Television: First Peep Out of WEEP

Possibly the loudest and zaniest radio station in the U.S. is Pittsburgh’s WILY, which tailors its programing and advertising to a Negro audience. This week WILY will die—of an overabundance of success—and in its place will arise station WEEP. There will be some program changes, occasionally some subdued music, and commercials beamed to a general audience. But for the most part, WILY fans will not be disappointed in WEEP. Announcers will still bray crazy commercials; odd-voiced groups will yell the lyrics to Chicken Baby Chicken, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, and assorted other tunes “to endure traffic jams by.”

Explained manager and Part-Owner Ernie Tannen: “After inspecting our electronic navel, we decided we had grown too fast and too big to keep on being just a Negro outfit.” WILY found that its mesmerizing music and offbeat programs were attracting up to three times as many white as Negro fans. So WILY, after filing new call letters with FCC, became what Tannen believes to be the first Negro station to move into the general market.

Happy Sounds. One of seven radio stations in a chain headed by wealthy Food Broker John Kluge, WILY quadrupled its advertising billings in the last three years, now carries 150 commercials a day. Yet both Tannen and Kluge felt its identification as a Negro station had sealed off even more potential customers.

Of WILY’s three hard-driving Negro disk jockeys, two will be replaced by white men, one will remain: Sir Walter Raleigh, whose haughty, sardonic British accent seems to make hipsters flip. Says Raleigh, as he lays on such “crazy wax” as O Bop She Bop and Rockin’ Pneumonia: “Well, chaps, that’s the way the mop flops. Lads and deicers, we’re feeling rather geometric this afternoon, yes, indeedy, we have happy sounds coming up; a jolly good show, what? . . .”

Uptown Gossip. Amidst its planned madness, WILY also has exhibited civic spirit—it helped to get children placed in foster homes, campaigned for improvement in the Negro community. From its pigeon perch on top of a fruit market, WILY collected neighborhood news by offering listeners $5 for tips on human-interest stories or uptown gossip. “Radio isn’t like it used to be,” says balding, Baltimore-born Manager Tannen, who once worked as a chorus boy in Mae West’s Catherine Was Great. “It has become like wallpaper, a companion.”

This week Tannen planned to celebrate WEEP’s christening by playing only one record all day, Perry Como’s Just Born. In picking a new name for his “general market” station, Tannen combed the dictionary before deciding that WEEP held all sorts of possibilities: “A surefire slogan: ‘WEEP for joy.’ I can call myself the WEEP veep; we’ll have a traveling car called the WEEP jeep; and, my God, think of what we can say when we sign off: ‘And now, for the next twelve hours you won’t hear a peep out of WEEP.’ “