DREAM DUST: More today from former WESB disc jockey Dave Cibula
of Bradford on sign-off at the radio station some 30-plus years
ago:

“While you played all the different LP tracks you put the
station to bed, as we called it, rounding up all the news casts
from that day plus local stories and got them ready to send down to
The Era. Plus the day’s program log — you made sure all the ads
played were checked off, I’s dotted T’s crossed that went to the
Era, too, and got out the next day program log for the morning
guy.

“At 11:55 p.m. or so you would play the theme cart again. We
read a brief wrap-up of the days headlines, played a brief taped
prayer called Meditations.

“We signed off every night with, ‘This Station is owned and
operated by Radio Station WESB Bradford. After that you would go in
the back and turn off the transmitter.

“Now after you worked awhile you wanted to get all the work of
putting the station to bed while Dream Dust was on so at 12:05 you
could go.

“I had two things I did — one, I recorded three nights of Dream
Dust on the old reel-to-reel tape machine we had in the control
room. So a couple times I could just put the tape on and forget
about the old LPs skipping and sticking while you were out of the
control room.

“That lasted a good six months before anyone caught on.
Remember, as a young kid, you just didn’t think you could get
caught.

“After that my girlfriend, who is now my wife, would come out
and I taught her to run the board, cue the album tracks so I could
get the closing work done and at 12:05 a.m., out the door we would
go. Thank heaven no one ever walked in late at night. I would have
had some explaining to do.

“The old station on High Street was a lot of fun back in those
days. It looked like an old pill box but all the people I worked
with back then just had a lot of fun. It was a good time.”

As Dave noted, the Era and WESB at the time shared news stories.
The federal government broke up such joint ownership some years
later.