KWSS 94.5 Gilroy/San Jose studios 1986 "The number 1 hit music station"

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• published: 06 Dec 2013
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This is the KWSS 94.5 El Paseo de Saratoga studio on October 5, 1986. The tour begins in the offices and moves on to the production, on-air studios, and live announcer. Management ran this place on a shoestring. They hired top talent, but the facility was awesome crude. As chief engineer, I was able to make it sound a lot better than it looks fortunately. All the electronics was diddled, and those ITC PB machines actually sounded quite good with the tweaking I did on the circuitry. KWSS had been recently bought by Nationwide Communications. When the corporate engineer toured the place with me, he bluntly said "The first thing we need to do is get a new chief engineer" after seeing the place. Luckily the GM liked me and contradicted that, and I stayed at 94.5 until 1995 when consolidation finally made my CE position redundant. GM Palmer Pyle was my guardian angel fortunately. Mr. Pyle had been a pro-football player, and you can Google that. One day in his office he said, "I bet you think I'm pretty stupid". I sincerely told him no because I always could tell he had powerful instincts under the hood. After all, he led a strong radio team that made KWSS a top billing station in the market. The new Nationwide Communications studio was well funded and much nicer. What was strange is that the fancy new studio never was as much fun as this dump. Somehow the magic was gone, and what was once the top rated, most profitable South Bay station gradually faded out. This is the first of many KWSS studio/transmitter videos plus long air checks as I go through my stuff. This was video taped by local air personality and Ohlone College instructor, Tom Gomez, with an early version VHS camcorder.