Sponsor (Oct-Dec 1964)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

the: week in WiVSHINGTON AS VIEWED BY OUR WASHINGTON NEWS BUREAU December 18, I96U There is a Santa Glaus. There are, behind the most granite of bureaucratic fronts, some understanding and syirpathetic hearts. One small, besieged and bedeviled radio broadcaster, five years on the razor edge of bankruptcy, up on 12 counts of FCC rule violations, held to short-term renewals, caught in the I96O payola mangle, must believe it. In this holiday season of good will to men, FCC hearing examiner Basil Cooper has made a 6l-page impassioned plea for license renewal for station WILD — the scandal-splashed Boston AM featured in Hill payola hearings. The "tragic history" of the WILD owner began in the holiday season of December 1958 — and if the FCC agrees with Cooper, will have a happy ending in this holiday season by renewal for WILD and exoneration for its owner. Examiner Cooper has written a Horatio Alger story in reverse, the riches to rags saga of one Nelson B. Noble, reluctant owner of WILD since December Admittedly, the station has been run on something less than a high plane since then, says Cooper. But the FCC is not dealing with deliberate deceit. Noble is a man suffering from "ignorance, oversight and unwarranted optimism," who reached for any and every "piece of flotsam" that came by, in an effort to sustain his financial life. Cooper does not rely on emotional appeal, but sleuths through every detail of the record and the exhibits. He whittles down to very small magnitude, or entirely disapproves, most of the sins of omission and Commission charged to the WILD owner by the FCC. The Commission found. Noble suspect of; deejay and. station payola on WILD; hiring deejays of little ability or education; letting our poorly supervised contracts to foreign language time brokers, Italian, Greek, Albanian and Polish; borrowing money from record companies and plugging records without proper sponsorship identification; giving deejays time spots in lieu of salary raises; airing dubious commercials for one "Sister Marie" who claimed to unite loved ones and cure drinking; failure and errors in logging commercials and keeping program "promises." The sad tale, worthy of a Dickens, began when Noble had a highly successful scrap iron and steel fabricating business. Believing he "was on his way to becoming a millionaire" he accepted the advice of friends that radio business was an "enchanting, challenging and lucrative investment." No sooner had he committed himself to a $200,000 buy of WILD, from Bartell broadcasters, Inc.^ in December 1958, than the seven-month 1959 steel strike put his business $liOO,000 in the red. In the first year, i^adio station payments and. losses were over $200,000. CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE tecember 21, 1964 13 i