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WTAW Radio
WTAW’s Radio Station History Cards
Tom Turbiville | WTAW Radio Host
Laura Quezada | Transcriber
00:00:00 Dick Bolin (DB)
Here's the latest news from the Associated Press. Anytime now, the big…
[Unintelligible news broadcaster speaking]
00:00:07 Speaker 2
Aggies win 74-72! Here's your…
00:00:12 Speaker 3
…1620 WTAW.
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00:00:16 Tom Turbiville (TT)
This is WTAW, the First 100 Years, I'm Tom Turbiville. In the very early days, stations like
WTAW were required to apply to the Department of Commerce for, among other things, airtime
and request extended airtime for special broadcasts. And these requests were archived on what is
called “history cards”. Today, that's all on computer, of course, but we still have copies of those
history cards, and it is a treasure trove of fascinating broadcast history. It is from these history
cards that we can see that WTAW, indeed, was first licensed on October 7th, 1922, the date we
call our birthday. These history cards tell us, for example, the WTAW applied for extended time
October 2nd and 9th, 1943, from 8 to 10:45 p.m., to quote, “broadcast football games between
Texas A&M and Texas Tech in San Antonio and also Texas A&M and Louisiana State at Baton
Rouge”. In March 1944, WTAW applied for additional time between 8 and 8:30 p.m. to
broadcast, quote, “Blue Network Coca-Cola Spotlight Van Program honoring Naval Radio
Training Detachment on Texas A&M campus”. [chuckle] In April and May of 1959, the history
cards tell us that we applied for a construction permit to move our transmitter from College
Station to Mobile Avenue in Bryan and our studio location from 3703 South College in Bryan to
Mobile Avenue. Suffice it to say, these little three-by-five history cards tell a lot of the history of
WTAW, the First 100 Years.