WHDH (850 AM) Early years Originally located in
Gloucester, Massachusetts, WHDH was founded on June 20, 1929, by Ralph Matheson. Matheson kept WHDH, which moved its studios to Boston on November 6, 1930, though some programming had originated from Boston for some time beforehand, and the transmitter remained in Gloucester until a 1932 move to
Saugus. The 1941
North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement moved WHDH to 850kHz, and allowed the station to broadcast on a full-time basis. WHDH was able to increase power to 5,000 watts and go full-time, but not without protests from KOA, one of the dominant class A
clear channel stations on
850 AM. For two years, from 1943 until 1945, WHDH was the local affiliate of the
Blue Network, the former "NBC Blue", replacing
WBZ as Blue affiliate; WHDH ceded the affiliation to
WCOP after the Blue Network also chose to affiliate with
Lawrence's WLAW (the facilities of which were subsequently sold to
WNAC).
Purchase by the Herald-Traveler In 1946, shortly after World War II, the
Boston Herald-Traveler newspaper purchased WHDH, by this time again an independent station. Bob Clayton, Norm Nathan, news anchor John Day, and a mid-morning women's show hosted by Christine Evans (also billing herself as Chris); along with live coverage of
Boston Red Sox baseball,
Boston Bruins hockey, and
Boston Celtics basketball, made WHDH one of the most popular stations in the region in the post-World War II era. In the late 1950s,
Jess Cain joined the station, first co-hosting the morning show with Dorey, then as solo host when Dorey moved over to television. Cain would remain at WHDH for 34 years. By the early 1960s, Hank Forbes and Alan Dary had joined Cain, Clayton, and Nathan on the WHDH staff. In the 1950s and 1960s, WHDH, along with WBZ, had among the strongest lineup of personality disc jockeys in Boston radio history. While the two stations for the most part programmed different kinds of music, both had very talented air personalities who were "household names" in the Boston area. Perhaps the station's best-known on-air personalities outside of Boston were the comedy team of
Bob and Ray, who did a comedy-and-records show at WHDH before they departed for national fame in New York City. The station employed a popular
MOR (what today would be called "
adult standards") music format, which would also include soft rock songs by the end of the 1960s. The station also had specialty shows playing
jazz and
big band music.
Sports coverage While WHDH was never "all sports", it was easily Boston's top sports station during the 1950s through the end of the 1960s. It referred to itself "The Voice of Sports", a sub-branding of the station's overall imaging as "The Sound of the City". For 30 consecutive years, from 1946 to 1975, WHDH was the flagship station of the Boston Red Sox, featuring play-by-play announcers such as
Jim Britt,
Ford C. Frick Award-winning
Curt Gowdy,
Ken Coleman, and
Ned Martin. From 1946 to 1949, it also broadcast the
Boston Braves, the city's
National League baseball club (the Red Sox and Braves then only broadcast home games, thus the teams shared the same announcers and did not have schedule conflicts). After the Braves left WHDH for WNAC (the forerunner to
WBIX and
WRKO) in 1950, WHDH began broadcasting all Red Sox games, home and away. The station also aired one of the first sports-oriented talk programs, although without telephone calls. "The Voice of Sports" was a Saturday night feature for years, usually hosted by
Don Gillis and featuring sports reporters from the
Herald-Traveler. It was a panel discussion program featuring lively debate about sports for an hour and represented the sum total of sports talk on Boston radio in that era. The title was also used for a sports talk program when telephone sports talk began to take hold in the early 1970s. It was an afternoon telephone sports talk hosted by
Leo Egan which ended after the station was sold to John Blair Broadcasting. During the winter months, WHDH and WHDH-FM were the flagship stations of the Boston Celtics of the
National Basketball Association and the Boston Bruins of the
National Hockey League, employing such announcers as
Johnny Most,
Fred Cusick, and
Bob Wilson. For a single season,
Jim Laing was the announcer for Bruins games and brought candor to the job. He was fired for being too frank about a team that finished sixth in a
six-team league. In the mid- and late 1960s, when both the Bruins and Celtics played, one of the teams (usually the one playing at home) was heard on AM; while the other (usually the team playing on the road) was heard on FM. WHDH also was the radio home of
Harvard University football in the autumn, including 1968, the year of Harvard's famous 29-29 "win" against arch-rival Yale, considered one of the greatest college-football games ever played. In addition, the original
WHDH-TV (channel 5), which took to the air November 26, 1957, Less than two years later, WHDH and its FM sister station (by this time called WCOZ) were sold to Blair Radio, a national radio station advertising representative; the deal marked Blair's entry into station ownership. WHDH then elected to not renew its contract with the Red Sox upon its expiration following the 1975 season, citing financial losses; the broadcasts moved to
WMEX starting with the 1975 postseason. WHDH did not carry Sox games again until 1983, when it became an affiliate of the Campbell Sports Network, based out of
WPLM and
WPLM-FM in
Plymouth; Campbell moved the broadcasts to WRKO following the 1985 season. The station's last major sports property was the
New England Patriots during the late 1980s. Blair modernized the WHDH format, bringing it from the adult standards-oriented MOR sound to more of an
adult contemporary approach. Veteran disk jockeys were replaced by personalities with a
top 40 background, such as former WRKO personality Tom Kennedy (the DJ, not the game-show host), Bob Raleigh from
WPGC in Washington (owned by Richmond Bros., owners of WMEX), Sean Casey, who was formerly with
WOR-FM in New York and Bill Silver, the well-known voice of per inquiry advertisements who put the phrase "but wait there's more" into the national lexicon. The music was carefully researched and became more contemporary to appeal to an adult demographic but without a rock and roll style presentation; for all intents and purposes, WHDH played top 40 without any hard rock and with more non-current material. By the early 1980s, WHDH began to focus even less on music and more on personality, while playing more music and having less talk than rival WBZ. Air talent then consisted of people such as Dave Supple, Tom Kennedy, Jim Sands (who did a popular Saturday-night
oldies show), and Tom Doyle (who by the early 1980s was Cain's co-host). By the mid-1980s, WHDH was moving toward more of a talk format and on August 22, 1988, the station dropped music abruptly; although the station had been playing more music than WBZ, that station would gradually phase out music over the next several years. During its talk radio days, programs hosted by
Larry Glick (who moved from WBZ in 1987), Avi Nelson,
David Brudnoy (who would later go to WRKO, and finally, to WBZ), among others, were featured. During this time, Blair, following a takeover by
Reliance Capital Group, chose to sell its English-language broadcast stations to focus on the Spanish-language
Telemundo television network; in March 1987, it reached a deal to sell its entire radio group to Sconnix Broadcasting. The deal separated WHDH from its longtime FM sister station (which had become WZOU), as Sconnix chose to spin off WZOU and retain its existing FM station in the Boston market,
WBOS. In 1988, WHDH became an affiliate of the
NBC Radio Network.
David Mugar era On August 7, 1989, WHDH was sold to local businessman
David G. Mugar, whose New England Television Corporation (NETV) owned
CBS affiliate WNEV-TV (channel 7). (Sconnix sold WBOS a year earlier.) On March 12, 1990, WNEV's call letters became
WHDH-TV to correspond with WHDH radio. Mugar was hoping to bring back a main competitor to WBZ radio and
television, with a renewed emphasis on news and straight talk format with some political programming. Some sports programs remained, but news and talk were main priorities. Among the personalities to arrive in the early 1990s were mostly talents from within NETV, including television newscaster Ted O'Brien. WHDH also became the Boston affiliate for
The Rush Limbaugh Show. on December 1, the station was sold to Atlantic Radio, putting it under the same ownership as rival talk station WRKO. (Mugar would sell WHDH-TV to
Sunbeam Television in 1993.) Atlantic Radio made an attempt to distinguish WHDH and WRKO in 1993 by relaunching WHDH as an "information station", with the feature-oriented
Boston This Morning premiering in the morning drive slot on March 8; nine months later, on December 16, it was replaced with
News All Morning, a news block competing against WBZ. Conversely, the station began to air a
talk show hosted by
Boston Herald columnist and one-time WRKO midday host
Howie Carr on October 4, 1993, airing in afternoon drive against WRKO's
Jerry Williams. During this time, Atlantic transferred hourly
CBS Radio Network newscasts from WRKO to WHDH; On August 15, 1994, American Radio Systems announced the purchase of WEEI (590 AM)'s intellectual property (call letters, programming, and staff) from Back Bay Broadcasters, who had acquired WEEI from the Boston Celtics back in March. ARS then announced plans to move WEEI to the stronger 850 AM, replacing WHDH. ARS concurrently moved the Rush Limbaugh and Howie Carr shows, in addition to the "Skyway Patrol" traffic report brand, from WHDH to WRKO.
The Money Experts, a daily financial talk show also previously heard on WHDH, would move to
WBNW, a new business talk station that would take over WEEI's old frequency.
WEEI (850 AM) SportsRadio 850 . As part of this complex transaction, ARS changed the station's format to sports radio on August 29, 1994, rebranded the station "SportsRadio 850 WEEI", and reassigned on- and off-air personnel; In effect, this new WEEI (850 AM) became the successor to the previous WEEI (590 AM), and also inherited WHDH's rights to
Boston College Eagles men's basketball; WEEI's existing rights to
BC football were also carried over to 850 AM. Due to conflicts with
BC basketball, Boston Bruins broadcasts, which WEEI had carried on 590 AM, remained on that frequency even after the launch of WBNW; ARS also moved Red Sox broadcasts to WEEI from WRKO starting in 1995, marking their return to the 850 kHz frequency. Conversely, Celtics broadcasts were moved to WRKO for the
1995–96 season; they returned to WEEI the following season. Concurrent with the move to 850, WEEI ceased an affiliation with
ESPN Radio; however, on September 11, 1995, it returned to the network to carry
The Fabulous Sports Babe (in middays) in a schedule shuffle that also saw the merger of the
Dale Arnold and
Eddie Andelman shows into
The A-Team and the launch of
The Big Show. WEEI also added "Patriots Monday", featuring weekly appearances from New England Patriots players and coaches, in 1995; it moved to rival WNRB (the former WMEX) in 1999, but returned to WEEI in 2002, and was joined by the similar "Patriots Friday" (formerly aired on
WAMG) in 2008. In March 1995, the station ceased carrying
Sports Byline USA and
One-on-One Sports in the overnight hours in favor of the
Sports Fan Radio Network.
The Fabulous Sports Babe left the WEEI lineup on October 3, 1997, with the station using its time slot to launch the locally-produced
Dennis and Callahan on October 6.
Dennis and Callahan became the station's morning show on September 7, 1999, after the station dropped
Imus in the Morning in August due to declining ratings.
Westinghouse Electric Corporation, then-parent company of
CBS Radio, announced its acquisition of American Radio Systems in September 1997. As the combined company would have controlled 59 percent of advertising revenues in the Boston market, as well as three of the top five radio stations, in April 1998 the
Department of Justice ordered CBS to divest WEEI, WRKO, WAAF (now
WKVB), and WEGQ (now WEEI-FM), as well as
KSD and
KLOU in St. Louis and
WOCT in Baltimore, as a condition of its approval of the merger. In August 1998,
Entercom announced plans to acquire the four Boston-area stations, along with WWTM (now
WVEI), from CBS for $140 million. WEEI again lost the Celtics broadcast rights in 2001, this time to WWZN (the former WNRB). Entercom reacquired the rights to the broadcasts in 2005; initially heard on WRKO, Celtics games moved back to WEEI in 2007 (though Celtics coaches and players appeared on WEEI regularly during WRKO's time as flagship). Around the same time, the station again lost ESPN Radio programming when the affiliation was acquired by WAMG and
WLLH; the station then expanded an affiliation with
Fox Sports Radio that began in 2002. WEEI was awarded its first
Marconi Award in September 2006 for sports station of the year. WEEI was also named large market station of the year. The station had an ongoing feud with
The Boston Globe. In 1999, the Globe's executive sports editor, Don Skwar, banned the newspaper's sports writers from appearing on the station's afternoon
The Big Show after columnist
Ron Borges used a racial slur while on the air in reference to
New York Yankees pitcher
Hideki Irabu. Two weeks later, the ban was extended to WEEI's
Dennis and Callahan morning show. WEEI retaliated by banning
Globe staffers from all its shows. Nevertheless, WEEI host Michael Holley is a former Globe columnist. The ban came to an end on August 4, 2009, when
Bob Ryan appeared on
The Big Show, with host Glenn Ordway stating that "we have all come to our senses".
ESPN on WEEI In September 2009,
The Boston Globe reported that ESPN Radio was in negotiations to clear some of its night and weekend programming on WEEI, with speculation suggesting that WEEI could subsequently move to one of Entercom's properties on the FM dial (such as the 93.7 FM facility then occupied by WMKK), with the AM 850 signal switching to ESPN Radio. The report followed WAMG's decision to end its ESPN Radio affiliation and go silent, along with the launch of an FM competitor,
WBZ-FM, the previous month—the first serious threat to WEEI's dominance in Boston sports radio. Entercom confirmed on October 7, 2009, that ESPN Radio programming would return to WEEI effective November 2 (though most programming would remain local). WEEI began to carry ESPN Radio's overnight programming, including
AllNight with Jason Smith, and some weekend programming. As late as December 2010, station management continued to deny occasional reports of a move of WEEI's programming to WMKK. Ultimately, WEEI began to simulcast on 93.7 FM on September 12, 2011, a decision that came after WBZ-FM began outrating WEEI in three key demographics, The simulcast of WEEI and
WEEI-FM was split on October 4, 2012; the existing local programming and sports broadcasts remained on WEEI-FM, while AM 850 aired a redirection loop for one day before joining ESPN Radio on October 5. ESPN Radio's morning show,
Mike and Mike, marked its new affiliate with a live broadcast from
Gillette Stadium. WEEI also aired Boston Celtics games that conflicted with Boston Red Sox games on WEEI-FM through the 2012–2013 season; if the conflict involved a Celtics playoff game, the Celtics aired on WEEI-FM and the Red Sox game was on WEEI.
Sports betting In October 2021, WEEI dropped ESPN Radio in favor of
sports betting programming from the Audacy-owned
BetQL Network. The station also carries some programming from
CBS Sports Radio. Unlike the other Audacy stations with a sports betting format, which brand as "The Bet", WEEI continues to brand using its call sign. ==References==