July 2025
NOTE FROM PRESIDENT WAG
Members,
Mark your calendars!
The date for next AHRS Business meeting will fall on the usual 4th Monday, July 28th, 2025, at 7pm. The Exec CMTE will meet in person by invitation only at 6:00 PM. The AUGUST meetings will be on Monday, August 25, 2025, at the same times.
Boyd Bailey will host for the meeting despite being on vacation with family and hopefully, we can make things on our end!
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86330579924?pwd=ckZLWEJMb0V2ajhBUzh0S2liQnlmZz09
Meeting ID: 863 3057 9924
Passcode: 631140
Boyd’s next class is Saturday, Aug 2nd, 2025, and plans to discuss
I. band-pass and band-stop filter configurations, with, I hope, some illuminating clarifications
II. the trouble-shooting process on one of the most difficult projects we had in the past 5 years
III. a grounding refresher, couplates, and the 'big one': oscillator coil matching
IV. try to work in some practical aspects of using a NanoVNA for precise measurements of capacitors at high frequencies
V. additional topics for the future, eg, ham-related topics, and
VI. possibly the homebrew puzzler mentioned last time.
The following link remains in effect:
Topic: AHRS Radio Restoration Class
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web..us/j/88180351990?pwd=N2lucjB3WVhtR05nTSs5S0xGcURadz09
The puzzler: This picture was in our latest newsletter as a donation from the estate of Dave Ingram; we are working on the background of this homebrew device but have been stymied. Let me add it as a puzzler: Does anyone know what this mechanism is?
The puzzler is solved but we want this now to be a teaser… The homebrew is described in the pamphlet below with details to follow!
Let me thank everyone that volunteered to serve on a committee, both past and those just added!
August will be busy:
· We will be again exhibiting at the Alabama Broadcasters Association annual meeting August 7th. This year’s theme is AM (yes, AM!) stereo which was a short-lived technology here in the Birmingham area and overtaken by FM stereo. We have a transmitter and are looking to find an example or 2 of receivers. Personally, I was unaware of the modality until we received the donation.
· The Society will be at the Huntsville Hamfest on Saturday August 16th and we’ll need volunteers to help at the shop and at the Von Braun Center South Hall. Details about the event are at hamfest.org. We plan to bring some vintage keys and have repaired several legacy items of ham radio interest to the sell at our tables.
· The local Council is hosting an endeavor on August 23rdto help Scouts earn merit badges. We participated last year and had several at the shop to help them get their radio merit badge. We plan to participate again this year.
Tom Killian and Ray Giles are looking to host another auction,but this will need to wait until we get through our August activities.
On behalf of the Shop CMTE, and all our members, we must reinforce our policy of not leaving projects on benches for extended times. Recently, we have had several days with a couple of workstations unavailable due to projects that had just been left there for days to weeks. This is unfair to the general membership so we must please ask several things:
· Move your project at the close of your “work session” so another can use the position. We plan to make room on the shelves to facilitate this.
· Tidy your space and return tools to their proper storage places when you’re done for the day.
· If you encounter problem with tools or test equipment at the bench, let an officer or board member know.
· If you need a tube for which we have many available in the tube room, members may use one to repair a personal radio. If a tube is rare, please use it for diagnosis only and return it; consider purchasing the replacement. If we are repairing something for a non-member, generally the replacement should be purchased (unless we have so many in the tube room, we need to thin the herd…). If in doubt about tubes or other parts, ask!
· Remember also, if a radio is being repaired for a non-member and/or may be left in the shop for more than a few days, please fill out a “repair form” so we know whose it is with contact information, context, and which member(s) are working on it.
Thanks to Robert Cain and Steven Westbrook for putting up signs for both our reference library on the main shop level and the underused lending library downstairs. Now, you can't miss them!
The fully restored Hallicrafters SX-88 is now on display on the main level of the shop near the library door. John Green, a longtime friend of the Society who completed the restoration at his home in NC, will present a several part program about Hallicrafters and this unit in particular. We hope to have the first Zoom program at our business meeting in August. Again, on behalf of the Society, thank you John on many levels!
Back in March, we got a donation from colleagues at BARC (Birmingham Amateur Radio Club) of this Drake R7 receiver which had intermittent audio and S meter function. Member Ken Smith spent hours troubleshooting and repairing circuit boards so that the radio seems to be fully functional again. Thanks so much for your expertise, especially with non-hollow state devices Ken!!!!
Our Board held its quarterly meeting on Tuesday July 22nd – all officers and 8 of 9 Board members attended. To everyone’s relief the next Board meeting won’t be until year’s end which includes our annual Holiday get-together. (Date and nominees TBD…)
· One of the goals relating to the library was to create and place signage for reference and lending libraries. The Board commends Steven Westbrook and Robert Cain for obtaining and hanging them, respectively.
· The Board strongly reaffirmed we enforce our policy regarding projects left at work benches; see above.
· Boyd asked if other topics, eg, ham-related, should be included in his future classes.
· We are otherwise in compliance with our bylaws and SOP
In closing, Dave Cisco gave an oral presentation last November on the history of Powel Crosley and his radios, radio stations, and cars as well as other interests in his private and civic life. The audio was transcribed, was edited, and is presented along with some photos in this issue. No AI was used (or harmed) in the process, and we thank Dave for the program and all who assisted in bringing it to print here; proper attribution has been given.
Respectfully submitted,
President Wag, AHRS
Shelley Stewart
Below is an article from B’ham Now about a significant achivement by one of our regular attendee at our Legends of Broadcast events.
A Birmingham legend has earned a spot in the highly-coveted Radio Hall of Fame thanks to his lifelong commitment to journalism, local business and civil rights.
Born in 1934, Shelley Stewart began his radio career in 1953 at WEDR after graduating from Rosedale High School and enlisting in the U.S. Air Force, according to The History Makers. His on-air moniker was “Shelley The Playboy.”
This would just be the beginning of an illustrious career that has spanned over 70 years.
Another trophy for the shelf
This isn’t Stewart’s first major accolade. In 1999, he was awarded the “Footsteps to Freedom Award from the 16th Street Foundation, and in 2013, the National Association of Black Journalists honored him with the Community Service Award.
He was also named a Pioneer of Radio Inductee by the Smithsonian Institution in 1996.
Stewart will join 10 other radio personalities in this year’s induction into the Radio Hall of Fame. The event will take place in Chicago this October.
On the most recent episode of his podcast, Shelley’s Plumbline—which he also calls the “Academy of Common Sense”—Stewart discussed the accolade with humility.
Many people say I have a ‘voice.’ I don’t know whether I have a voice or not, I just talk. Many people think I got there with practice. No, I did not practice being a radio personality. Never in my life had I dreamed of being a radio personality, and I certainly never dreamed of being inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. That never crossed my mind.
B’ham Now
Shelley Stewart
An inspiring career despite a difficult start
At just 5 years old, he and his brothers watched their mother be murdered by their father, as told in a book detailing his life story, “Mattie C.’s Boy: The Shelley Stewart Story” by Don Keith. This began a childhood of suffering, homelessness, abuse and racism.
That didn’t hold him back, though. He would go on to support Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement, most notably with the Children’s March in Birmingham.
Throughout his career, he worked at WEDR in Birmingham; WOKJ in Jackson, Mississippi; and then back to Birmingham at WENN and WATV. He and Erskine Fausch eventually acquired WATV, transforming it into the most popular radio station in the city.
In an effort to reduce dropout rates and increase graduation rates of high school students, he founded the Mattie C. Stewart Foundation in 2007.
He also founded a prominent marketing company in 1967 called Steiner Marketing, today known as o2ideas.
Today, his podcast is on its 10th season. On each episode, he discusses social topics “that are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago,” the podcast’s description says. Shelley’s Plumbline has produced over 100 episodes since 2023.
At 90 years of age, Shelley still sits down before the microphone as he pursues answers to tough topics, challenging us to change the experience of being human and our outlook on humanity.
Mark Jamroz, Executive Producer of Shelley’s Plumbline
This Birmingham radio station put me in danger of smoking pot
July 15, 2025 David Sher 23 Comments
By Terry Barr
Before music streaming, there were CD’s, cassettes, 8-tracks, 33, 45, and 78 records, The Sony Walkman, Apple iPods, and of course, AM and FM radio.
Birmingham has a storied radio history but there was one radio station I heard about while sitting in the back of my church.
It was fall, 1974. I was home from the University of Montevallo for the weekend, and on that Saturday night—still warm for late September or early October—as I was preparing to meet some friends, I heard words that literally stilled my soul:
“This will be my last show,” the voice said. “On Monday, the station is changing formats.”
Of course I knew that radio stations did this occasionally. I remembered when WERC shifted from some banal middle-of-the-road playlist (about as Pop as they got were songs by The Association and The Fifth Dimension) to Pop/Rock. “The Big Switch,” they called it, and on a Sunday at noon, the switch meant that “Ticket to Ride” could be followed by “Hold Your Head Up.”
I also remember my father lamenting that yet another station that played “your music” had infiltrated his car radio, leaving him only WCRT, which played big band and other standards from Dad’s youth, to WAPI, which played, well really, who remembers what they played?
I should have been kinder to Dad. Didn’t he deserve a few stations, since now “we” had WERC, WSGN, WVOK (50,000 watts!), and maybe even WAQY was still around.
But greed affects even the otherwise most considerate of us.
So call what happened with WZZK, which had formerly been WJLN-FM, a karmic payback. And yes, even in my devastation, I realized that the universe does like to play these little tricks on us [In full disclosure, when I lamented this change in life’s circumstances to my father, he actually was sympathetic, even if he had no idea what “Free Form, Underground FM” meant.]
Free Form. Underground. FM. No playlist.
To my memory, WJLN-FM (sister station to WJLD-AM, one of B’ham’s soul stations) began its progressive shows with a DJ named Father Tree, whose time slot was usually the evening—after 6 PM, though I can’t be sure because I listened only once or twice given that I was still a Top 40 junkie. Father Tree was a legend, and that has to be true because I first heard about him in that most scared of spaces, the back row of our church, during service.
FM radio was a novelty even in the early 70s. I remember when WBRC-FM (106.9) decided to play a rock and roll format, with every other hit being “solid gold.” Later, WAPI-FM did something similar, though what I think is that everything they played early on was an oldie. Stunning, too, was the day my father bought a new car with an AM/FM radio, though he continued listening purely to AM.
As good of a memory as I have, however, I cannot for the life of me remember the first time I really tuned into WJLN (104.9), and even more to my sadness, I don’t remember what my motivation was other than I had likely grown tired of not being as cool as my friends who lived for bands like Wishbone Ash, Cactus, Humble Pie, and, of course, Black Sabbath.
I wasn’t against tuning in a progressive station, but I did think doing so would mark me, would put me in danger, would make me want to…
smoke pot.
At some point WJLN started programming Free Form Progressive basically all day—from 9AM till at least 10 PM. I think on this now and understand that they either thought they had enough support in the Birmingham community to do so, or they understood that their FM frequency was only simulcasting the AM to a lot of dead listener air.
So it was a summer, and let’s call it 1972. I worked for my father at the wholesale jewelry store he managed, my job being to box up and price new merchandise or reprice older stock. That I made $1.65 an hour doing this still amazes me, though in the moment, my weekly wage afforded me a rash of new 45s and then, real 33 and 1/3 LPs. Sure, I saved for college, too, which even in 1972 seemed a distant forever.
I sat in a back office, away from the other clerks and billers. I didn’t mind, because in that office was an old-fashioned tube radio that took its time warming up, but then allowed me to tune in to whatever program I wanted. So in that summer, I decided to try WJLN, which was relatively commercial free, given that most of the ads were for head shops, record stores, and a place called The Angry Revolt.
Radio with no set format, no robotic playlist, felt like floating, except that I had never heard of half the bands making it on air: The Michael Quatro Jam Band, for one. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, for another, though I figured this had to be the same Manfred who hit with “The Mighty Quinn” back in the mid-60s. Maybe their song “Buddha” did have a kinship to Quinn. I always wondered.
They would also play entire album sides and/or fifteen minute songs like Yes’s “Close to the Edge.” What I particularly loved, though, was that they took requests, and I don’t mean that, like AM, someone would call in and request “Down on the Corner,” a song that was already in rotation and so would have to be played anyway, request or not.
No.
I called in often, requesting Neil Young and Buffalo Springfield tunes. It felt so personal to request “Bluebird” and then hear it come through the radio maybe five minutes later.
One of my best memories, though, was the day after I watched an ABC Tuesday Movie of the Week, a script adapted from a book about a teenaged girl who got heavily into drugs. The film was titled Go Ask Alice, and during it “Alice” listened to a haunting song that I vaguely knew, or at least I knew it was by Jefferson Airplane, a band I thought, again, was too out there and scary. Did I think they were they too hippieish? Too “revolutionary?” Too into drugs? Or was it Grace Slick’s voice, which certainly did haunt my dreams?
So the following day, I called in to WJLN and requested the title I thought was correct: “Go Ask Alice.” The DJ, Bob Gilmore, was his usual friendly self. In fact, whenever he introduced himself, he added, “Your friend” to the “Bob Gilmore.”
“Sure man, I’ll get that on soon.”
And when he played it, by request, he didn’t add that the kid who requested it didn’t know that the song was really called “White Rabbit.”
A kid would remember such a gesture, for sure.
And, of course, that song was about drugs, and Alice in Wonderland.
The other main DJ, the morning guy, was “Brother Bill Levy.” Bill was nice enough though always a bit distant. I loved his voice, and sure, I wanted to be as cool as he was. My memory says that he had the hippie banter down well, but loved nothing more than to get on air and treat the rest of us to a deeper cut from Vanilla Fudge or New Riders of the Purple Sage.
I listened faithfully to the station in those years. It eventually changed its call letters to WZZK, and sometimes the DJs even referred to it as Z-104. They never formatted anything regular, though, and up until the very end, they were playing The Band, or Jethro Tull, and even The Moody Blues.
I know. This sounds like a Classic rock station, except classic rock stations now won’t play the ten-minute version of “Cowgirl in the Sand,’ will they?
So it was Bob Gilmore I called after he announced the end.
It was Bob Gilmore who informed me, with utter distaste, that the station was going “country” (in hindsight, a very shrewd business decision).
And it was Bob Gilmore who played the very last song I ever heard on the only progressive free form FM station I ever heard in the Birmingham of the early 1970s, or ever.
The song was by The Moody Blues, from their LP To Our Children’s Children’s Children.
A song called, “Watching and Waiting.”
And for many years after, that’s what I did.
If anyone knows what happened to Bob or Bill or where they are, please tell them I think of them often, with love.
Other columns by Terry Barr you might enjoy:
· Celebrate Birmingham authors who tell the truth
· Man sheds tears over old Birmingham restaurant
· Did you know Birmingham had a counterculture?
· My heart aches for Birmingham’s old music scene
· My heart aches for all those old Birmingham restaurants
· South Carolinian aches for a trip back to Birmingham
Terry Barr is a native of Bessemer. He has been a Professor of English at Presbyterian College in upstate South Carolina since 1987. His most recent essay collection, The American Crisis Playlist (Redhawk Publications 2021) is available at Amazon.com, and you can find his work at medium.com/@terrybarr.
David Sher is the founder and publisher of ComebackTown. He’s past Chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce (BBA), Operation New Birmingham (REV Birmingham), and the City Action Partnership (CAP).
Reprint with premission from ComebackTown, Terry Barr & David Sher
Quotes of the Month
Success means going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiam. - Winston Churchill
This is a nice place. It reminds me of the reform school. - Larry Fine
We meet every Saturday (unless a Holiday weekend) at 8:30 A.M. until around 11:30 A.M., at the one-story AHRS Shop at the corner of 8th Avenue North and 18th Street, (1801 8th Avenue North, Birmingham, AL 35203). Please use the rear (Southeast) entrance.
The Shop is open on Tuesdays at 8:30 A.M. until around 11:30 A.M. Note that parking can be a problem on Tuesdays, so you may have to find street parking occasionally.
Regular monthly members meetings are on the fourth Monday night starting at 7:00 PM with the Executive Meeting starting at 6:30 PM
Please come join us!
The electronics classes are generally on “Zoom” and “in-person” at the AHRS Shop, typically the first Saturday of each month (except when something special is taking place, then we agree on an alternative Saturday)
Check your emails for the schedule and how to participate.
We start from the beginning Ohms Law, inductors, resistor and Capacitors color codes, as well as what each component does within the radio circuits. We also teach how to use test equipment used in the repairing of radios. We teach troubleshooting radio troubles, as well as how to read a radio diagram.
Currently the class is studying advance topics relating to troubleshooting and project radio repair. We are retooling our website in hopes of archiving prior classes for those who may have missed a prior class. Email will provide timely details on date, topics & links.
There are coil winding classes, and one-on-one repair help. Come join these classes!
Membership dues are $25.00 a year, payable beginning in January. If you have questions about your dues, you can contact Treasurer Mike Woodruff at 205-823-7204. Dues can be mailed to AHRS at P.O. Box 131418, Birmingham, Alabama 35213 or paid on-line at https://alhrs.org
Be sure and check out our website at https://alhrs.org, which has copies of all newsletters from 2006 to the present (click on News), videos, photo galleries, museum, Old Time Radio columns, Projects, Reading Rooms, Archives, and Contact Information. Within the next few months we hope to update our website and add additional content and new capabilities
President – Richard “Wag” Waguespack
(205) 531-9528
drminims@aol.com
Vice President – Steven Westbrook
(205) 305-0679
spwestbro@bellsouth.net
Recording Secretary – Grady Shook
(205) 281-3007
gshook@bellsouth.net
Treasurer – Mike Woodruff
(205) 823-7204
woodruff_michael@hotmail.com
Boyd Bailey, Member and Instructor
(334) 412-6996
boyd.bailey@charter.net
Newsletter Editor/Webmaster – Steven Westbrook
(205) 305-0679
spwestbro@bellsouth.net
Web Address:
https://alhrs.org
E-mail Address:
ahrs2000@gmail.com
Youtube Channel: Alabama Historical Radio Society - YouTube