The AM Forum

Fresh out of Dodge Radio Institute, Valparaiso Indiana, my dad Paul W8VVS went to work for WMRN, Marion Ohio, 1941 - 1942.  He was on duty when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the news came over the Teletypes.  
* I believe the chief engineer of WMRN at the time was Bob Morrison W8QYU.

Today I came across three glossy 8 x 10 photographs of the station.  Attached is a photo of the transmitter room which I thought many of you would love to see:

* 04/18/13 addition - de Doug WA3DSP, Reply #20:

"Tom asked me to post a high resolution scan (5.6 Mb) of this photo to my website. It is available at

http://www.crompton.com/hamradio/AWA/bohlander_paul2_bio.htm

I added the photo to a bio that I had for Paul.  The WMRN photo is at the end. Just click on it and then save the high resolution print."

Just super!

My kind of place. :D

73DG

Tom,
Thanks for posting the great picture of WMRN where you Dad Paul worked.  I can just see him fine tuning that great RCA transmitter. 
73,
Joe, GMS

I bet they wore starched shirt and tie to work and smoked like the devil in that non-air conditioned room.
An RA 1000? RCA had a similar copy with a slightly different arrangement of meters.

And EEs all used two initials followed by last name.

FB pix Tom!

Nope, Fred.  All RCA there.

73DG

Thanks for posting that shot, Tom,

Same board I'm using here. Had one of the racks, too.

Beautiful logo.

Paul,

I had part of one of those RCA consoles, front panel and chassis.  I parted it out.  Mine had two Vu meter.  All the xfmrs were in it along with the tubes, levers switches, attenuators with the mushroom knobs.  I bought it from Rutgers University.  Have no idea how it came to be in that condition or even what Rutgers was doing with it.

Mine, I think, was a little younger than yours as it had 9 pin tubes. 

Fred

Then Raytheon (RA 1000) was the copy of the transmitter in the picture?
RCA was the bully in the radio world and caused a lot of grief to innovators and inventors.

Hey Fred, they're a lot more common than I thought when I first got this one in 2005.

Yours is actually the more famous, since the "two meter" kind was identical to the one used at Sun Records during the early Elvis Presley sessions. 

(http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01973/19540615-sun_1973181i.jpg)

I've got octal tubes, right. Didn't know there was a version with miniature tubes. Wonder if it may have been converted to cut mechanical noise. The octal tubes could be very microphonic, and each pre-amp chassis was mounted to the mainframe with soft rubber grommets. I've put silicone replacements in there to good effect.

I also have the original paperwork when the station bought and accepted it back in 1948.  It's seen a lot of use but it feels like you're flying an aeroplane with all that bakelite & metal.

Fred, it's an RCA rig, that's all.  No one is trying to claim it is anything else.  Love the old meatball logo.   Those old boards were really built.  (Like everything else back then.)  Probably had huge w.w. pots.  No noise on those.   I'm sure we'd all like to have everything in that tx room photo.  I see what appears to be the station ticket on the left wall. 

Yep- the transmitter is a BTA 250L, or 250K (just slightly different paint colors.)  In the left rack I can see an old GR phase monitor- the upper part is the crystal oven and the unit below it shows the actual deviation.  Below that is an RCA 66A modulation monitor.

Not sure what all is in the right hand rack, though the piece with the meter on it is most likely a BA-86 limiter amp.

Scott Todd

Look at the wall moulding on the left side of the racks.  Is that a hidden door to the directors office?  Or the "don't let it hit you in the back, Your Fired !" door?  Shades of the "Oval Office."  

I just love old hires B&W pixes of this stuff. You can almost read the print on those certificates.

Oh, I see now.  The racks are sunk into the wall and that door probably leads to the cloak room behind them for cable access and stuff.

Paul,

As I remember,  The front panel on the one I had was flat black al. don't remember that curvature along the top.  It was a mike mixer that accepted 7 mics as it had 7 mic input xfmrs.  It also had many other inter-stage type xfmrs.  All of them were made by UTC for RCA.  Had a UTC LS style output xfmr.  The unit had many step level controls of various sizes.  These controls were made by Langevin, very high quality,  I use them in my rigs for audio level.

The unit used all 12AY7s, low noise dual triodes.  Output tubes were missing along with the power xfmr.  It also had a number of step dB attenuators along with some lever switches like yours, but don't remember the push buttons switches.  I still have all the parts and pieces, I check for the push buttons switches.

I use one of the lighted Vu meters in my AM xmtr.  I think the meters were made by Simpson.  I still have all the wiring that was removed from the chassis.  Typical ham, we save everything.

Fred

I do have one bank of push button switches that came from the RCA mixer.

Here is a shot of Mike Dorrough KO6NM, back in '63 sitting at the mighty Western Electric 25B mixer.

The best mixer ever built, IMO.

73DG

A few more:

73DG

Interesting.  A local OT and friend John, W9BYN, also attended radio school in Valparaiso, Indiana in 1941.  He ended up doing communications work for the Army during WWII.  John is 91 now, still getting around and active on the bands.

I used WE 25B boards at a TV and a radio station during the mid-60's.  Bet there aren't many around anywhere these days.

Hi Jeff,

After about a year at WMRN, my father got an instructor job back at Dodge Radio Institute because Dodge obtained a government contract to train U.S Army personnel.  My dad taught Morse code and radio theory courses, military traffic procedures, operation of Army field equipment, etc. 

A legend in your area, Stan Surber W9NZZ became an instructor there also on that contract.  After that contract dried up my father was hired by Philco as a field service technician on radar as part of a Navy contract to get experienced knowledgeable radio technicians out to the field to support the new Navy technology.  This group was called the Air Contingency Group (ACG) and later became known as NAESU, which I think still exists today.  The Army had a similar program.

While I was in the Air Force, in 1971, and stationed at Chanute AFB, I traveled to Kokomo, Onward,  and Peru (pee-roo) to visit my ham friend Doug WA3DSP who was stationed at Bunker Hill AFB at the time (which was renamed Grissom AFB after the Apollo capsule fire).  I met Stan twice, once in Feb. 1971 and then later that summer when my parents came out and we all visited Stan and Doug again.  Stan was still working for the railroad and he took us on tour of a control tower.  I remember driving past the big Delco plant in Kokomo.  Doug WA3DSP is active here on the Forum.

Awesome photos! Like Rick said, the rez on those B&W shots is great.

The shot of the Schlitz can in the studio brings back fond memories of the early 80s. The console was a badly mauled Collins 212B (it actually showed up at NEAR-Fest a few years back and I bought it) instead of the Gates, and the beer was something else equally cheap, Rolling Rock perhaps. A particular memory involved friends stopping in for a visit, running out of beer, putting on a 20 min Opus Magnum by Kansas and a rapid ride to the town General store while listening to make sure the stylus didn't get stuck. Not saying that the station was unmanned, mind you.

The remarkable thing about the photo of ol' No Money is that on the air now he sounds just like he looks in that pic!  :D

Tom asked me to post a high resolution scan of this photo to my website. It is available at

http://www.crompton.com/hamradio/AWA/bohlander_paul2_bio.htm

I added the photo to a bio that I had for Paul.  The WMRN photo is at the end. Just click on it and then save the high resolution print.

Thanks ! 

What a great shot.
 
Noticing stuff like the pen holder next to the little RCA desk mic, and I can see there's one pot up but the channel's not keyed, and that the transmitter Plate switch is off. Geez!

Really appreciate you and Tom posting this material.

Hi Tom, Yeh for some reason the locals call Peru, Indiana Pee-roo,  Go figure.  Didn't know your friend at Bunker Hill (Grissom) AFB, but I knew a few others.  A group a well qualified electronics folks came out of there and were hired by Delco in those years.  One of those (a non-ham) worked in our department (radio design) for many years. 

Interestingly, the budget cuts now threaten the closure of the Grissom control tower (also the tower at Gary. In. which is pretty vital for Chicago air control).

Thanks for the info on Valpo.  I'll provide info to John, W9BYN, and see what he remembers of those years.  Jeff

Concerning the hires pix, what is that below the chair? A Sola constant voltage xformer or something similar?   That wooden seat looks awfully hard for DJ service.
Anyone still have the 16 in. Advert platters with a zillion tracks and do you play them?
Would be be fun at a fester.

Rick,

I think that you are looking at the chair's back mechanism.

When I have time, I will scan in the other 2 8x10's of the station.  One is an outside view of the whole building, and the other is an inside view showing studio rooms.

The 5.6 Mb high res transmitter photo available on Doug's website (link listed in a post above) - If you zoom in on the RCA transmitter meters you can make out most of the words under the meter bezels.

Attached are the other 2 photos of the WMRN set that I have.  According to wikipedia, WMRN was started in 1940.  So the station was only 1 - 3 years old when these photos were taken.

Amazing facilities for a small town, 250 watt station.

Yeah Steve, some one put a lot of 1940 dollars into that set-up.

Today's equivalent would be close to or over the mill mark...

Yeah you can see where the landscaping hasn't really filled in yet, outside.

I wonder if that big room with the chairs was for live performances.  I was talking this weekend with some folks on 80m who named WRVA and WBT among the stations they listened to in the early 1960s.  I went to look at an old Hammond that WRVA wanted to sell as they prepared to relocate.  It was part of a live music studio the station originally had.

Bet this might have been similar.

Those shots were probably taken on a Graflex "press" camera, like a SpeedGraphic. Great big sheet film.  What the lens didn't have for detail was made up for with huge negatives.  An 8x10 could be a 1:1 contact print, so the grain was real small and the resolution real high.

Paul, K2ORC picked one up at a Rochester (NY) fest some years back. I took a shot of him that I have somewhere, and perhaps your Dad as photographer used that type of gear.

A friend of mine, David Burnett, still slogs one of these around as a news photographer. Amazing.

(http://www.petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2013/02/burnettspeedgraphic.jpg)

That's a REAL camera, Paul.

It was customary to sink big dollars into AM radio back then. It used to be a money maker before mom and pop were put out of business. The companies got bigger and bigger and the profits melted away..............then FM radio stole the show.

My observation earlier about the RCA or Raytheon transmitter from Tom's post, was that they seem to be identical looking transmitters. RA 1000 and the RCA unit pictured.

Also, I'm thinking they used a red filter to make the sky and clouds pop out like that using B&W film

There was a problem with a large format camera at Rainchester a few years back. If I remember correctly. Something about a group picture. Nice profile. But the beer was cold. That I remember.


klc

WMRN - Look at the hallway photo.  The doorway on the left must be the entrance foyer of the building.  Each end of the building is a studio.  The glass windows on the right side of the hallway photo must be for the transmitter room.  Note the chairs sitting in the left side of the hallway and the shape of the chair backs.  Now look at the transmitter room photo at the bottom of the frequency monitor rack which is to the left of the transmitter.  You can see the reflection of a chair back.  So it appears that the transmitter room photo was taken through the hallway window.

* I believe the chief engineer of WMRN in 1941 was Bob Morrison W8QYU.

* Ralph W3GL says the flag at the far end of the hallway is a "Defense Flag", which dates to 1944, 2 years after my father left the station.  The photos were then mailed to my father while he was staying at the YMCA on Lehigh Avenue in Philadelphia, at the time.   He was taking courses at Temple University related to radar technology, as personnel of the new Air Contingency Group (ACG) I mentioned in Reply #17 page 1 of this topic.

A little light entertainment from a few years back:

http://www.myfootage.com/details.php?gid=58&sgid=&pid=18082

Here are a couple pix of a WECo 50kW and the bill for it.  Obviously, there was money in AM radio, check the date and dollars... :o

73DG

Looks like the old WE transmitter at WJR-Detroit.  (The great voice of the great lakes)

Those were the days for radio. An entire room (big) for a 5kw transmitter.
My son and I are visiting a local FM as a Cub Scout achievement. The studio will be impressive. Transmitter is remote and only 100 watts. No excitement there.
I wonder if he'll start yapping that his daddy has just as much studio stuff as they do.
As an aside...The Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts still have requirements or electives to get involved with Ham radio.

I stopped at WMRN this week while on vacation in Ohio.  I took a picture of their building from approximately the same position as in the 1943 photo posted in Reply #25 above.  The building is the same except it has been doubled in depth.

WMRN 70 years later:

Tom, thanks so much for starting this thread. 

There is something just so comforting about an old station building still being used today.

73DG

Tom it must have been very nostalgic for you to visit. 

Wonder if you stopped in and talked with anyone?  Maybe it would have broken the spell, since, yeah, probably not likely anyone would care.

I messed with your photo a little, hope you don't mind, and put it alongside the original.

If only people would hold up as well, 70 years later, eh?

Thanks for your comments Dennis.

Paul, in retrospect I probably should have contacted the station months ago but I never considered going inside until I was standing out front this past Tuesday.  I could have walked to the front door but just didn’t care to.  Thanks for converting my photo to black and white and lightening it up to better match the 1943 photo which was taken later in the morning, and for mating them together. (The building is now doubled in depth.)