Broadcast Writer

SBE Chapter 24 Newsletter 05/2021
By Vicki Way Kipp

Remember when radio breaks were live, discrepancies were epic, and disk jockeys had to time the intro of each song to figure out how much ramp-up talk to hit the post before the lyrics?

Remember when breaking news from the AP Wire was slowly impact-printed on a dot matrix printer, with the accompanying whir, clink, and “scritch” sounds?

Now, there’s an archival website dedicated to old-school airchecks that broadcast on Upper Midwest radio stations. There are airchecks from Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay/Fox Cities, Central and Northern Wisconsin, and Western Wisconsin.

You can revisit some favorite radio personalities from the 1960s through the early 1990s at the delightfully specific URL www.MostlyUpperMidwestAirchecks.com.

The website’s creator, Mark Pfeifer, says, “The site is a labor of love, and the purpose is to keep memories alive of great and fun radio of the past in the Midwest and elsewhere.”

Mark Pfeifer has never worked in broadcasting; he just has an appreciation for radio. Pfeifer grew up in Madison and liked to record radio broadcasts for fun. He continued his recording hobby when he moved to Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Toronto (with radio reception from New York and Ohio), Texas, and St. Paul, Minnesota.

Some of our chapter members were on the radio earlier in their careers or were radio station engineers who collected airchecks. Some of us still use our jock names. Was it a “K” or a “Double-U” station? What was your jock name, call sign, and city of license?

Engineers with airchecks from the 1960s through the early 1990s from the Madison, Milwaukee, and other Wisconsin radio markets can contribute to this Midwest radio museum by sharing your digitized airchecks. The archive is also seeking airchecks from Iowa and Northern Illinois during that era.

Aircheck donors can email an MP3 file (of 20 MB or less) to Torontomail@yahoo.com. Alternatively, you can publish airchecks under ten minutes duration to YouTube and then email that YouTube link to Mark.

If you’ve been saving airchecks in your home “archive,” your donated airchecks can get more plays on MostlyUpperMidwestAirchecks.com.

Cassette Tape Charms
Cassette tapes are endearing– think of mixtapes recorded from a radio station’s OTA top ten countdown. But cassettes are more endearing than enduring. Repeated playback, play-pause, and the FF/RW with tape in play mode took a toll.

Radio airchecks were usually recorded on 1/4″ reel-to-reel tapes or cassette tapes. At WSUP-FM at UW-Platteville, we recorded airchecks on bulk-erased demo cassettes that record companies sent to radio stations.

Back when cassette tapes were the dominant recording media, the consumer-grade cassette tape market was highly competitive. Maxell and Memorex had the most memorable ad campaigns.

Maxell sold their “high fidelity” cassette tapes by showing a cool guy persona, wearing a leather jacket and black sunglasses, sitting in a Le Corbusier chair getting “blown away” by Maxell’s high-fidelity recording of “Flight of the Valkyries.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjf5pdJJ44Q

Memorex made its mark with a cassette recording of Ella Fitzgerald singing that could shatter a wine glass. “With such crystal-clear fidelity, you’ll have to ask, is it Ella or is it MX-3?”
https://youtu.be/KeeuT3ciqpI

Memorex’s “Is it live or is it Memorex?” ad notwithstanding, it probably wasn’t hard to make that call most of the time. The telltale white noise of cassette hiss gives cassette tapes away.