710 WGBS HISTORY

Hey Guys and Gals:

Could anybody give me a history of WGBS 710 AM? I know it was MOR format but what kind of Music did they play? Was it more AC'ish or more in the nostalgia area?

Thanks for your help on this one!!

T.J.

Late 70's as Music Radio 7000, it was an AC format. Before that if I recall, WGBS was sort of an AC-MOR station, typical of a lot of full service MOR stations of the day.

1978 was the year WGBS 710 went from "We Play Favorites" an upbeat personality A/C-oldies mix featuring

AM Drive: Arnie & Amos (Arnie was the voice of Amos and was a kick to watch him work)
Mid day: Lee Rogers (PD)
PM Drive: Ron St. John
Evenings: Dale Reeves (wow talk about a fun personality jock!)
All Night: Teresa Lee
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After a bad spring book Rogers left for WJW Cleveland. They made Arnie PD and Arnie hired me for evenings. A move that didn't do either one of us any good! Dale went to afternoons and St. John went to mid day. All was okay for about 2 weeks then Dale left for WJW, Mark Denver came in to replace him. Shortly after than "Musicradio 7000 The New WGBS" was born.

I must say I hated every minute of it including WHN PD Ed Salamon bursting through the door to tell me what format rule I had broken. Today if someone were to do that I would throw them out of the studio or leave myself. I didn't know any better back then so I put up with it. I knew nothing about how to do a very tight and confusing format. I had come from MOR radio where the jock was king.

At "Musicradio 7000 the New WGBS" we had to say that everytime we mentioned the station. Try it sometime it gets old fast! Also to give the illusion we were a hip album station at the end of each set of music we had to backsell the last 3 or 4 songs with title, artist and album title, every time without exception. This gets really old too.

In 1978 WGBS had a revolving PD chair... Lee Rogers, Arnie Warren, Dan Halyburton, and finally Charlie Cook. Charlie was the first PD to fire me, after being demoted from evenings to all nights. I want to say a big thank you to Cook for ending that very unpleasent part of my career. It was a mess but I got over it and went over to WQAM a much nicer place where I did weekends and vacation fill in for the last couple of months of 1978. This is not to say there weren't some great folks at WGBS I just didn't like or fit what they were doing after they altered the format. As we all know, the format didn't work anyway!

One day I asked "why 7000" The answer I got was funny. "We wanted a number that was bigger than Y-100". I swear that's true. :

I was working there when they made that switch to 7000. I thought it was kind of strange too. I was one of the news anchors at the time. Charlie Cook was the PD, Arnie was there for a while and then he left and they hired two guys to do mornings. Ron St. John was doing afternoons. Mark Denver was also there. Bob Cain was our News Director. Dan DiLoreto was the GM at the time. Big stories to cover while I was there. The Mariel Boatlift, the Hatian influx, and the Liberty City and Overtown riots.

Jim Edwards

Hey Mike..what format was WQAM when you were there? Storz hired me to do mornings in 1984. It was Sun Country WQAM. Never mentioned the dial position. Somewhere along the way we had all kinds of weird readings on the transmitter site..turned out that two cranes working on high-rises on Byscayne Bay were creating a "directional" array, and also damn near french frying the crane operators..so the GM mandated that we reduce power to 500 watts day..from our really strong 5000w day..our ratings plummeted, and it was a horrible place to work. That ex-hospital on Arthur Godfrey Blvd was creepy..and that old Altec Lansing console...yeeesh. I couldn't understand why the mic sound was so thin..then when i saw the studios..there was an EV 635A mic..and a Shure Level Loc for a processor..horrible. In the back of the bowels of the building I found a Neumann U67 sitting in a carboard box. I begged to have them put it on the air..but the Chief Engineer saaid that the deejays would ruin it with all the smoking. Yes EVERYONE smoked there in the building..the place was horrid! I lived in Kendall, and drove in every day at 4:30am..and every day I would think that if I just swerved the car into a bridge abutment i coule avoid going in there..That was when I decided it was time to quit.

I do remember a "St. John" on the air..was he on 97 A1A? They were gooood!

Jeff, when I was there it was still Top 40 under PD Tom Birch. Birch was a nice guy as was MD Ron Eric, Dave Burgass and I think Captain John had just arrived to do mornings. It was a much different place at that time compaired to what you described.

The old Altec board was easy to use, WQAM had a much better studio layout than WGBS. I think we had a better mic back then too. WQAM still sounded good in 1978.

Was Tim Baxter at Sun Country while you were there?

The times that I heard WGBS in the 60s and early 70s, the station seemed to be pretty much straight ahead MOR...

I remember in the 80s WGBS had a kick-butt signal that came in loud in Palm Bay just like it was a local station.
in the evening for a short period of time they carried what was the 1st sportstalk Network.
I remeber calling up to them and talking to the host John Sterling. (YANKEES WON..THEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE YANKEES WIN)
I also seem to think WQAM had oldies till 3 pm and then had sports talk after 3 pm.
This is what I seem to remembered these things, But who knows Maybe I "Misremembered"

This may be before many of you. My father was Spencer Danes who worked at WGBS in the early 60's through 1969. He was a news reporter during the cuban missle crisis and also covered the hurricanes (storms not footbal) the Gemini and Apollo NASA missions etc. Ken Malden I think was the PD at the time. I am looking for the Kermit Shaffer blooper of his called "the buzzard". He was reading AP story out of Deneland, Fla. About a Navy pilot that ejected his jet after hitting a "buzzard" pilot was OK, but for some reason my father found this story extremely funny and broke up laughing, he tried to do the story like six times getting further along each time, but just could not keep it together and broke out each time, quite funny. If any of you have any of Kermits blooper albums and can find this, I would appreciate it, My Dad passed away in 1999 from Cancer but I will always remember his love of GBS.

Greg Danes

larnov said:

I remember in the 80s WGBS had a kick-butt signal that came in loud in Palm Bay just like it was a local station

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Their night signal covered all of the Caribbean before they went Spanish and jamming was initiated from Cuba.

Anybody remember Robbie George at WGBS? He was Bob T at WWRL in the sixties. I never heard him on any station in Florida. I wish that I had when Ii was visiting Fort Lauderdale back in the day.

benale said:

Anybody remember Robbie George at WGBS? He was Bob T at WWRL in the sixties. I never heard him on any station in Florida. I wish that I had when Ii was visiting Fort Lauderdale back in the day.

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I remember Robbie George. He was the WGBS music director and often did a weekend shift. He had a wry sense of humor, a very nice guy.

I did some looking back through the early history of WGBS and saw proof in the old Broadcasting Magazine and Broadcasting Yearbook that WGBS started out as the original WFTL in Fort Lauderdale back in 1939. The owner then got permission to move from 1400 with 250 watts to 710 with 10,000 watts. The owner later sold to George B. Storer who moved WFTL to Miami and changed the call letters to match his initials: WGBS, later the power was raised again to 50,000 watts.

The second WFTL appeared in 1946 and I don't want to take it any further than that...

"Hablaradio Siete Mil, La Nuevo WAQI"

I took a trip to Jamaica in 1983 and the only US stations I was able to pick up with a listenable signal were WGBS and WSM.

My old buddy Brian Scott was PD at WGBS in about 1980. I don't think he was there very long.

From Cuba with love

En los 70s esta era la emisora de referencia, semi clandestina, para gran parte de la juventud cubana. Escuchábamos sus "top 40" en Camagüey, en el centro de la isla de Cuba. ¡Muchas gracias a todos en la WGBS por tanta alegría"

[font color=red]This is a mod edit, using Google Translate. Translation: In the 70s this was the reference station, semi underground for much of the Cuban youth. We listened to their "top 40" in Camagüey, in the center of the island of Cuba.Many thanks to everyone in the WGBS by such joy "[/font]

DavidEduardo said:

That signal reached even farther than that.

Many times when I lived in Quito in the mid to late 60's I was able to get WGBS on my car radio... particularly if I was driving to one of my transmitter sites in the early AM hours for maintenance.

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Amazing...we never stopped to think of where that signal went at night. David, I didn't know you did engineering. You've had your hands in many different radio departments, bravo!

I once visited the WGBS transmitter site. Very impressive, solid block building with a huge generator. The main at the time was an RCA Ampliphase and the aux was an old 10KW transmitter that might have dated back to when they were WFTL and got approval to go from 1400 to 710 with 10KW.

To David, I've received a few RF burns. Lucky for me it was only from a 100 watt HF transceiver.