WREK circa 1975 - A Guided Tour

Throughout most of the 1970s, WREK was located on the 5th floor of the Van Leer EE building. You could either walk up several flights of steps, or take the freight elevator (there was an unofficial rumor you weren't supposed to use the elevator, but nobody I knew ever tracked it down. Ignorance was bliss.) If you needed to get in after the building was locked, and didn't have a key, there was an intercom by the loading dock door. eventually I think they got a remote control for the lock, but initially they had to walk down and let you in. The operators didn't like doing this if they were alone, because it meant leaving the station unattended for a couple of minutes.

From either the stairwell or the elevator, you turned right, and went all the way down the hallway until you faced a door. At this point, you had just passed the news room (1), and the transmitter room (2) was humming and buzzing away on your right, behind the "Danger! High Voltage" sign.

The news room was little more than a small, walk-in closet with too much furniture in it (a desk and a book case). You had to push the chair under the desk to get the door open far enough to get in, then nearly sit on the desk to close the door. On one occasion I was in the news studio with another person, and it was excessively cozy. The news studio was primarily used for making carts, but on a couple of occasions I went live in it.

The transmitter room really contained the transmitter. The antenna was on the roof just above. The transmitter included three, whopping big power tubes. They had to be shipped from somewhere like Chicago. We had ours shipped by overnight air freight, insured to the limits. WRAS (Georgia State) used similar tubes; allegedly their Chief Engineer or GM would fly to the factory to buy theirs, which flew back in its packing in a box next to them, in its own (paid for) seat. (They had a much larger budget than we did.)

Entering the door in front of you, you found the lavishly equipped (by low budget gEEk standards) main Control Room (3), sort of a Great Room without a vaulted ceiling. Immediately to your right was a shelf area for "Stuff" (4). This shelf was actually the heart of WREK, from a worker bee perspective. This was where you found news bulletins, AP wires, new music, new music that was up for grabs, notes from other station personnel, and occasionally paychecks^[1].

If you bothered to peak behind the Stuff (on your right, remember?), you found the Engineer's Corner (5). Some cabinets, a work table, a desk, some shelves, a light. And lots and lots of electronics components, many of which you could not find at Radio Shack to save your life.

Directly in front of you in the Control Room (3) was the reception area (sometimes a couch, sometimes chairs, depending on who had found what on the curbside) and operator's desk. The operator's desk actually had very little on it besides an intercom to the studio and loading dock entrance, and the station log, where they were supposed to write down when we played music, Public Service Announcements (PSAs), station identification, and so forth.

To your left were two offices (6). I was only in them once^[2], and don't remember for sure where the doors were.

Across the room from the operator's desk, again to your right, was The Rack (7). This was where things happened. The Rack contained a number of tape playback decks (1/2 inch reels, 1/4 inch reels, cart wheels^[3], and maybe a cassette), the Sequencer (which determined the order the decks were played), equalizers, compressors, noise filters and all sorts of related equipment, plus a plethora of monitors ranging from signal quality scopes to a stereo playing back the live signal from the air to the dreaded Off Air Alarm.

Past the operator's desk was the Main Studio (8). This was where almost all live broadcasts were done, and where music was taped from the vinyl it inevitably arrived on (CDs weren't even a concept yet). You could see into the studio through a large, double paned window next to the operator's desk. Above the studio door was a big, red "On Air" light. Few things got an op's attention like someone reaching for the door handle when that light was on.

As you entered the studio, the only things in front of you were a narrow window and a few metal storage cabinets, which housed our precious record collection. Supposedly we had one of every record we'd ever received, but (a) some of the stuff was so bad WREK didn't keep copies, and (b) some of it disappeared with less than scrupulous employees or their friends.

The window was used by the news crew to determine the weather when we couldn't get the National Weather Service bulletins for some reason, and there wasn't time to call the weather number. This being north Georgia, the most frequent weather conditions were ``sunny and partly cloudy'', ``heavily precipitating'', or ``dark'' (night time, not currently precipitating). There was also a giant, digital readout from a thermometer somewhere on the building's exterior.

Continuing to the left, there was a studio console with a couple of microphones, two extra chairs for guests, the inevitable cart machine, a reel to reel of some sort, and a phone with a light instead of a ringer. Past the console, against the back wall, was our prized Scully deck. It was a beautiful, two track, studio quality recorder which (as far as anyone knew) nobody had ever used.

If you turned to the right when entering the studio, there was another door. This led to the wiring closet (9). It was also a storage room. The phone wires terminated in this room, at a home grown marvel of relay-based telephone electronics. Supposedly Southern Bell had tired of WREK engineers hacking their equipment to do things they'd never intended, and yanked it out, leaving us with bare wires. But I know for a fact that what we had was a huge piece of plywood with wires and components bolted all over it. It tended to mutate a lot (we were mostly EEs after all) and the schematic was always a couple of revs behind.

Notes

In the mid 1970s, we were paid the glorious sum of $1/hour for such student jobs, around half of minimum wage. We were primarily paid in fun and/or experience. For a while, the Fearless Leader of the news staff was able to pay us $1 extra per story that was related to Georgia Tech.
I think I filled out my initial application in one of them. I never heard back from them. Months later, Helen Fairbrother (who did theater and movie reviews) found out I was interested in radio, took me by, and got me hired on the spot. By then, Frank (Triode) was the GM, and things tended to run more smoothly.
Most of the current stuff, from music to PSAs, was on ``carts'', which looked suspiciously like see through 8-track cartridges, but held high-quality stereo tape. Like 8 track tapes, they held tape loops, but with start, stop and "blue" tones designating "start of track", "end of track" and (I think) "start of loop". The blue tones were called that because you pushed a blue button to place the tone on the tape. A "cart wheel" was a carousel for carts. The reels were primarily archives of older music.

Miles O'Neal (meo@rru.com), Sep 1998