he knows far more about Shakespeare than television. Months earlier, when Ron was asking questions about television, Tim was asked what show did “I love it when a plan comes together” come from, which was “The A Team”. Tim, for some odd reason, thought it came from Gilligan’s island, leading to this:
Sometimes our guests would turn on us. Marybeth Mohr, of the Loudoun Times-Mirror, was part of a conversation about Loudoun’s past, and when the conversation turned to Southern hospitality, I somehow got labeled as a stalker:
Of course, sometimes, we’d turn on our guests. My Comcast broadcast partner and good friend Paul Draisey used to frequently drop by. Paul is a broadcasting legacy in Loudoun County, as he started working for WAGE back when Richard Nixon was still president. So Ron Kitzmiller decided this would be an appropriate greeting:
Since we were three guys who at times didn’t have a clue, we would seek help in some of the areas we were most clueless. But all we did was further prove the point, particularly Mr. Jon:
It was a fun time. Perhaps one day, we’ll have to do it again.
Currently rated 4.3 by 3 people
- Currently 4.333333/5 Stars.
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