John's Other Wife
The tech girl has one consolation, though. Nearby Boston station WHDR has a very powerful transmitter; and over the control room monitor, if she is so minded, she can hear every word of Gang-Busters or John's Other Wife.
This is all standard procedure, but sometimes something goes wrong. For instance, a show may have been mistimed; and the two girls may find them selves with fifteen minutes at the end of a show and nothing to play in them. Often they take the easy way out, and simply replay part of the show. The proper procedure, however is to "pull" records from the library. Since most of these records are 78 r.p.m., quite a few of them have to be pulled, very often in a hurry. Dead time is the P. M. 's chief nightmare.
Another nightmare is the "back" the production mistake that goes over the air. Backs may be unavoidable; a phone call in the middle of an announcement, a knock on the door, something falling, or a car honking below. Hacks may be small, such as a slight mistake in wording an announcement. And hacks may be heinous, such as forgetting a plug or mis-naming a record or forgetting to give record credits to the store lending records for a show. And there are tech hacks too; when the P.M. announces "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", for instance, and the tech girl plays "Blue Skies"; or when a record starts with an eerie screetch, or when a 78 record in played at 33 1/3 speed.
But more often than not the girls achieve that announcers dream, a hackless night. At about 11:45 the announcer calls the Weather Bureau and gets the forecast for the next day. The two girls begin sorting records, and putting them back into envelopes. At about three minutes of midnight, the last show is brought to a close.
Then the final announcement, from "Radio Station WRRB now leaves the air" to "signing off for . . . on controls, and the entire staff of Radio Radcliffe." She gives the time; signals to her control girl. Again the triumphal march goes over the air; this time the whole march is played, the only time a theme is played in full at Radio Radcliffe. Then the control board is switched off till 7:28:40 the next night.
The tech girl and the P.M. straighten up the studio, collect their varied belongings (the P.M. picking up the records) bid each other good night, and go home to bed. The tech girl is through for the week; but the P.M.'s night will not really be over until about 9:30 the next morning, when she returns the records to Briggs and Briggs.
New Plans for Fall
Next year should be different, for Tech and Radcliffe have ambitious plans. The Annex station will move into new, larger quarters in the Holmes Hall basement, across the hall from the Cliffe music library. Studies will be twice the size of the present rooms. The control room will be flanked by two broadcasting studies, one of which could be used for "live" programs.
Being constructed now is a new console, or control panel, to take care of larger coverage. Over the summer WMIT and WRRB will be officially attached by a special telephone line which will relay exchanged programs Tech has lines to local auditoriums, and Radcliffe plans to receive programs called "remotes" relayed through WMIT from these sources. WRRB eventually hopes to have its own lines for remotes.
Radio Radcliffe plans to extend hours as well as program sources. Tech's library broadcasts an all-day classical musical program which Radcliffe girls could hear from 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. WRRB will send its own programs over the air during the evening until midnight, as at present.
There is just one unsettled matter. When Radio Radcliffe moves into Rolmes Hall, what will happen to the fabled Beast?