1960's: The sound of my music, WKBW, 1963 - 1973

March 22, 2020. If I had to choose an audio soundtrack for my teens, it would have to be WKBW Buffalo. Before we moved to Eden in 1958, I have this specific yet vague memory of driving my the public display window on WGR with a neighbor from Lackawanna, where you could wave and they'd recognize you on the air. Other than that, radio was not an element in my life pre-Eden. It was primarily after school tv, like Soupy Sales, Howdy Doody and the like.

While I was still attending Immaculate Conception School (1958-63), my radio memory was of a small transistor with a single ear plug, allowing me to thread the cord up my school shirt sleeve as I tried to listen to the day games of the World Series, back when the entire series was day games, including week days.

Teen music radio, in the form of WKBW probably became a part of my life when I entered seventh grade at Eden Central, which contained grades 7-12 in the impressive, two-story, Tudor-like building on North Main Street. The building was about fifteen years old, and there was evidence as to how it had once housed grades K-12, with the music room showing remnants of a kindergarten classroom, with letters of the alphabet and numbers embedded in the linoleum floor tiles.

Seventh grade was a bit of an awakening, with my teen years upon, new kids at a new school, and the increasingly louder backdrop of the cold war, civil rights, rock and roll, and -- later -- Vietnam. Although no one labeled it as such at the time, it was the teen years for the Boomers, the kids born in the ten years after World War II ended, basically from 1946 to 1955.

One major element of that awakening -- beyond puberty -- was WKBW, with its collection of fast-talking, top-forty record playing, larger than life disk jockeys -- Joey Reynolds, Dan Neavereth, Tom Shannon, and more. [For some 1963 samplings of 'KB' radio, click here and go to the 1963 audio link. Scroll down and find some amusing history of 'Beatlemania' in Buffalo. Incidentally, WKBW had the option of hosting the Beatles the Monday night following their Ed Sullivan premiere. The station leaders judged the guarantee to high and the weekday concert too risky, so they passed.]

I probably spent a significant amount on my indoor evening teenage years listening to WKBW. My first memory was Joey Reynolds. Later names such as Jeff Kaye and Jack Armstrong come to mind, but Reynolds was the GOAT. Funny to teens, he was able to connect with them. Probably a mystery to adults, he was eventually fired after several years at the station, supposedly for making some puerile remarks about a lingerie ad. The local department stores -- Adam, Meldrum & Anderson (AM&A's), Hens & Kelly, and Hengerer's would big radio advertisers and not as open minded as the teens listening in to Reynolds.

I also remember WKBW sponsoring 'donkey basketball' games against local high school faculties, and summer softball games. The disc jockeys hosted 'sock hops' and other dances, usually at local high schools. My guess is that they earned little on the radio job; it was the extras that really paid their bills. They did a controversial version of 'War of the Worlds,' tailored to Buffalo, that took many unsuspecting people by surprise. In the fall of 1969, with the Beatles dissembling, they also produced another somewhat serious 'Paul is dead' documentary.

Unable to afford even 49-cent '45' records, when I finally secured a portable tape recorder, I'd tape a song off the tinny transistor radio, hoping that the dj would not talk over the beginning or end, and trying to have my own, personal recoding.

By the time I left for college in 1969, much of WKBW was passe, at least to the college crowd, who gravitated to the more album oriented FM stations, many of them run by college students from their campuses. At home during college breaks, WKBW registered less with me with each passing college year. While the station, the disc jockeys and the 'golden era' of teen radio are gone, any time I hear a song from that era, I can usually picture myself in that large bedroom at the end of the hall on the second floor at 3158 East Church Street, hearing that song for perhaps the twentieth time that week, dreaming of life after Eden, and not realizing what a great, joyful gift of teen experiences I had and memories bringing even more joy today