Mike Dell's World, number four twenty two for
11/16/2025.
When I was a young boy,
there wasn't any Internet.
There There wasn't any World Wide Web.
There wasn't any
egghead sending me texts saying those are the
same thing. You don't have to say Internet
and World Wide Web. They're the same thing.
There weren't any video games when I was
a boy.
Well, there was Pac Man.
That was a game, I guess.
And Asteroids,
Wizard of War,
Scramble. Defender was a hell of a lot
of fun.
Those were what we called
video games.
Did I say we didn't have video games?
Because that would have been a mistake.
But there is one thing you have now
that we didn't have when I was a
boy that I wish we did.
Mike Dell's World.
Of course, if you guys recognize
the the voice there, that was, Brett Butt,
who is
a famous comedian in Canada and, also the
creator of Corner Gas,
which is a Canadian
sitcom, which,
was
absolutely
my favorite
sitcom of all time. And,
he did a podcast for a while, so
I kinda,
lifted his,
intro,
except for I
finished the last with Mike Dole's world.
Anyway
so, yeah, today, we're gonna talk about
radio,
and I'm talking broadcast
radio.
And
another nice thing about being up here in
Northern Michigan is we don't really have
big radio groups up here.
You know, we don't have clear channel. We
don't have
you know I don't know. There's a whole
bunch of different big
conglomerate radio groups, but
the vast majority of the radio stations around
here are locally
owned
and locally operated.
You know, they do play some syndicated
shows,
especially the talk stations.
You know, they they play some
some definite,
syndicated stuff, but, there's also some
local programming, which a lot of places don't
have anymore.
You know, at least not not any of
the small town areas. I mean, I I
would say I guess that's probably not true.
There's probably
at least one station everywhere, but, you know,
all these radio groups up here are pretty,
locally owned.
The big one in town,
WTCM,
and, of course, the call sign stands for
Traverse City, Michigan,
WTCM
AM five eighty, and FM one zero three
point five with other translator stations,
all over the place.
And I won't go into the super geeky,
details, but five eighty is a 50,000
watt
directional
AM station that reduces power at night.
So during the day, it's 50,000 watts, and
its signal is directional towards the Northeast,
which makes it
kinda nice pretty much anywhere
North of Traverse City,
you know, and even into the Eastern Upper
Peninsula,
and I'm I'm assuming,
Southern Ontario,
you can listen to w c t yeah.
WTCM.
I'll I'll talk about another station here in
town too. But,
yeah, at night, they flip it down to
1,100 watts so it doesn't,
get out very,
very far.
That,
four tower array that makes it directional
is
right, by my folks' place,
at my mom's house.
I remember when they were building that array.
It was fun watching them build that.
But, they've got four,
I don't know how tall they are, a
couple 100 feet, 300 foot towers, something like
that.
And,
it's very distinctive,
when you're driving around the area. You can
see the
the the box towers there,
west of town,
up on the hill. It's
a little bit away from
Green Hill.
Green Hill is, like, the main big hill
up on Silver Lake Road.
And you get over that and pass the
Crown Golf Course, turn up Secor Road,
and that transmitter array is off on the
right.
The towers are probably a 100 yards apart,
and there's four of them in kind of
a box pattern. And,
somehow that makes it directional.
I don't know.
I I I guess I do understand
the theory behind it, but,
it's,
very techy geeky.
But, yeah, you can, definitely, during the day,
hear them, you know, just all the way
up,
you know, the Northern Half Of The Lower
Peninsula and the Eastern Half Of The
Upper Peninsula.
And, yeah, it's,
it's quite a station, and they play
a lot of the syndicated stuff. They were
the home of Rush Limbaugh.
Now I don't know what they have on
from twelve to to three.
Haven't really listened
too much, but they,
you know, they had Dan Bongino
on there until he became the
assistant director of the FBI.
And
I forget who the other guys were they
had on there that took over for Rush
when Rush passed away.
But, they had them on there for a
while. But, you know, they have the usual,
you know, conservative talk radio suspects in the
afternoon. But in the morning, they have a
local
show, Ron Jolly show,
and then, Vic McCarty
show.
And that goes basically from seven until noon,
those two shows. And those are definitely local
and
very cool. And on the weekends, they have
some some
buy your time
radio shows. You know? I don't know if
you know in radio
and some of the smaller stations, you can
buy an hour or two
on the weekends
and, put on your own radio show. So
there's a couple of those. I think there's,
like, an estate planning show and
some sort of automotive show. And, Leo LaPorte
used to have,
his syndicated
talk,
you know, his syndicated talk, the tech guy
show.
I think they have Kim Commando on there.
She's a national talker,
on the weekend.
But, you know, kind of a interesting
interesting
setup.
And and right now, they're on AM five
eighty. Five eighty is an act you know,
really good frequency on AM. The lower the
frequency,
the better.
And so they're down at five eighty, but
they started out in,
1941.
They were Traverse City's first commercial radio station,
and they were on thirteen
seventy.
But that only lasted
a little bit of time before they bumped
to 1,400,
kilohertz or 1.4
megahertz.
From 1941
until 1982.
I was in high school when they made
the switch to five eighty.
And at the time before the switch, they
were simulcasting
their FM signal. And
WTCM
FM is the big country station here in
town,
which is colocated,
with the with WTCM
AM in the Paul Bunyan Building,
which is a
kind of smallish looking building,
right on Front Street, Traverse City.
And
also in that building is WKLT,
the rock station.
So and that's a a pretty recent thing,
but I'll I'll get to that in a
bit. But, TCM
FM,
when did that
come in? I'm just looking through some of
the my fact sheet here.
I wanna say it was
it was a little bit later on.
Oh, 1975.
There we go.
I I believe that that started.
And
but another thing that, that company, it's Midwestern
Broadcasting.
That's a locally owned group by the Biederman's.
Les Biederman started started the station, and then
Ross Biederman took over. And I think he's
retired now, and
and somebody else is running it, but, it's
still owned by the the family.
And they also, you know, have WATT
in Cadillac,
WATZ
in Alpena,
WMBM
in Petoskey where they started it, and then
that that got switched. I'll tell you something
cool about that too.
But, you know, so they had quite a
few
stations. They also started the first TV station
here in Traverse City, WPBM
or PBN,
channel seven. And my mother used to work
there when she was in high school.
She worked as a receptionist at the TV
station up there, and then I worked at
the TV station for a couple of years
as a master control,
guy on the weekends and evenings,
you know, putting in the commercials and helping
with the news
and whatever.
And
but, that was all part of the Midwestern
Broadcasting
family. And here in the
I forget when
this happened.
In fact, I'll have to look. WKLT,
which was known as double rock KLT
for a while because they had two,
they had two transmitters,
and
they were owned by a a different group.
But
Ross bought them up
a few years ago.
A good friend of mine, Omelette
is his name, Steve Nordsman,
and
omelette on the air.
And, he he was working for KLT,
and
when they ran into hard times, he jumped
over to another station owned by another friend
of mine,
the bear
ninety eight one.
And
he was over there for a couple of
years. And then when Midwestern bought,
WKLT,
they brought him back.
And now he's teamed up with his former
former morning show guy,
Finster, I guess, is his name. Sean is
his is his name. I haven't really met
Sean, but,
the omelette and Finster show, it's, you know,
one of those rock
station things. I've I've filled in, for the
news guy a couple of times on his
show
just because. Why not? It's kind of fun.
But,
anyway, so KLT is now also in the
Paul Bunyan Building, but Midwestern also has WCCW,
which has two stations as well as an
AM and an FM.
WCCWAM
was the ESPN Sports talker.
They're at thirteen
twenty, I think.
And now they're, WTCM
Gold. They play old country music on AM,
which is kinda cool. You you you know,
riding around in the car. I kinda like
listening to that because it's, country music from
the fifties, sixties, seventies.
And,
I guess it's going pretty good.
Jack O'Malley,
who was the morning guy on the country
station for,
well, at least twenty or thirty years,
and then he became a congressman for
two terms,
down in Lansing,
a state congressman or state,
representative, I guess you'd call it,
in the state house. And then, he came
back, and now he's the morning show guy
on WTCM Gold,
which is CCWAM.
And then CCW
FM is the oldies station.
And what's funny about that now is, I
guess, I'm getting old.
They're playing a lot of the stuff I
remember as as current.
The old joke with WCCW
FM was
they bought all their music in the seventies
and then just, they don't change any of
the music. They just change their what they
call their format
as it gets longer. You know? But, that's
always funny. But, WCCW
stands for Cherry Capital of the World.
And,
but, they're they're part of the Midwestern group,
And I know there's at least a couple
other stations. I by the way, this is
not gonna be a comprehensive list. This is
just gonna be what I know about.
But,
but WCCW,
I the thing I remember is
was a guy named
Lynn McNett,
and his,
what was his on air name? I forget.
Michael O'Shea. There we go. I remember him
for the longest time.
He was kind of
the, the personality
behind CCW. He's since passed away.
But,
yeah, I remember, remember him when I was
a kid, listening to him. And there was
a guy on w c TCM AM, Merlin
Dummerow,
and he was there right from the beginning.
I think he was, like you know, he
signed on in 1941,
with the station,
and he would do a thing called farm
and orchard time every day at noon.
And it
reminded me of
the guy on
w
k r p in Cincinnati, the the
the news guy. I
can't think of his name right now, the
one that had the fake walls
in his office.
But, anyway so Mer Merlin was kinda that
way, but he was cooler.
And, he retired
probably at least ten years ago,
and
I went to school with his, his kid,
Dale.
And
and my mom knew him when he, you
know, when she worked at the TV station
because he had something to do with that
as well, and they used to call him
Zeke.
I don't know why he got that nickname.
But, you know, there's a whole bunch of
other stations. It's kind of crazy, you know,
flipping through the the, AM band or the
FM well, the AM band isn't that crowded.
There's, like, four or five stations. But on
the FM band, I swear it's, every little
bit. There's also a couple of public radio
stations here.
There's, Interlochen public radio, which I had talked
about in a previous episode, but
its claim to fame was, Kate Patello's, their
morning DJ
on the classical station.
They also have a news station, so they
have two different
frequencies. And then,
WCMU,
radio
out of Mount Pleasant for Central Michigan University,
they also have two stations,
here. They got translators here. They're all over
the state, but they have two translators here
in Traverse City. One,
is their news talk, NPR station, and then
the other one's another classical. So we have
lots of classical, plus there's a whole bunch
of religious broadcasting stations.
The old 1,400
frequency,
that WTCM
AM was on
got sold to a religious broadcaster, and,
I I don't know if it's the same
transmitter, but it's the same antenna
that they used way back in the day,
on that station.
But, yeah, we have you know, if you're
into listening to radio, there is a lot
of radio around here, and some of it's
even local.
And that's, you know, kind of the problem
with the radio business.
Again, I've talked about this in, you know,
long time ago in previous episodes, but,
you know, a lot of it, they listen
to the consultants and they have the playlists,
and they're playing syndicated.
Even the DJs. You know, around here, there
are some DJs. Not a lot, but there
are some.
WKLT
has live live DJs. I I know at
least during most of the day.
I don't know what they do at night.
The country station has live DJs,
throughout the day.
The AM station, of course, you know, has
live
programming
during the day,
during the morning.
But like I said, I'm not sure. You
know?
I frankly don't listen to a lot of
it anymore. I get I get in the
vehicle, and most of the time, it's a
podcast.
Sorry. I had to take a drink there.
But,
you know, most of the time when I'm
driving around, it's that. But, like, you know,
if I just wanna go for a ride,
you know, and sometimes I'll just take the
dog and just go
drive around out in the woods and
and then I'll put on WTCM
Gold
and listen to Old Country. That's kind of
fun and, you know, the the AM has
a certain sound quality to it that,
I I guess you wouldn't call it quality,
but it's a it's an attribute
that
just sorta reminds me of the old days.
And
always wanted to get into antique radios.
There's an outfit around here that restores old
radios, but I'd like to get one and
try to restore it myself. And I'd probably
just put it on TCM Gold and and,
you know, that sound really cool on a
nineteen forties four model radio of some sort.
I do have a pretty cool radio I
got from my grandfather,
a Zenith Transoceanic.
It's a shortwave AMFM
radio, and it has a little thing that
flips up. And there's a wheel there so
you can figure out the time zones and
and,
a little map of of where the time
zones are. So if you're listening to Radio
Moscow, you can see what time zone they're
in and whatever. It's kinda cool, but I
don't know how much shortwave is even out
there anymore either.
Again, you know, radio is, you know,
podcasting and YouTube and all this other stuff
is sort of, eclipsing a lot of radio
first for a lot of people.
But you know? And I'm kind of one
of them. I still, you know, love the
magic of radio.
And I am a ham radio operator. And,
again, we're gonna have an episode about that
coming up,
but, you know, that's there's a little bit
of difference. But, you know, even ham radio
is kind of dying.
A lot of the local VHF,
repeaters and whatnot are pretty,
well,
not very busy anymore like they used to
be in the in the eighties and nineties
because
everybody's got a pocket computer and
can communicate with the entire world
with their phone.
You know? With and phone, I I use
in air quotes because it's not really a
phone. It's a pocket computer. It just happened
to happens to have a phone function.
But,
yeah. So
the world is changing, but, broadcasting
in this area
is
seemingly alive and well.
And, you know, back in the day,
you know, when I worked at the TV
station, they had to have somebody there twenty
four seven.
You know, even with automation,
there was always at least the master control
person in the station
at night to
monitor the transmitters.
And, you know, we had to have a
general radio telephone license, which wasn't hard to
get. You just had to get one,
you know, to operate the station and same
thing with the with the, radios.
But now there's
all kinds of unattended
transmitters all over the place and
and master control
for the TV stations.
Well, at least the ones on the hill
here because it's an ABC, NBC combined now.
They do, they have two different stations out
of there, but they have multiple channels. You
know, with digital, they can have multiple channels
on each of the transmitters.
And
I don't believe there's a person in the
building after a certain hour. I think after
the 11:00 news, it goes on automation,
and, nobody's there until the morning news.
So there's a few hours there where there's
just nobody in the building.
But I yeah. When I used to work
there, I would work the overnight. So, you
know, after the 11:00
news, everybody left and it was just me
in the building. I'd take hourly checks on
the two transmitters
that we had. They were both remote transmitters,
but we had a remote control set up
and and all that. So, you know, and
and nowadays, I don't think they do that.
And master control is no longer local.
Their master control is in Flint, and, the
person that's operating the station
is operating
10 or 12 stations
around the state
remotely from Flint.
So
way different than it used to be. I
used to I used to enjoy that. It
was kind of fun.
Of course, we would play it in the
middle of the night. They'd play this, news
program from NBC,
and it was
twenty five minutes
of nothing for me to do every half
hour.
And then I would run a, two minute
local break
and then go back to the network,
and that's what I did most of the
night. So a lot of the times, I
was watching
Star Trek next generation, which we had on
videotape
on one of the side monitors, and I'd
be watching episodes of that
except for, when I had to do a
break
and a little alarm clock that would go
off about a minute before the break and
and make sure I have all my commercials
in and,
you know, trigger the break, do the IDs,
and
send it back to the network.
But I was there,
and I looked at
the looked at the, transmitters,
and the lights. You you also had to
monitor the lighting system. It was remote.
But, you know, if one of the lights
went out, it would indicate on the panel,
and then I'd have I had a 800
number to call the FAA to let them
know that the light's out on the tower,
and they'd put out a NOTAM for the
airplanes
to say, hey. Tower lights are out on
this tower here. And,
Yeah. It was a whole thing. But,
one of the one of the cool stories,
there there was this
phenomenon
because all these thing these remote transmitters were
connected via
microwave.
Yeah. That's just really super high frequency,
signals that went between towers. And there was,
like, three hops
up to the Sheboygan
transmitter, which was, you know, way up north
by the UP.
And
so but from our tower at the station,
we could watch
channel four out of Sheboygan. We could see
it off air because we had 500 foot
tower.
And then we'd also watch the channel seven
transmitter, which was down in Harietta,
you know, half hour south of Traverse City.
So I had a monitor for each.
And
another interesting thing,
side note,
there's another channel four NBC
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
So that's why, you know, channel four was
way up north
because of that.
So I'm going into the, half hour break.
And
when I went into the break,
channel seven was playing the commercials I was
playing.
And then I looked up at the channel
four
monitor, and it was playing different commercials.
Like, well, that's weird. How did they get
different commercials?
And then just about that same time, I
still I got an alert that the transmitter
in Sheboygan
went down.
And what had happened is they had a
power outage, and the generator didn't kick on
like it was supposed to.
So they had a power outage up channel
four,
but I didn't notice it on air because
I was picking up the Milwaukee station
on the channel four monitor.
And,
like I said, I only noticed it because
the commercials
were different, and then the monitoring system finally
caught up and told me the transmitter was
down. But,
that was
that was quite entertaining.
And,
one other adventure in broadcasting,
it was Christmas Eve, and I actually volunteered
to do a shift on Christmas Eve,
which was fine. We did our, you know,
family Christmas on Christmas Eve, and then we
had another one on Christmas day
with the other side of the family.
So, you know, me being up all night
running a TV station won a huge deal.
But I had missed the,
there was this farm program that played at,
like, 06:30 in the morning. So, you know,
I'm just gonna be watching that at 06:30
in the morning on
on
Christmas Day.
But I had to record it off the
satellite
at you know, it was like two in
the morning. So that was some of the
other things we did is, you know, we
would record syndicated
programming.
And this farm show was supposed to go.
It was their holiday special,
whatever,
and I missed the recording somehow.
So I didn't have anything to play from
seven to eight in the morning.
You know, I could've thrown anything in there,
I guess, and nobody would've noticed. But
I thought to myself, well,
I don't know. Maybe,
you know, let's see what other stations
that program was on, and maybe I could
get it from one of them somehow.
And it turned out that WGN
in, Chicago
played it, and they played it an hour
and a half early.
Yeah. Hour and a half earlier. So I
went into the production manager's office, and they
had cable TV, and we had WGN
on the cable. And at the appropriate time,
I recorded
their version of it.
And then all I had to do was
take their commercials out and, and put our
station ID over top of their station ID.
And
I was able to pull that off. So
I actually got to play the right program
even though I missed the satellite feed.
So,
anyway
okay. One more. Jeez. I'm on a roll
here.
Used to be that,
Jeopardy
would, come down in one bulk,
satellite feed
in real time, so we had to record
it real time. It wasn't like a now
they just send you a file.
But back in the day, we had to
record it off the satellite in real time.
And so
I think that was, like, Friday night or
Saturday
in the middle of the night or something.
I I don't remember exactly when it was,
but it was, you know, two and a
half hours
of recording
for Jeopardy for the week. And then, you
know, the editors would cut it apart
and,
you know, get it ready for broadcast, you
know, every
evening.
And so
I recorded, you know, the jeopardy,
and I knew I was gonna be out
at my dad's house,
and he loved jeopardy.
And I knew I was gonna be up
out there while he was watching Jeopardy. And
you don't you're disturbing. You watch it with
him.
So, anyway, I watched that
Jeopardy
six or seven times
just so that I had all the answers.
I mean, all the answers
for that one that was gonna play on
the night I was gonna be at dad's
house.
And, anyway, so we played that, you know
or they played that while I'm sitting there.
Dad's watching Jeopardy, and I call out the
answer. Call out the answer. Call out the
answer. And I did that for the whole
half hour,
and he thought I was a genius until
I told him what I did.
I couldn't couldn't but it was funny while
it was going on. Alright. Enough of that.
So
tomorrow
what am I gonna talk about tomorrow?
Let me look at my little master
list. Oh, yeah. We're gonna talk about heating
with wood.
I don't know if any of you guys
ever did that, but,
when I the whole time I was growing
up, I didn't even know the furnace
worked
because we never used it. We heated with
wood and the wood stoves. We had two,
one in the one downstairs and one up
stairs. The only time we ran the one
downstairs is, you know, when it got real
cold or if we wanna go down there
and do something, we'd fire it up. But,
yeah, we heated with wood the whole time
I was growing up. So
let's talk about that.
Anyway, catch
me tomorrow.