The Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia

Broadcast Pioneers member Fred Woskoff
The Palestra
February 12, 1969

ABOUT THE PHOTO - On Wednesday, February 12, 1969, a ragged, hastily assembled basketball team representing WRTI-FM (during its last days as a student run station) tipped off against an equally motley crew from WRCP AM & FM, a Philadelphia country music station. The game took place in Philadelphia's famous Palestra, at half-time of a real game between Temple University and Penn State.

The WRTI team included Mark Frantz, John Friedman, Rich Kirkpatrick, Larry Malloy, Bob Sigovich and Steve Whitney. The "coach" was Broadcast Pioneers member Fred Woskoff. Dick Weiss was supposed to play, but someone had stolen his gym shorts, so he was reduced to sitting on the sidelines, looking on.

Broadcast Pioneers Current President Jerry Klein was the referee, since he was associated with both stations (student station manager at WRTI-FM, and the all-night DJ called "the Midnight Cowboy" at WRCP). We have a short excerpt in our audio archive from the end of that WRTI/WRCP game.

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Member Fred Woskoff tells us that he thinks the unidentified camera operator (located in the right of the above photo) of the WCAU-TV grand opening in May of 1948 was Hank Bilecki. We talked with Board Member Dick Kearney, who was with the station for a half-century, and he didn't think so. Fred told us more about Bilecki and other memories of his days in the Philadelphia market:

And, for those real trivia buffs, Hank played "Rudy Rowtheboatnikoff," a "Russian" Cosmonaut on Channel 48's "Captain Philadelphia." Of course, Stu Nahan was the Captain, and if I recall, Hank filled in while Stu was doing Flyer games' play-by-play. When Stu moved to Los Angeles, "Captain Philadelphia" was replaced by "Sargeant Sacto," played by Tommy Noble (of Bandstand fame). And, for even more trivia, Channel 48 later replaced Tommy with Phil Allen, who was also "Sargeant Sacto," in addition to doing radio in Trenton.

Hank always played Santa at WKBS functions, and he alway insisted that we get a really good Santa suit, because he didn't want to disappoint the kids.

Another hilarious tape from WKBS that might turn up some time is when Al Farnese spoofed Bernie Herman about a "new microphone" thy engineers wanted to try out. Al took a Lav mic and put it inside a big fire extinguisher cone, then put a screen (and an RCA logo button) on the front, with the cord running out the bottom. Bernie was sitting on the set of his afternoon movie host show, and Al kept getting him to give "a level." Al kept going for several minutes, with Bernie getting more and more angry. Finally Al had the huge "mic" literally in front of Bernie's face saying "that sounds good," and Bernie finally asked "isn't that going to block the shot?"

Hank and several other Channel 48 staffers went to work in Washington at the U.S. Information Agency after WKBS went dark. I visited there in 1997 and met with a couple of them. Tony Masciarelli, Roger Levi, and a couple other guys were there. Don Paine also went from WKBS to the USIA, but by 1997 he had retired, I think. Some very good guys to have worked with, indeed.

Then, there were all the WKBS "Banana Splits" appearances. The station bought copies of the four characters from the show, and we used to take them on location for appearances. One time, Tony Masciarelli, myself,
and a couple of other staffers took the costumes to a McDonalds on North Broad Street. There were so many kids there that things got out of hand a bit, so the McDonalds folks took us down to the basement, and we hid out there for over an hour while they tried to get the disappointed kids to leave. Getting down the step in the costumes was no small feat, believe me!

Hank also did, along with Al Farnese, who played "Dickory Doc," a video for a WKBS Christmas Party that is still one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Hank played Santa, arrriving at Doc's workshop. Doc hears the reindeer on the roof, and Santa calls out......"whoa Dancer, whoa Prancer....whoa Go.... it", and it goes downhill from there. Maybe somebody has a copy of that for the archives

Give my best to all my Philly friends. We're keeping very busy (as you might imagine) here in Madison, WI, as WisconsinEye has been averaging about 100 hours of new programming each week around the events at the
Capitol. We're sort of the C-Span for Wisconsin, although we're not-for-profit, and supported by donors and through our cable partner Charter Communications.

The e-mail address of the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia is pioneers@broadcastpioneers.com