Here's the trivia test I gave to WBAP's Hal Jay, Ernie Brown and Steve Lamb
It is WBAP’s 100th birthday this year. (Thank you Amon Carter!) — and as the Amon Carter author and playwright, I was asked to give a little bit of the station’s history.
Because it was at the Flying Saucer bar, I knew nobody wanted to hear a speech by me. So instead, I decided to play WBAP Trivia with three of their top stars. How much do they know about their station’s glorious history?
My players were Hal Jay, Ernie Brown and Steve Lamb.
Possibly my questions were a bit too difficult because they were sometimes stumped. But hell, it’s their station, so I wasn’t being that unfair.
Anyway, here are some of the questions (as requested by my old StarTex/Star-Telegram buddy Christy Jones Barrett). See how well you do: Answers at bottom.
1) What was the first radio station in DFW? Who came after that?
2) In the early days, the station wasn’t located at 820 AM. Where was it on the dial?
3) Who said, “If this is going to be a menace to newspapers, we had better own the menace!”
4) How much money did station founder Amon Carter invest to get it going?
5) Which of these facts about Amon Carter are not true?
He hated Dallas and did everything he could to undermine his competition.
He gave away his famous Shady Oak hats to celebrities.
He ruled Fort Worth for 50 years.
He was married three times and his third wife was 25 years younger.
He loved Fort Worth and West Texas more than life itself.
He hired Hal Jay to work at the station in 1931.
6) WBAP and WFAA had an unusual arrangement that lasted 30 years. What was it?
7) What was the famous sound that WBAP staffers used to signal that the two shared frequencies, 570 AM and 820, were switching on the dial in a station-to-station handoff?
8) In what city did the two partner stations, WBAP and WFAA, build an art deco styled broadcasting plant?
9) What happened at that plant in 1942?
10) What well-known WBAP boss recorded the audio book version my book and play, AMON! The Ultimate Texan?
11) Who in history is credited with coming up with the idea of giving Mr. Randy Galloway his own radio sports talk show? The first in the Metroplex.
Sports guys! At the birthday party, from left, Chuck Cooperstein, the voice of the Mavericks; the now-retired sports columnist and broadcaster Randy Galloway; sports editor Steve Lamb and lead morning man Hal Jay.
ANSWERS:
1) WRR of Dallas was first in 1921. The second was a station owned by the newspaper, The Fort Worth Record (3/22/1922) . Then came Amon Carter’s beloved WBAP (5/2/1922) and that was followed by WFAA (6/26/1922), owned by The Dallas Morning News.
2) 800 AM
3) Amon Carter said it a year before it went on the air.
4) $300
5) Only the fact about Hal Jay is wrong. Hal has been at the station for 31 years, but no, he never met Amon.
6) For decades, they shared frequencies, shared facilities and shares antennas. No other radio stations in the U.S. had this kind of partnership.
7) For WBAP it was the famous cowbell. For WFAA it was a gong, but it also was a tone.
8) Southern Grapevine. the building was demolished in the early 1970s to make room for D/FW Airport.
9) An Army plane carrying six crewmen lost a wing when it clipped the guidewire tying the two antennas together. Tragically, all six died in the crash, but the broadcast never cut out and the antennas stayed up.
10) Tyler Cox, who ran WBAP for 20 years as operations manager, played Amon Carter in the audio book.
11) Steve Lamb.
HOW’D YOU DO?
BIG NEWS: The play AMON! The Ultimate Texan play is coming back for shows at Artisan Theater in Hurst on Aug. 27, Sept. 3 and 10, 2022..
“Theater is the oldest way we have of trying to tell the truth about who we are.” — the late playwright, Terrence McNally.
NEW! Read how Amon stole a lot from Dallas, including Gary Cooper.
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NEW! Read about Amon’s favorite paperboy
NEW! Read about the man who loved Amon Carter so he named his son after him.
NEW! Interview with playwright Dave Lieber
