Sheptalk

Forum Topic
General Shep Related Chatter

Subject	Message	Replies
Sense of Place Date: 01-04-2006 By: diskojoe	Last night I listened to a show from January 1972 where Shep talked about being in places like Yankee Stadium, Churchill Downs and the TV studio where the 1960 Presidential Debates were held and feeling the sense of history in these places. In the outro, he was joking about how someday people would be wondering about the studio he was broadcasting from. I am wondering if WOR still uses the studios which he broadcasted from.	2

Replies

Date	Member	Message
01-05-2006 ( Reply#: 256 )	umtrr-author	There was an item in the annual review that Scott Fybush of "Northeast Radio Watch" ( http://www.fybush.com ) that states that during the year, WOR moved from 1440 Broadway to Wall Street. I lived in Carteret, New Jersey from 1969 to 1989 and the WOR transmitter from which Shep once broadcast is long gone. I believe it was torn down before I left Carteret. George in Ellison Park, NY http://www.irwinsjournal.com
12-19-2006 ( Reply#: 666 )	rnascak	I grew up listening to Shep on WOR, but by that time, WOR no longer used the transmitter in Carteret, my home town. I believe Seton Hall University used it for several years afterwards. In the late 1950's, Carteret was essentially split in half by the New Jersey Turnpike. The transmitter was located in West Carteret, several blocks from my aunt's house. I remember riding my bicycle to the transmitter site several times when it was still there. It was accessible by a gravel road that went between two houses. The drive opened into a small circular area in the center of which was a large fountain. The fountain doubled as the cooling apparatus for the transmitter. It was interesting to see it in the winter. There would be a melted path in the snow indicating where the cooling pipes were buried leading from the small building which housed the transmitter and studio. Huge clouds of steam would flow from the fountain when the transmitter was operational and the twin 350' towers and their center feed formed a 3-element vertical antenna were in the back of the building in the marshy area bordering the Rahway River. Folks living in the area regularly were treated to late night improptu performances due to the high field strength of the 50KW transmitter causing the nails in the roof joists acting as diodes, and rectifying the audio into somewhat ghostly voices emanating from their attics. Alas, sometime in the 1970's or 80's the site was demolished, towers and all, and it is now a city park where my son played little league. In 1972, I got to meet Shep at a book signing for "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters", at which he autographed a copy for donation to the Carteret High School library. Perhaps it's still there. I asked Shep of his memories of Carteret. His comment was that he liked Carteret in the springtime, because the natives would come out and you could feed them by hand! Here it is some 35 years later and I now live about 20 miles or so from Sanibel Island in Florida, Shep's last place of residence. My only regret is that I never got to speak to him on ham radio. K2ORS de KA4NAI 73 SK