I first heard WREC-FM in the summer of 1967 while shooting pool in a Clarksdale, MS, bowling alley...make that THE Clarksdale bowling alley. They were playing easy listening or MOR as it was officially known then. When I started working there in July of 1969, they were still playing a MOR format from the SAME library as WREC was using.
Fred Cook was Program DIrector and General Manager and, among other duties, he ok'd ALL the music. By that I mean he and his Sharpie pen were visible on every album we had...his big FC with a checkmark slash and lots of crossed out cuts on the albums!!! Of course we played what we wanted anyway from what we had. I remember wanting to play Glen Campbell in the early '70's when he had so many big hits. Fred said NO Campbell on either WREC. Shortly after that, Charles Brakefield asked Fred why we weren't playing Campbell. After some heated discussion, Fred drove to Pop Tunes at Poplar and Danny Thomas and bought one of every Campbell album they had, including some stinkers. He put them all in the library at once with NO initials or crossouts. Not that Fred held a grudge or anything...
Back to the topic...WREC-FM played the same music WREC-AM did with one exception. Sunday afternoon from 3-6pm Terry Bill ran The Classical Hours with a large library of classical music we had that he had control over. There were actually two rooms in the basement of the Peabody with albums in them. The original was up the hall from WREC-AM control with the ONLY bathroom we had in the technical area. The other room was adjacent to that one, immediately behind the WREC-FM Control Room. Smith Howell and Milton Brame built the cases and they were beauts. They also built rolling cabinets either one or two bins wide with rubber mats in the bins for albums to be stacked vertically. Before your air shift, you rolled an empty cabinet back to the library and chose the albums you wanted to use that day. It was your call as to vocal/instrumental mix, tempo, style-everything was up to you and you were expected to know the music well enough to put together a listenable program. It was great fun.
Everett Flagg hosted "Music TIll Midnight" M-F and Mac Todd did it Sa-Su, both 8-midnight. They ran it from WREC-FM with the signal simulcast on WREC and a board operator, usually Leonard Blakely, running WREC commercials while Ev or Mac ran PSA's on WREC-FM, if it wasn't a combo buy.
Guys who worked shifts on WREC-FM...Terry Bill, Joe Oliver, Vins Bishop, Ev, Mac, me, I believe Jack Jackson, when he wasn't doing the weather with his dummy on Channel 3, and others that slip my memory. It lasted from March 1, 1967 to the name change to WZXR-FM at the advent of Drake-Chenault's Great American Country automation in app. 1976 when Mike Edwards and the late Kerry Darr were hired by me as station operators of that Schaeffer 903 System.
http://www.easylisteninghq.com/syndicators.htm
