Hello Henry! Hello Henry!

Found on the memorabilia wall at Zack’s Hamburgers

“Hello Henry” is in Stereo! Henry Boggan was AM radio the way it used to be. WBT-AM is a Class A 50,000 watt station in Charlotte that suffers from poor grand conductivity, which means you may or may not hear it up the East Coast, but back in the day truckers plowing up I-85 from Atlanta to New York needed something to keep them awake. Henry worked the night shift from 1979 until 1996, when FCC / Congress stupidity destroyed terrestrial radio. WBT turns off the studio lights at 7PM and welcomes Dave “I’m debt free!” Ramsey, John Batchelor and Coast to Coast AM. The station is under contract to be sold to Beasley which probably means even that will be replaced with colon cleansing herbal cure infomercials.

Before streaming, if you lived in Charlotte, your radio options were limited after the sun went down unless you liked country music or recorded preachathons from dead pastors begging for money from beyond the grave. Henry went out of his way to avoid discussing politics or anything controversial. Little old ladies would call in and give a progress report on the blooming of their Christmas Cactus. Or maybe people would discuss which place in town has the best hamburgers…

This poster documents why AM Stereo failed. Once a reasonable implementation was created, AM stations would not switch to music because 99% of the potential audience had only mono car radios, and stereo music on AM mono is pretty horrible. Not only is it mono, it has static and low fidelity. But if the only AM stations that could afford to install new transmitters and totally rewire their studios were the big stations with loyal audiences like WBT-AM who didn’t want to listen to music – there was no reason to want to buy an AM stereo radio. AM stations were also not keen on needing full ASCAP / BMI licenses.

I just read today the EU has outlawed the sale of new FM analogue-only radios. New FM radios must support DAB+, the European digital FM standard, incompatible with the North American HD digital radio. We survived the digital conversion for TV. The NAB needs to be kicked in the gonads and forced to convert to fully digital radio and the same ban on new analog radios. The problem with that is HD Radio has patent issues, although the original patents have expired.

Henry Boggan died in 2006. Queen Charlotte was cooked at Thanksgiving and fed to the homeless at the Greyhound Bus Station.