Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 7, 1994 TAG: 9407070147
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DANIEL RUBIN KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA NOTE: BELOW LENGTH: Long
It's the Geator with the heater, the Boss with the hot sauce, broadcasting live from Mary Ellen Van DeVort's chandelier!
And Frannie Costa's toaster.
And every station on Bridget Lewis' AM radio.
If your idea of hell is living with someone else's music, pity the people of Harmon Road in Philadelphia's Roxborough section. There they sit, in the shadow of three WPGR-AM towers and under the spell of all-day oldies from Jerry Blavat's station - Geator Gold Radio - which bleeds through copper pipes, telephone lines, downspouts, Nintendo games and all sorts of electronic equipment gone haywire.
Bridget Lewis, 18, led a tour of her house, past the stairway light, which cannot be turned off when the station is on. Past the kitchen telephone that functions as a party line. (``Sometimes, if you move around, you can find a place where it's not so bad,'' she said.) Past her sister's boombox, which was playing the Box Tops' ``The Letter'' on WIP, WHAT, KYW, WOGL, WDAS and, of course, WPGR. Finally, to the living-room VCR, which showed a scene from the soap opera ``Another World,'' in which Paulina and Jake were saying, ``Oh my God, we are in the middle of nowhere!''
Just the two of them and Leslie Gore, singing ``It's My Party.''
With car alarms constantly on the fritz, garage doors opening and closing by themselves, and porch lights glowing whether switched on or off, this leafy neighborhood is haunted by a technical glitch called ``rectification,'' which is a form of radio-frequency interference.
Simply put, the 50,000-watt station's towers are so close that they overpower household gadgets, charging the gas present in fluorescent lights and converting metals and appliances into primitive radio receivers and transmitters that play the sounds of endless summer.
``It's not something new,'' said Blavat, the legendary jock with 32 years' experience on air who is also operations manager and program director for the station. ``I'm very sympathetic. If you live by KYW's towers in Whitemarsh, you have the same problem. WOGL in Jersey, same problem. It's something that goes with AM.
``Absolutely nothing has changed. The only thing that has changed is this woman, who is an attorney, had the station [playing] out of her answering machine. She called over here and was very nasty to the receptionist. Next thing I know, there were meetings with lawyers and the FCC and things like this.''
That woman is Debbie Valenti-Epstein, a neighborhood activist and Roxborough High School graduate, Class of '72, who snapped to attention one day this spring after she couldn't make out any recorded messages on her new machine over the station's programming.
Valenti-Epstein said she called WPGR, where a ``very surly'' woman said, ```The FCC told us to put the towers there,' and if we had a problem, to call the FCC.''
She did. The federal agency sent an engineer to the station and determined that it was operating in compliance with its license, according to Barry Peahota, the FCC's senior engineer in the Philadelphia-area office. The problem, he said, is that the people live so close to the towers - in some cases, about a football field away.
``The energies of WPGR are fairly high,'' Peahota said in an interview. ``It operates at 50,000 watts. It means the field intensity of their signal at a close proximity, just about where the houses are located in some instances, is very high. This means that sensitive electronic equipment experience a phenomenon they otherwise wouldn't experience if they were located a little farther away.''
It means Dotty O'Neill's Mixmaster plays nothing but the hits.
After getting no satisfaction from the station or the FCC, Valenti-Epstein, who is president of the 21st Ward Community Council, started raising a fuss in a Roxborough newspaper. More than 60 people called or wrote to her, all but three fingering WRPG as the offending party. They had had their fill of oldies.
WPGR's station manager, Tom Primavera, wrote to Valenti-Epstein, saying that the antenna system has been in place since 1959 and that over the last decade ``the station has occasionally received complaints of interferences of various types of equipment such as telephones, answering machines, video games, drain pipes, etc.''
The station has provided ``technical assistance'' to some who complained, although he described some of the problems as stemming from faulty telephone wiring, which would have gone unnoticed had the AM radio signals not been so strong.
Most other annoyances, he wrote, are caused by people having equipment that ``simply does not operate well in strong [radio frequency] environments.''
To live in the shadow of the towers is to learn tolerance. Starting at sunrise, when the station signs on, the music starts leaking into the houses. Then, at sunset, the station signs off and the compact disc players start spinning again, and Nintendo and Sega Genesis do their things. It is not a neighborhood where children do a lot of daytime entertaining.
Soon, the station will broadcast around the clock. In November, the FCC approved extending the hours for WPGR, and Blavat said he would do so as soon as he completes the programming. However, because AM signals transmit farther at night, the station will drop the power to 500 watts at night, which Peahota of the FCC said should not be discernible unless neighbors intentionally tune in WPGR.
by CNB