The Archive

 

I didn't wake up this morning planning to convert years of cassettes to digital.

Yet, here I am.

I agreed to two video depositions today, thus (mostly) anchoring me to my office, so I try to occupy the time with other activities.

My options otherwise area to go crazy or fall asleep. Both aren't ideal.

Oh, and option three is to walk away and have Sean monitor things for a few minutes while I step outside to talk to the guys from the septic service, who came to pump things out.

Let's just say it had been a while and that was kind of what I was referring to in a recent post. Thus we didn't have working toilets here for a few days. We adjusted but it wasn't pretty.

Anyway, that's fixed now.

So as I got ready to start the day, it occurred to me that I have a bunch of radio cassettes, dating back to 1999, that really need to be moved online.

Once I set up my recording system, I basically pressed play and let it go. I've done minimal editing as I've compiled several broadcasts.

The tapes span from 1999-2004 and most of them are audio from WGCH. I began carrying recorders of one form or another after 2004 and thus recorded things digitally.

While I haven't listened to every minute of audio, each tape presented a memory.

The first cassette chronologically was of a talk show I did at the time called "Inside Sports." Dated Aug 12, 1999, it begins with the voice of my friend and colleague John Iannuzzi as he presents the evening (!) news. Please note, again, we did an evening newscast!

I opened the show after that, cohosting with the late Luke Michaels. Luke, partially responsible for getting me to WGCH in 1997, always thought we'd make a really good on-air team and our chemistry is clear.

Of further note are the old jingles that we used and the commercials that used to run. The station just sounds different. Also of note was that WGCH had a sister station -- WVIP out of Mount Kisco -- and we often simulcast on the two outlets. In fact, WVIP had a High School Football Game of the Week at the time in Westchester County and I was the play-by-play voice for that year. It was also the last year we did it.

I'd heard there were some sketchy advertising issues but I can't tell you for sure.

A couple of those games have either been converted or will be. John Jay (Cross River, NY), Fox Lane, Ossining, Horace Greeley, and Brewster are among the teams that we covered on WVIP in 1999.

Eventually, we'll get into Greenwich sports, with basketball and hockey as 2000 begins. More sports will follow as the project continues. There will also be more talk shows and other nuggets as well.

Already converted is when I was asked to come in for coverage of Tropical Storm Floyd on Sep 16, 1999. Yes, there was once a time when WGCH (and WVIP) had a news staff. This is not to say we don't anymore (obviously, Tony Savino and Jim Campbell drive that now) but there was more coverage in the years that Jim Thompson was news director because there was a different budget in place.

I noticed there are old Renegades games and Bridgeport Bluefish games plus the 2002 Babe Ruth World Series. I even saw at least one edition of "The Rob Adams Show," my all-too-brief talk show that mostly avoided sports. I look back on that very fondly because it allowed me to spread my wings in a different way.

I even saw a tape of a sports talk show dated Feb 25, 2002. That's two days after Sean was born and I was probably able to shoot to Greenwich, do the show, and get back to my newborn. If I recall, Chris Carrino, radio voice of the Brooklyn (then-New Jersey) Nets was the guest and he congratulated me.

Another tape is dated Sep 12, 2001. I know I've already converted that one but it still takes my breath away. We obviously didn't talk sports that night.

I should also note that I don't have the tapes where I served as the studio host (this would be 1997-1999). I might have segments but not much exists.

All of those shows, and a lot of other things, got cut when ownership changed. It was sad

It's also sad that there are tapes that are lost. I've long-lamented there is no existing audio from WGCH or WVIP on Sep 11, 2001. There are games and other things that are lost to history.

For instance, Greenwich and New Canaan football played to a scoreless tie in 2002 at Cardinal Stadium. AJ asked me if I have it and, unfortunately, I can't find it.

Much like others in the history of broadcasting, the tapes were either lost or even taped over. We reached a point at WGCH where we got really cheap and refused to buy more tapes. The first time I called a game at Mahopac High School -- two football section championship games in 2004 -- we didn't record the broadcasts because we didn't have tapes.

It took 17 years for me to finally have audio of a broadcast at the field I graduated on when I called football in November.

After 2004, the percentage of broadcasts that were saved went way up. Occasionally a defect with a computer or recording device kept the event from being recorded. Even rarer is someone forgetting to record it. Otherwise, almost everything exists.

Except for audio from Superstorm Sandy, as we lost power while recording. That audio is gone.

Some tapes also got purged because they were just bad games or forgettable shows. Sad but true.

There are so many voices, both forgotten and remembered forever. There are commercials from Bob Small, who of course is still at WGCH. There's Dave Rothenberg, now a star at ESPN. There's Ron Lyons, my first football partner. In fact, when I did Fox Lane at Ossining, that was a change from the originally scheduled broadcast. Nobody told Ron we had moved the game so I did a chunk of the broadcast alone before he showed up.

Also of note for me is, well, me. I hear a lot of who I am today. I also hear a lot of who I'm not today. I think I'm more detailed in my descriptions. I think I'm more comfortable. I think I'm more polished. But there's no question you can tell that it's me.

Oh, and tape has a tendency to make one sound a bit like a chipmunk as time goes by. I don't think my voice really sounds like that.

These tapes from 1999 and most of 2000 are before I became sports director so more voices will come along. Sean Kilkelly was already there but others weren't yet.

But given I've limited the amount of work that it takes to convert these, this will be a fun project that I really wanted to do during the pandemic. I'll be posting the audio on my archive.org page so that you can hear it for yourself.

It's important to have these, if only for me.