I discovered WPEZ FM Radio (AKA: The Stereo Z) upon return to school at WPSBC, in the fall of 1973. They filled the void left by the format change of 13-Q FM (WSHH) from top 40 to beautiful music format during that summer. Though I was devastated to learn of the passing of WKTQ Radio’s FM side back to softer musical fair, my sadness was countermanded by the new WPEZ, which offered a similar format to 13Q, and a much stronger FM signal. Plus, they broadcast in stereo from the beginning. 13-Q FM was mono.
Like radio station WKTQ, WPEZ FM 94.5 ran many cash radio contests though they didn’t pay nearly as much per win as did 13-Q. Yet the winners seemed to get just as excited at their telephone triumphs of $50 or $100 (typical); probably because they got to talk to a live charismatic DJ in addition to winning the money, which the WPEZ DJs tended to be indeed.
WPEZ radio’s big slogan was “WPEZ plays less commercials,” and during the first year or so, that seemed to be quite true. They indeed did run very few commercials, and this was a big lure for us kids, who just wanted to hear the big hit music and not a bunch of talk and squawk.
However, they also played the same songs quite often; highly repetitious. In late 1973, I think they spun the Steve Miller Band’s hit: The Joker, every fifteen to thirty minutes. I remember commenting in amazement to [Mentat] about it one fall Friday afternoon as we waited for the bus home. He said that he’d asked a WPEZ DJ why they played the same stuff so much, and the DJ grumbled that he didn’t like playing songs over and over. But that’s what the listeners wanted, he told [Mentat]. So they must have also gotten many requests for Grand Funk’s We’re An American Band, and The Locomotion singles, along with Led Zeppelin’s classic Stairway to Heaven, Paul Simon’s Love Me Like A Rock, and the Edgar Winter Group’s Free Ride hits. They ran these songs into the ground.
In the morning, Jane Clark read the news two or perhaps three times an hour, opposite of morning drive DJ Striker McGuire. Originally, McGuire worked the 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM slot but got promoted to the 6:00 to 10:00 AM shift sometime in 1975 if memory serves. I used to listen to him on my portable GE TV radio just prior to assembly at 8:30 AM, and get a chuckle from his jokes. One time he said something nasty that I’m sorry I missed. But for months afterward, WPEZ periodically ran this announcement from their general manager, apologizing for “the comments of Stryker McGuire.” To this day, I still do not know what he said, and regretfully so.
DJ Jim Ryan hosted the 6:00 to 10:00 PM spot throughout the mid 1970s. He was funny in the style of 13-Q’s Jackson Armstrong in that he’d try and see just how much he could get away with saying, and when he’d utter something totally outrageous, he’d play this tape of a bunch of guys going, “Whooooah, whooooooah, whooooooah!” to call even more attention to his borderline risqué’ comments.
Several of us rode a weekly bus from our home towns in and around Altoona to our school in Pittsburgh. We’d make this trip every Sunday, and come back home again each Friday. Most of us carried FM radios on these trips, and WPEZ 94.5 FM was perhaps the last Pittsburgh station to fade out as our east-bound bus topped Cresson mountain on Fridays. At 50,000 watts effective radiated power, WPEZ had perhaps the “loudest” FM signal in its region and beyond. I could even get them here at home faintly, if I swiveled the radio antenna the right way.
However, the local cable company (Warner Cable at the time) also offered an FM radio service during the 1970s through sometime in the early 2000s, and they carried The Stereo Z as well. Once I learned how to hook this up to my radio, I fooled no more with those telescopic antennas that I was always breaking anyhow. Cable made those obsolete, and my parents, wishing not to buy me new ones all the time did not help matters either.
Until I upgraded to cable service in my bedroom though, and after I’d broken the antennas off all the radios I had, I spent many a weekend trying to pull in WPEZ Radio FM clearly in my Bellwood bedroom using other sorts of antennae. I’d string wires from old extension cords and motor windings all around the ceilings in my room as well as in the hall and up the stairs into the attic. I even bought an FM dipole antenna from Radio Shack, hoping to get WPEZ better. A sympathizing ham radio friend, aware of my struggle to receive “the Z” DX-style, gave me a tube type RF amplifier that functioned between 54 and 98 Mhz. So, it could amplify WPEZ’s 94.5 Mhz. signal, making it quite strong. But the darn thing added so much hash and noise to the signal that, though stronger, the reception was no clearer by any means. Still though, trying to listen to WPEZ at over a hundred miles away taught me much about radio basics and making antennas. I sure wish I would have owned a Beam Box FM antenna. That might have worked better than the amplifier and strengthened the signal without adding all the noise.
On one warm spring day in 1975, I awoke to find WPEZ’s signal coming in just as strongly as if I was in Pittsburgh hearing it. For the entire morning, it reverberated wall-to-wall. Had I finally found an antenna configuration that worked? Well, I had. But my antennas weren’t what brought it in on that day. Indeed, it would be decades before I’d learn of tropospheric ducting (a phenomenon on VHF frequencies that allows broadcast signals to travel much greater distances than is typical for them). Changing temperatures and air pressures in the atmosphere create the so-called ducts, in which the signals travel quite far, just as water is carried through pipes to distant cities. Unfortunately, these “air ducts” constantly change position, length, and number. It turned out that I was lucky to receive WPEZ as long that day as I had. Just after lunch, their signal began to fade, and by 2:00 PM, had all but completely disappeared. Learning that my antennas were not all that brought WPEZ from Pittsburgh to Bellwood depressed me for some days, and I had to seek counsel from my electronics teacher to feel better about the whole incident.
From the fall of 1974 to the fall of 1976, WPEZ FM was my primary source of new music and news while at school. At the beginning of 10th grade however, WTAE FM changed into an automated-style top 40 station that for the first several months anyhow, played absolutely no commercials. This new station on the block (96 KX) captivated me; particularly the no-commercials part, the automation (everything was run by computers), and the KX Call Girl sweetened the KX pot even more. Then, WPEZ failed to measure up; the same that happened to 13-Q when WPEZ came to town. Though WPEZ continued for several more years, I tended to listen to them less.
But WPEZ’s role in my teenage musical evolution was as profound as 13-Q’s had been in pre adolescence. During seventh and eighth grades, you could have taken the tuning knobs away from all of my radios, and I probably wouldn’t have cared so long as they were all tuned to WPEZ Radio. They changed format again in the early 1980s and changed their call letters back to what they’d been before the WPEZ hoopla; WWSW FM.
Tom Hesley
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Good night.