The history of WJIB is fascinating.

Clifford Harvey was born in Philadelphia and graduated from MIT in 1931 with a degree in communications.  He founded Harvey Radio Labs in 1932, a company that made high frequency transmitters. By 1940 85% of the company’s production was for military use, and they were awarded the US Navy “E” award for excellence.  That same year, Harvey Radio Labs was sold to Frank Lyman, Jr.

In 1947, Frank Lyman, Jr. was the engineer and founder who applied to the FCC for a new radio station in Cambridge on 740 kiloHertz.  It first went on air in 1948 as WTAO.  The call letters, if you were to draw “TAO” in a certain way, would look like “740”.  

In 1945, Lyman obtained an experimental FM license for W1XHR (“X Harvey Radio”) in the new FM “high band” on 96.9 mHz.  A few years later the license was changed to a commercial FM license under the call sign WXHR.  In 1953, Lyman received a license for the first UHP television station in Boston to operate channel 56 and named it WXHR-TV (now WLVI). 

Lyman sold the three stations (WTAO, WXHR-FM, and WXHR-TV) in 1968 to a company owned by Kaiser Broadcasting and the Boston Globe. The and the TV call letters changed to WKBG-TV (Kaiser-Boston Globe”). WTAO 740 retained it’s local format, but WXHR-FM was renamed WJIB-FM, and the programming changed to a new emerging “beautiful music” format emulating the new success of KFOG in San Francisco.  WJIB-FM became the first successful FM stations in Boston, and quickly became #1, Boston’s most-listened to radio station.  It held that position for nearly 20 years.  

By 1988 as the audience of WJIB got older and older, advertising revenue got smaller and smaller.  WJIB-FM was sold to new owners Emmis Broadcasting who decided to completely overhaul the station to a new format to attract younger listeners The WJIB call letters were abandoned, and the frequency renamed WCDJ, “CD96.9”.  It flopped.  In 1993 new owners Greater Media flipped the call letters of the failed WCDJ to WBCS, “Boston’s Country Station”.  After that, a talk, then dance, then “Mike FM”, and the final classic rock format  failed, in 2012 96.9 became Urban Contemporary , the format it carries on with successfully today.

But what happened to WTAO? During the first year of the process, there was a bidding process, and the station was awarded to one or more Black Interests, subject to the payment of their bid be made by a certain time. That “time” was postponed many times due to opposing parties vying for ownership, mostly from the Black community. The Folk format was dropped and replaced with a Gospel format, with the call letters changed to WLVG (“We Love God). By 1991, the federal court bankruptcy judge who had given the hopeful operator of the station 7 years to come up with the money had passed away.  Now a different judge had taken over the case. Meanwhile other interested parties had come on the scene in the latter part of this now eight-year case.

Bob Bittner, who published a local Boston weekly singles dating magazine, was aware of the goings-on.  He attended what resulted in the final disposition of the case at federal court on July1, 1991 to make a sealed bid. Prior to the opening of the bids the judge rejected the pleas of the man who was supposed to come up with the money for seven years.  There were four bidders, one of whom didn’t like the judge’s terms and walked.  That left three bidders, one of who was Bittner, and all bid well into six figures.  Bob Bittner was lucky; his bid was a mere $115 over the second highest bid.