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Originally Posted by jr_tech
The use of the last one or two characters in the call sign to indicate the city was apparent, as well, although I don't understand how "MM" was chosen to represent Winston-Salem. (W41MM, Winston-Salem).  |
I live about 20 minutes south of Winston-Salem, so you aroused my curiosity and I found out what the MM stands for. It's Mount Mitchell. That's where the tower was located for the station, but it was owned by the same man who owned WSJS in Winston. This is from WSJS' site...
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In 1942, Piedmont Publishing also owned the first FM radio station in the southeast. It was identified as 44.1 W41MM-FM and changed to 97.3 WMIT in 1948, when the modern FM band was adopted. Done in cooperation with General Electric, WMIT was an experiment in building a station that would reach the entire Southeast, from Nashville to Richmond, Atlanta to Roanoke. They built the tower on Clingman's Peak next to Mount Mitchell and broadcast the WSJS signal with 350,000 watts using multiple generators. The Station format was classical music. The only way to send the programming from the studio in Winston-Salem to Mount Mitchell was by placing a broadcast STL atop the Reynolds Building, then the tallest building in the Carolinas.
WMIT was too expensive and required too much technical work to keep the multi-state radio station going. Storms and technical problems that took a long time to fix angered Winston-Salem residents who wanted a signal closer to home for local news during World War II. By the late 1940s and early ‘50s people in the other cities along the 70,000 square mile listening area were starting to get new local FM signals of their own around that time and stopped listening to the Winston-Salem news and NBC radio broadcasts to enjoy local news and programming in their own cities. In 1958, Billy Graham bought it and relicensed it from Winston-Salem to Black Mountain as a religious station. He changed the frequency to 106.9 and he still owns it. 97.3 was still allocated to Winston-Salem and still had a huge grandfathered coverage area, but was moved and dropped to sign on as 97.3 WKBC in North Wilkesboro.
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I remember listening to WSJS-FM when their format was still classical music, in the early 1970s. I also listened to WMIT in Black Mountain, which was not always easy to get reception-wise. I never knew it was owned by Billy Graham until I read the above info.