Deejay follows his star (one-man radio station)

WEST BATH, ME. — You could set your clock — better yet, your clock-radio — by it.

For years, radio listeners from Wiscasset to Cape Cod could hear Kate Smith belting out "God Bless America" every day at 7 a.m. on WJTO-AM 730.

When station owner Bob Bittner decided to do away with the morning ritual a couple of years ago, he received an excited e-mail from a fishermen's cooperative in Gloucester, Mass., begging him to repent and bring Kate Smith back.

"Apparently there are a lot of immigrants working at the co-op," Bittner said from his West Bath studio one recent morning. "And this was their boss writing to say that they all loved hearing the tune every morning. So I put it back on the schedule."

It was that simple. There's no corporate red tape to cut through when you're the station manager, disc jockey and board of directors all wrapped up in one. Bittner, a veritable mom-and-pop store of the airwaves, can make those decisions because WJTO is a one-man operation.

A voice of the past Kate Smith has long departed this realm and many people think AM radio has gone with her. But WJTO is still here, nestled in the scenic countryside off Berry's Mill Road. It is doing very well, thank you, helped along by Bittner, its sole proprietor and employee.

Bittner is a rarity in this day of corporate rule. He loves what he does, which is to run a couple of radio stations.

He is the reason why WJTO is rather unique. No advertising. Not much talk between records. No angry voices. It is supported financially by Bittner's other AM station, WJIB in Rowley, Mass. On that station he makes money, selling time.

The money from that station allows WJTO to survive without selling air time for commercials.

"This station is a labor of love," Bittner says on a warm day in October. Outside, a field full of asters frames Mill Cove. Beyond the cove the sun bounces off Casco Bay. Bittner is dressed in jeans and an old flannel shirt.

The beauty of radio is that you could be dressed like a fisherman but sound like a CEO.

Bittner is known to his audience simply as Bob, as in "This is WJTO 730 and my name is Bob playing some good music for you."

From the road, the building housing the station looks like just another picturesque house with a view to die for. But inside, instead of a living room, den and kitchen — the usual domestic scene — one finds a labyrinth of varied-sized rooms with consoles, glass windows, signs beside doors that proclaim, "ON AIR."

Bittner sits in what he calls the lobby, dominated by an old dining room table. A large window half a wall's height looks into the studio where Bittner performs his magic, broadcasting to the world from Wiscasset to Cape Cod by harnessing 5,000 watts of electromagnetic power.

At night, power drops to 28 watts, barely enough to cover West Bath and Bath. During the night the airwaves on 730 megahertz are taken over by a French-speaking station in Canada, but during the daylight, Bittner rules from Maine to Massachusetts, the signal carrying best over water.

Personal touch Through the miracle of technology, Bittner can be at the table in the lobby while his voice introduces yet another song. It's an old song, but not necessarily an oldie. Bittner, 56, plays the music he thinks his audience will like, those over the age of 45 or so. That includes groups like Peter, Paul and Mary, the Weavers and the Carpenters.

The format used to be called middle-of-the-road, or adult album-oriented, or easy listening. It's music that's not too loud, not too soft, about 50 percent memories and a lot more nostalgia. In fact, it's music so sentimental it comes with its own memories.

But what sets WJTO apart from other AM radio stations is the absence of commercials and the personal touch Bittner brings to it.

"I could sell commercials," Bittner says. "But that would entail hiring a salesperson, doing the studio work, the production work, putting my voice down."

"I could make $70,000 and it would cost me $50,000. That's a profit of $20,000. You have to ask, "Do I need another $20,000?'"

This is a rarity: A man who loves what he's doing. He lives with his wife in a house a short walk away from the studio. He has two dogs. The one who accompanies him to the radio station is Mitzy. Bittner talks to Mitzy in the same low radio voice he uses to talk to the older listeners who tune in to his radio station.

Mitzy can't control her tail, the voice like an electric shock, humming to her insides. The power of radio is that that same response can be broadcast hundreds of miles. One can just imagine all the ears between here and Cape Cod perking up when they hear Bob's bass voice that goes down smooth as aged wine.

Born in 1949, and brought up in northern New Jersey, Bittner plays music that is not necessarily of his era. But he knows the radio market. Knows that AM stations are the senior living centers of airways, the place you send retirees who have no place in a culture geared to the 18- to 40-year-old market.

Radio's heyday It wasn't always so. Bittner is old enough to remember when AM stations across the country helped mold the memories of the teenagers who were its primary listeners.

He remembers when big-market disc jockeys like "Cousin Brucie" Morrow and Larry Lujack held sway over millions of listeners and held the fate of musical success in their index fingers (all it took to signal the engineer on the other side of the window to spin the platter).

"I have a photo of me and Cousin Brucie," Bittner says. It shows a young Bob Bittner and Cousin Brucie looking at a newspaper.

Those were good days for radio listeners, but not always clean. Payola was a scandal in the late 1950s, when record producers and recording companies provided cash and other favors to get airplay for their records.

Still, radio and teenagers were a big force. There were other radio formats back then — country, middle-of-the-road, religious — but Top 40 was the one geared for the bulge of demographics known as the baby boomers.

Once the province of "educational" programming, FM radio emerged as an alternative to Top 40 programming. It sounded different, for one thing. On the AM dial the patter was loud and fast, like an auctioneer riding the bidding for tobacco. The worst sin was a few seconds of dead air between the introduction to and the playing of the latest hit.

FM featured longer album cuts rather than 45 rpm singles. The announcers were likely to speak at normal conversational pace, pauses and all, and the commercials were often broadcast in blocks so one could listen to 10 or 15 minutes of music without interruption.

Revolution Two things changed the sound of radio: The Telecommunication Act of 1996 and technology. The former pushed the old-fashioned radio station out of the markets, the latter saved some of them, like WJTO.

"That one piece of legislation changed everything," Bittner says. "The public was told cable rates would go down but they haven't, obviously. And instead of competition you had consolidation."

What the legislation did was allow the expansion of ownership in similar market areas.

"You take the Portland market," Bittner says. "One owner can now have as many as six stations. In larger cities he or she can have eight. But the thing is, there is no limit to how many one owner can have around the country."

Bittner says there are only two AM stations in coastal Maine doing their own programming, WJTO and WRKD in Rockland.

"In AM it's either feast or famine," Bittner says. "You get a 2.0 rating on Arbitron (a radio ratings service) and you have the demographics, it's feast. You get a high mark among the older people, it's famine."

But Bittner doesn't lose sleep over ratings. Instead, he has stacks of letters sent by listeners. That's what he focuses on, the relationship between himself and his listeners. He boasts that he sometimes reads as many as 70 public service announcements a day.

The bigger broadcast groups, such as Clear Channel, have grown so large in part because of the changes in technology. This allows one disc jockey to be heard on stations from Seattle to Miami. Through the miracle of computers, you can have a live person in Memphis reading the weather forecast for Portland.

But technology is also what allows Bittner to manage both of his stations. If he's in the studios of WJIB in Rowley, Mass., and something goes wrong at WJTO in West Bath, he can usually fix it by computer without leaving Massachusetts.

Forget the days of two turntables and a console. Now it's all done by the press of a computer key. Bittner records his shows in advance in a small studio with no view, except for the 15,000 albums that line three walls. They are in alphabetical order, from Beatles to Zeppelin, Led. From polkas to classical. Only a small fraction find air time.

"I don't play Dylan because he can't sing," Bittner says. "But I do play his songs, recorded by someone who can sing."

To play a song he merely has to punch a computer key and the song comes up without needing a cue, perfectly balanced. Many of the large station group pre-record their programming, but they don't have a "Bob" on hand to break in several times an hour and let listeners know about the bean supper happening tonight at the local church, or that there is a lot of rain coming our way.

Life on the air Bittner got his start in broadcasting by listening to WJTO during family vacations spent in Georgetown. His first on-air experience was during college in Rochester, N.Y. He moved up to program manager, then spent 10 years in that position at an English-language station in Puerto Rico.

In the early 1980s he worked at several radio stations in the Boston area, then left radio to start publishing a personal ads publication with a circulation of 150,000 in three states.

The publication made enough money to enable him to buy his first station in 1991, the bankrupt WLVG 740 in the Boston market. He changed the letters to WJIB and instituted "good music."

A couple of years later he bought stations in Manchester, N.H. and Worcester, Mass., straightened out their legal problems and sold them. He bought WJTO in 1997.

Technology has lured most of the young radio listeners away. High school students with their iPods and laptops and CD players don't spend much time listening to the radio. That has big-market radio executives feeling stressed. Will the same thing happen to stations like WJTO?

"If the owner can provide something that few other stations do, there'll be listeners," Bittner says. The two formats that fit are talk and adult-standards music.

"I don't think the immediateness of AM radio can be matched by iPods," he says. "The old music is almost always bringing back memories, and with an announcer who shares that with you and tells you about the church supper next Saturday, no iPod can do that."

Whatever one thinks of the music in general, what makes it different from similar formats that are prepackaged in some gleaming hyperspace of technological sterility is the element of surprise. A record of Al Martino singing "Love Me Tender" for example, or Al Jolson singing "My Blue Heaven," pricks the equilibrium, gets the tail wagging on its own.

"This is the most pleasant place to work," he says, gesturing at the scenic view outside the window, where honeybees are busy mining the asters. "I'm a happy guy."

There used to be a one-man radio station in Gloucester, MA,
WVCA ("Voice of Cape Ann") which played classical music
and its sole employee was owner Simon Geller, who didn't
exactly have the most professional voice. It was in his
apartment above a laundromat (though was 3,000 watts or so).

"I'm going to have to shut down now so I can go shopping..."
These days it's a professional-sounding oldies/adult
contemporary station (plus Red Sox baseball), WBOQ.
(Geller sold it and passed on some years later.)

He used to air a show on both stations called Let's Talk About Radio where, once a week for half an hour, he (sometimes with guests) would talk about what was happening locally and nationally with radio. It aired for some 430 editions but these days is on very rarely.

He'd come on and sometimes would sound like a lefty with political opinions, and yet he came right out and said
that Air America was "poorly done radio" (and thus wouldn't
run it on his stations...). Gotta agree with him there.
And his "other station" is based in Cambridge, a perfect
location for an AAR station. Oddly enough, the ratings
for his Cambridge station leaped up sharply when his
competition, which had been playing adult standards,
DID take on Air America. THEIR ratings plummeted.
So he actually benefitted by AAR taking away his
competition, and listeners found WJIB. Sure, the
ratings aren't as big as those of 50,000 watt or
10,000 watt stations in Boston, but the ratings he
got for a _250 watt station_ did an amazing jump.

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