The number 1400 means a little more than the average four-digit numeral to me, largely because I spent 11 years of my life speaking into microphones that carried my voice into the atmosphere at 1400 kilohertz.
When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, for many summers in the 1950s and ’60s, we would spend a week or two at a cabin along Lake Champlain in Milton, Vermont. Occasionally we would venture into nearby Burlington for dinner and a stroll around town.
One such stroll took us past the storefront studio of WDOT, a popular radio station at 1400 kHz on the AM dial. I watched, enraptured, as a guy sat at a control panel and played music and commercials. My most vivid memory is that when he announced what time it was, he called it “chime time” and rang a bell — “Chime Time is 8:14, folks [DING!]” and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where the bell was.
I trace my fascination with radio to two things — my dad’s enthusiasm for his ham radio operation and WDOT’s storefront studio. They led directly to the 22 years I spent doing radio news in the first half of my post-collegiate career.
A somewhat circuitous route took me to the studios of WDUZ in Green Bay, which happens to operate at 1400. Now, there were hundreds of stations at 1400. It’s probably the most populated of what are called “local” channels, where the stations are limited to broadcasting at no more than 1,000 watts because they were originally designed to serve a limited geographic area. There are five stations at 1400 scattered around Wisconsin alone.
My time reporting the news on WDUZ from 1984 to 1996 was my favorite job ever, until I found myself as editor of the venerable Door County Advocate newspaper a few years later. In both places I worked as part of a quality team that was highly respected in its respective industry, if I say so myself, but eventually they were absorbed into large corporations that didn’t value quality as much as we did.
The mind being as goofy as it is, these memories flooded back as I prepared to post yesterday’s blog entry, which happens to have been the 1,400th consecutive daily post since I started doing this every day on Aug. 1, 2020.
P.S. As near as I can figure out, the Chime Time bell must have been on a cart, that is to say, a tape cartridge programmed to cue itself up so that when it’s time to be played, you press a button and there it is.
