Boston, Labor Day Weekend, 2002

Boston Radio Archives co-editor and Northeast RadioWatch creator Scott Fybush came to Boston on Labor Day Weekend, 2002, to attend a family wedding, and made some time in his schedule to have dinner with some of the Boston-Radio-Interest mailing-list regulars, including your photographer and Archives associate editors Peter George, Donna Halper, and Dan Strassberg. We were joined at the dinner by Donna's husband, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten; Pete Ferrand, most recently of WNTK in New London, N.H.; attorney A. Joseph Ross; an engineer from Mega Communications whose name I have also mislaid; WJIB and WJTO owner Bob Bittner; radio pro Gary Ford from New Hampshire's Lakes Region; local engineering consultant Aaron ~~Read~~ ~~Bishop~~ Whatever; and mailing-list reader Larry Glavin of Methuen, Mass.

The dinner took place at the “99” Restaurant on Alewife Brook Parkway in Cambridge. After dinner, most of the group moseyed on over to Bob's nearby studios to record a couple of episodes of WJIB's signature program, “Let's Talk About Radio”, which has aired late Sunday mornings on the station since 1994. After the taping, Messrs. Fybush and Ferrand lent some their voice talent to WJIB's production department for a few new positioners to be used on the station and sister outlet WJTO (730 Bath, Maine).

The following Saturday, Aaron gave Scott, Scott's wife Lisa, a friend of Lisa's, and your photographer a tour of the new studios of Brandeis campus station WBRS (100.1 Waltham) in the newly-constructed Shapiro Center. (It seemed as if nearly everything on the Brandeis campus was named after this Shapiro character....) Scott and Lisa are both Brandeis alumni, and had worked at the radio station in its then-soon-to-be-former home in the Usdan Student Center. At the time we visited, the station was still operating from Usdan, and only part of the record library had been moved over to Shapiro. A couple of weekends later, the rest of the station was uprooted and deposited in its new home.

Following the visit to Brandeis, Lisa and her friend went off to do their own thing, while Scott and I drove down to the New Bedford area to visit a couple of TV towers. We also stopped at four of the five AM facilities in East Providence so that Scott could take some photos -- while he had visited all of the sites in the past, he did not have good still photos. One of these photos graces his 2003 Tower Site Calendar, which can be ordered on Scott's Web site.