DREAM DUST: Dave Cibula is a name you might remember from WESB
radio of years gone by.
He has some information on the station’s sign-off years ago that
we’ve been discussing in Round the Square. His comments from
30-some years at the “pillbox” were pretty interesting so we
thought we’d share them today and tomorrow.
Dave, a DJ from 1974 to 1979, started on the 4:30 p.m. to
Sign-Off shift. “Remember, I was just out of school for
broadcasting when I started very young and it was a long time ago,”
he writes.
“From ‘spinning Dream Dust,’ as we called it, I can tell you
here’s how it went. At 10:55 p.m. we did a five-minute weather
show, a weather round-up of national, state and local weather. We
read temps from all 48 lower states with the high and low and the
next day’s high and low … hard to believe today you got all that on
the radio.
“(At) 11 p.m., we did 10 full minutes of news ending with the
Obits. As a young kid, you really did not know what tempo to read
this not wanting to offend anyone or mispronounce a name. Then five
minutes of sports — now a 20-minute news block all by yourself.
After 6 1/2 hours on the air left you a little dry.
“We ended it all with a local favorite Dream Dust. The opening
was on tape, a single track cart much like the old eight track but
it was one track and it re-cued itself so you played it at the end,
too.
“Dream Dust was 11:15 p.m. ’til 11:59 p.m. We rotated about 25
or 30 albums for Dust. After the news you played the taped opening,
‘I’ll See You in my Dreams,’ for as long as you wanted. The tape
was about three minutes but we did not play the whole tape. We
would fade that down and have an LP cued up and start that.”
Dave send us a later e-mail, clarifying information about that
lead-in, played at the beginning and end of the program: “No one in
my years there ever seemed to know the name of it. It was just
first played on an old mat machine which was way out of date in
1974 then put on the tape cart. There was no name or title on the
old mat which was the size of an LP but floppy thin plastic.”
