The “Late Afternoon Edition”, News 850 WHDH Boston | June, 1993

With all the noise around the United States about what’s real history and what’s not, that’s where this website can be an invaluable commodity. What’s more authentic than hearing history as it was actually recorded!

This is the President Bill Clinton era. It is clear at this early stage of his presidency how many holdovers from the Reagan/Bush years there were still in the executive branch. It makes for interesting listening. There apparently was some severe flooding that year around the Mississippi River, as happens every so often, and there’s a story about the Federal government’s response in terms of an aid package to flood ravaged states. There’s international news involving Iran and some other middle-eastern regions, and two reasonably in-depth interviews done by Janet Jegalian.

DETAILS

This recording begins at approximately 3:35pm during the “Late Afternoon Edition”. It begins with Janet Jegalian voicing a commercial for some place called “Ace”. Don Huff is the first news anchor heard on this tape. WHDH has “Traffic on the Ones” with State Trooper Grant Mollis (at least that’s what his name sounds like). The WHDH “Weathermap” Meteorologist is Wayne Barnes.
News anchor duties on WHDH during the late afternoon edition were apparently rotated evenly between Don Huff, Janet Jegalian and Listo Fisher.

Janet Jegalian was first heard on WBZ in the early and mid-1980s, mostly as daytime personality, although as I recall, she did entertainment reports and even filled in once or twice for the nighttime talk shows before moving into news. Don Huff – not sure where Don came from prior to WHDH, but he went on to have a very successful career at WBZ after WHDH shut down. Same for Listo Fisher. Fisher had an even more interesting career. Before coming to Boston, Listo Fisher was a prominent feature on the old 1190 WOWO Fort Wayne.

WHDH itself was at one point the number one radio station in Boston. For many years, during the 1970s and early 1980s prior to its becoming a news station, WHDH and WBZ were neck and neck, with one station or the other getting the number one rating, although for a time, Boston broadcasting legend Jess Cain held that coveted #1 spot. As the 1980s wore on, the music programming became less important as both WHDH and WBZ shifted toward more talk and news programming. Then, WHDH abruptly stopped playing music altogether in 1988. For a time afterward, there was quite a bit of sports programming along with the news, but in 1993, the station dropped most of the sports and emphasized it’s news product. A year later, the station’s owner American Radio Systems (a very early forerunner of the company now known as iHeart Media) moved the new sports format and identity of WEEI, then on 590, over to 850. It’s a very long story as to how and what happened and there are several articles on the web that were written about that particular subject, so we won’t get into it here. It suffices to say that WHDH 850 ceased to exist after August 28, 1994.

Technical

This aircheck arrived along with several others that were loosely labelled “local radio”. This is mainly a collection of Boston suburban AM stations of various formats. We’ll get to posting those as the Summer of 2020 progresses. The audio quality is very good. It would be outstanding were it not for some electrical power line noise in the background. The noise is not very loud and doesn’t distract much from the overall recording, but it does prohibit us from giving this a 5-star rating for quality.

Runs 47 minutes, 30 seconds completely unscoped, including watermarks.

Aircheck courtesy of Contributor David Boucher