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John Long, president of the Georgia Radio Museum and Hall of Fame, remembers working at WTRP(AM) in 1962. He remembers it so well that he has recreated it at the new home of the Georgia Radio Museum and Hall of Fame.
Here are his words on the exhibit (that’s him seated in his exhibit): The console is a late 1940s/early 1950s era Gates SA-40. Turntables are Gates CB500s from the same time period. The tone arms are replicas. I refurbished them after rescuing them from WTRP in LaGrange, Ga.
I had the furniture custom made and mounted the Gates switches from the old furniture on it. Everything in the 1950s studio display is authentic to the era right down to the rotary phone, PSAs, 45s in a wire rack, splicing tape, and lead pencils from the era I found in my mother’s old desk.
The reel-to-reel is a Wollensak1520 mono recorder donated by Savannah radio legend Burl Womack. On the wall is faux acoustic tile and an old school clock like the ones used in many stations. On the wall (you can just see a corner) is a replica of an Electro-Voice Sentry studio monitor. Also, there is an EBS book with all the codes that stations used to verify an alert. There is a transmitter log hanging on the black rack. The copy board was custom built and the copy book contains copy an announcer might have read on the air. Underneath are several Capitol Minute Master LPs. Most stations had to join a network for news at the top of the hour so Capitol pressed the albums with one minute versions of their latest releases. It was a great promotional tool. There are also CRC production albums as well as early Pepper Tanner production library albums.
The decal on the wall (right) is an RCA Thesaurus decal used in the “Shop at the store with the mike on the door” sales campaign in the 1960s. In the black rack is a Magnecorder PT6-A and a Yale Audio timer. On the wall is an ML298-A transmitter tube and an Associated Press teletype machine complete with a box of teletype paper.
There is also a replica of a program log on the desk behind me. I gave the station depicted here the call letters WGRM (for Georgia-Radio-Museum). The museum has several other historical exhibits. It is located in the St. Marys Welcome Center in St. Marys, Ga.
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