Now we know…
April 27, 2025We were surprised to see the WLSW callsign return to it’s original home of 103.9 in Decmeber.
Of course when Ludwig Stanley Wall started it in 1971, the call letters stood for his name and it was licensed to Scottdale, PA. When Wall died, the station was sold to Broadcast Communications, Inc. who immediately put a new transmitter on and changed the callsign to WKHB-FM. The station was reassigned to Uniontown a few years ago.
As mentioned before the old calls returned a few months ago and the station is now reimaged as “2WLS”.
2WLS sounds like an Australian station that airs National Barn Dance.
I’m glad they went back to WLSW myself, it’s a classic name I remember from when I finally got a good a good receiver that could pick up these out of town and small stations and the FM band was opened up to me.
They had up and coming DJs who played interesting music, and they were playing albums at midnight for a while, 1980s. They called it “FM 104” and had a DJ who opened the mic, and he either started talking too fast, or the system was on mute, because he always came up a ‘..M 104’ on the air, or there would be a quiet pop and then the M ‘pmmm 104’ Maybe it was a noise gate not opening on the quiet ‘F’, but it was like that every time.
They had a dee jay with a Freeform format at one time, I barely remember it though, playing a variety, a hold-out from early FM radio I think.
On the call letters.. I wonder if letters aren’t just symbolic and meaningful to the station owners only, especially today when we have much more media. Radio geeks hang on this stuff, but do the real listeners even notice or care? All they want is the information or the tunes.
I hear old aircheck tapes from decades ago, and the dee jays are pounding on the call letters in every break several times, and that would get annoying.
Yeah, for business purposes and branding, they could use it as their corporate name, ‘WLSW Inc’., Nielsen ratings are by electronic pickup these days, ‘PPM’ and listeners don’t need to remember call letters.
I think they should just call it “Slaw 103.9” and call it a day. If ‘The Pickle’ or Smeltdown Radio could get away with it..
Have a good one.