I used to work at a station whose backup was the original from 1946 when the station first came on, and the towers serial numbers were 3 and 4. (The company who built the towers was new) In the office was an old FCC report that stated why one owner versus another was granted the original license. The reason that was given was that the winner of the license lived closer to the city of license. Both lived within 40 miles of the tower. The company didn't care about the old stuff they had and wanted to throw all of it out and I keep some really cool things....

WSAN went on the air in 1923 and when I got there in '73 it was still owned by the same family. One of the owners kept a lot of the old radio gear. I remember an old RCA broadcast transmitter from before WWII and an old transcription turntable about 3 foot across. There was a whole garage full of antiques. Alongside a helicopter they bought and never used. They had an ancient card reader/sorter/printer in the office and instead of back up genset power, they were connected to two power feeds from separate sources and an old manual transfer switch located in a room without windows so when the power failed at night and the batteries in the control room flashlight were near death, it was a comedy trying to feel your way behind the transmitter and back into that room which was full of old lithograph and printing machines that they had in use.

Admittedly, I didn't find it at a station -- it was given to me, but what I feel has the most value of radio station memorabilia that I still have is one of the original three-sided black heavy plastic microphone stand labels with the call letters CHQT on it. It was used when they first came on the air in 1965 in Edmonton on 1110.

As a young buck in '79 I came aboard KING-AM as a part-timer. One of the long-time jocks was fired, and I was instructed to clean out his cabinet. I found formatic memos from former PD's Hal Widsten and Alan Mason. (circa early-mid 70's). Something told me to keep 'em and I still have them somewhere in some box today! Maybe Ebay, maybe not. But I'm going to need to go back and find those gems at some point!

It wasn't a material thing that I found that was interesting (or maybe I should say scary).

Shortly after we installed out 2Way paging network in Sioux Falls, SD, I received a call from the Chief Engineer at one of the local FM radio stations.

It seems that our transmitter was directly in line between their studio and transmitter. Our transmitter was interfering with their STL. It was fairly benign; you could only hear the interference when there was complete silence.

We bought a set of band pass cavities for the receive end of the STL and I went out to put them in with their engineer.

Upon arriving at the tower, we installed the cavities in the rack and then hooked up the RF cables. I started looking at the rack and noticed there was no ground tied to it. Upon further investigation I noticed no grounds at all in the room.

When I asked the engineer where the building/system grounds were so we could ground the rack, he told me, (BTW this was a 1800' tower out in the flat corn fields of Sioux Falls) "We don't ground anything here, it just attracts lightning"!!!

Pretty scary!

I found a mummified bologna and cheese sandwich in a desk drawer......

the only other cool thing I found was a 45rpm copy of Ray Stevens' Mr. Baker the Undertaker b/w
The Old English Surfer. Has a little chip on the edge, but still plays!

Bet K-HITS won't play that one!

I sat in the same broadcast chair as Wolfman Jack did at my first radio job in (Beautiful Downtown) Longview, WA. So I found whatever he left behind there...

you sat in the same chair that Wolfman Jack farted in? That is real radio history! I live in the same town where Alan Freed grew up. I think you win!

:-)

I found the secret bomb shelter (it was pretty well hidden away) at KSLM's old studios in west Salem in 1971. It was stocked with all kinds of canned food, water, blankets, cots, drugs and medications, various supplys, dating back to the '50s. It was tricked out with a full, if compact, broadcasting set-up. It appeared no one had been in there for many years. Yeah, I wasn't supposed to be in there, but I was the night guy (who forgot to turn off the carrier of their rinky, automated FM station at midnight, and that's one of the reasons why they fired me), and what else is a night guy gonna do but explore? Besides, what if the Russkies had dropped the big one on the capitol of Oregon? Very tempting target.
R.I.P., Bob McCarl; sorry I let you down. "Jeff, you don't smoke grass or take drugs do you?"

"Jeff, you don't cut grass or eat bugs do you?

When I was with NBC, I found a set of the original NBC chimes in my office closet, the kind you tapped with a mallet. Being the honest type, I left them there when I moved on. Today I regret that, as the next person was probably less honest and they disappeared anyway. What a museum piece.

Re: The KSLM bomb shelter....It was still there in the 80's, complete with Geiger counters and large tins of food. The food containers were 5 gallon cans with a pop off lids. So, being the curious sort, I popped one of the lids off to find that it was full of crappy hard candy. There were at 3 least of these. Also, that same shelter had a leaky roof. Great way to spend the last days of your life, sitting in a windowless room with radioactive fallout seeping in while noshing on 20 year old cherry drops.

KSLM also used to have a shed that was south of main building that had a 16 inch turntable and a combination record lathe/turntable for recording transcriptions.

KEJO/KFLY used to have an old 1920's homebrew transmitter. The thing was huge, and also very cool looking with art deco style metal doors and large panes of glass.

While working at KERN in Bakersfield in the '70's
I found a 1964 poster for KISN with a picture of The Real Don Steele on the Steel Bridge.

At KEX around 1997, I found the master tapes of all the jingle packages from the 1960's & 70's. This included the "Call of the Northwest" package. They were stored at the transmitter. When space need to be made out there, a couple of interns were sent out to help clean it up.

When I went out there to check up on them, I found that they were about to toss a bunch of old reels into a dumpster. Those reels included all of the jingle masters, along with many commercial master files from the 1960's. Many political ads from the 1960's were included on those master files.

When I was working at WMUL-FM, our college radio station at Marshall University, I once found tranquility, inner peace, and love. Then I got really hungry

A reel-to-reel. And then I taught myself how to use it!

Bob, so you were the guy on Animal House that got his guitar smashed against the wall....

Last night before they locked 10th & Burnside up it was like Animal House in the station...Everyone dubbing all the jingles...stealing the music library...and raiding the files in the Exec offices. I found the original 8X10 photos of the studios (day they opened downtown)....plus wild memos from Burden and most of professional jock shots through the years.

I found a hemostat in the KINK control room many years ago. I had no idea they'd conducted major surgery in there at one time.

Do hard-porn mags in the mens room count here? Not so uncommon in the late 70's...of course, I never turned any pages!

"What was the most interesting thing you found at a station?................

A live airstaff!

Bob: I think you've brilliantly summarized why we all got into college radio!

C'mon Terry- how about certain Golden Parachute packages? Cough it up!

Something I forgot I worked at a station that had a newsroom that had a mixing board that George Marti of the Marti unit fame had built in 1947...Still worked, granted they replaced the wiring about 25 years ago but it works.