Hot Studio Floors!

My first commercial radio gig was at WCOS AM & FM in Columbia, SC. This was way back in the day when the station was located on the second floor of the Cornell Arms Apartment building on the corner of Pendleton and Sumter Streets. The studios were on the northern wing just behind the iconic sign embedded in the concrete slab over the main entrance to the building. From left to right as you stood in front of the building were the FM control room, complete with the old reel to reel and cartridge tape driven automation system, the AM control room which was the hub of the station and lastly the production room which also served as the announce booth when Bob Fulton did his morning show there. The station offices were in the west wing which was the largest of the four wings of the building.

When you look at a picture of the building you can easily see the corner windows of the FM control room and the production studio, but the small window to the AM control room is partially hidden behind the Cornell Arms sign.

Now, as cool as those studios were, putting a radio station playing loud Top 40 music in an apartment building mainly occupied by older working folks and retired people is less than optimal. And the heating and A/C systems in the building didn’t help much.

Radio studios back in the day generated a lot more heat that their modern descendants. First of all, every piece of equipment had a little “heat” to them. In the 60s, transistors had made an impact on the consumer electronics market but not in broadcast equipment. Vacuum tubes were everywhere; audio boards, cartridge and reel to reel tape machines, turntable pre amps and transmitter remote controls. Turntables and tape machines also had electric motors which also contributed to the sauna of the typical control room.

The Cornell Arms building had a huge central air conditioning system complete with a cooler on the roof. The system was barely adequate for the average apartment tenant. Some of the more hot blooded residents installed window units. Summer nights, when the temperatures fell into the lower 70s, the building managers turned off the cooling tower of central air system, and many of the apartment dwellers would open their casement windows to enjoy the night air. That is all but the hottest room in the entire building, the AM control room. We couldn’t open ours because we’d get complaints from all the neighbors who weren’t exactly rock and roll fans.

Adding to the conundrum was the fact that the volume control for the studio monitors of the old Western Electric 25-B audio board also controled the DJ’s headset volume. And to the last one of us, we all liked to run our headsets at “sonic boom” level. To add to the mayhem, there was the cue system monitor speaker that was in constant use while we slip cued the 45 RPM records over on turntable number one. The main monitor was on the wall over the window but the cue speaker was in the rack at the back of the room aimed directly at the sole window in the control room. So to say the least the station was the biggest source of noise pollution in the neighborhood, save that magic moment in time when the sanitation workers drove their truck into to parking lot to empty the building’s common dumpster.

We couldn’t install a window A/C unit in the control room because the noise it produced would be picked up by the studio microphone. We did have a fan that we would drag out into the hallway outside of the studio. It was the one thing that made doing a show bearable. Fortunately during the time the central A/C was off, it was outside of office hours so I’d do my show in my undershirt and blue jeans.

Winters in that control room were interesting as well. The building had a hot water radiant heating system. No, they didn’t have radiators; instead the tile floors were equipped with a hot water pipe system. So the control room floor was nice and toasty. The control room was a pleasant temperature and I often did my shows with my shoes stashed under the cart machine table, padding around in my stocking feet. I had to be careful that I didn’t roll the wheels of the air chair over my toes. I also found out that stocking feet are a tad slippery when running to the teletype machines to get the latest news and weather. Especially near the machines themselves with the layer of paper dust accumulated by the constant clacking of typewriter heads against those rolls of yellow paper.

In recent weeks, the control room of WUSC-FM has been very comfortable. There are no vacuum tubes or electric motors to heat things up. The weather is cooler so there is little heat being generated by the sunlight streaming through the control room window. I admit that I’m grateful that tomorrow morning will be cloudy and rainy. Because it is the week between Christmas and New Years, the Russell House is closed with only a skeleton staff around. So like WCOS on summer nights, the compressors of the AC system will be turned off. So if you hear a slight whirring when the microphone is on, it is the small fan on the desk underneath the automation monitor doing its best to keep this old DJ cool. Oh MY!