Rising proudly on a ten-acre plot on Soldiers Field Road stands WBZ's new three-million dollar radio and television center, and next to it the familiar 649-ft. transmission tower, the tallest structure in New England. Inside, an all-modern building houses the offices and studios of WBZ, WBZ-FM, WBZ-TV, and short-wave WBOS; the station realized two years ago that they were all too big to squeeze inside the old Hotel Bradford headquarters. Outside, next to the building, the high tower lights up the night sky and sends the station's FM and TV signal over a radius of 65 miles.

Television has been gradually taking over the WBZ building. Radio doesn't require much room, for most of WBZ-AM emanates either from the NBC network or from sister-station WBZA in Springfield. Ever since the WBZ building opened in July, 1948, television has been taking over space in corresponding proportion to the industry's general growth over the last few years.

The station put the finishing touches on its first big television studio last summer and has just completed its second, an auditorium-type affair which can also be used for radio. At the moment, however, all WBZ's "live" television is shot in the first studio, a two-story room equipped with the newest in lighting. Compensating for the heat produced by floods, spots and a dozen banks of base lighting, ceiling air units pump in 8200 cubic feet of air per minute, thus completely changing the air every 11 minutes.

In this room are produced the station's 25 hours a week of live studio shows. These are mainly hobby, music, puppet, and nature programs which can easily be run off back-to-back in different sections of the same room. Often as many as six consecutive shows are screened with only 30 seconds' worth of break between programs in which to scoot cameras, scenery, lights and microphones into their new positions. The only serious mishap so far in these live shows came last spring in the "Living Wonders" nature program when an annoyed rattlesnake from the Boston Museum of Natural Science took a bite at the microphone and glued it up with venom spray. A spare mike was rushed in to finish out the show.

When WBZ-TV isn't in the studio playing with rattlesnakes or out following a ball game, it devotes much of its time to films. After the films are adapted technically for television, they must undergo a crucial test before the film editor. The editor spends eight hours a day scrutinizing every film the station plans to use, occasionally deleting whatever "won't go in Boston." "I bore myself silly," she says.

Of course there is more than just television inside the WBZ center; but the other departments are all small and self-contained. In the rear are five radio studios, a newsroom, and a disc jockey's library for the few low-budget studio programs that supplement NBC network shows. Downstairs the large equipment room holds a relay to the radio transmitter at Hull, Mass., and, of course, the transmitter which feeds TV and FM through cables up the tower.

Quick-paced work allowed WBZ to complete its sprawling radio and television center in a little over a year. The entire WBZ family packed up and moved out of the Bradford and into the new center one weekend in June, 1948.

Harvard holds a very strong place in the center's early love, thanks to the anties of two students who one night a year ago last spring climbed the full 649 feet of the tower. But it won't happen again. WBZ has since had time to put up a big, prohibiting spike fence around the base.