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 WTND-LP – 106.3 FM
The Voice
P.O. Box 665
Macomb, IL 61455
www.wtnd.us 
Listen to WTND-LP
WTND-LP Program Schedule
About the Founders of WTND-LP
 Tom and Darryl
The set up at the time there was that they wanted to play anthing that had made it to the top twenty of the billboard charts. They were having a difficult time finding certain records for the station to play. We had a very good collection even back then, and we were able to supply them with most of the music they needed. I remember one record in particular that they wanted very badly and were stumped as to where it could be found. It was "Seventeen" by Boyde Bennette. We surprised the heck out of them by bringing in a mint condition single for them to tape.
As payment for our gathering music for them, we received huge piles of forty five RPM singles, which the station had no use for what so ever. They were on several subscription services and received new records all the time, but since they didn't currently play new records, the new stuff was simply piling up in their storage room. It was a good trade, since they didn't actually want our records to keep; they just wanted to tape them and put them on "carts" so they could be played on the air.
We would, in fact, bring in a stack of records from their list and the "Record Turner" would play them and an engineer would run a tape recorder and copy them to tape. They were later transferred to the carts that would be played on the air. This was done because of the union rules. no one but a person from the musician's union could operate a turntable at a major radio station in Chicago at the time. No one but a member of the Communications Workers Of America could run a tape recorder. You get the picture. It was very silly.
If we didn't have a particular song, we searched all over town in many different record stores to find the records they needed. We actually already had almost all the ones they needed, but there were a few that we didn't own, so we made it a priority to find all of the songs that we didn't currently have. We were very careful to use only the original versions of the songs we brought to them. we also would let them know if they were playing a wrong version of a song that had come from somewhere else.
All the people that worked with us at WIND were very nice and they seemed to be very pleased with what we did for them. One thing that was kinda funny was the fact that later when the station was no longer playing music only from the sixties and before, they didn't have a particular record that they needed and they contacted us to find it for them. The record was "Motorcycle Mama" by Sailcat, and they had given us something like ten or twelve copies of it earlier, but didn't save any copies for themselves. We were happy to let them use a copy to record.
In 1973 we developed a friendship with the program director at WOPA-FM in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb. We began helping him with a similar result. The only difference was that he let us have albums in return for letting him record our music. WOPA was not a union shop. When they officially became an oldies station, they changed their call letters to WGLD it was quite a decent oldies station, and with our help, it got even better.
After working with the PD for several months, he stopped calling us to ask for stuff, and we wondered if we had upset him somehow, so one day we called his number and asked to speak to him. We were informed that he no longer worked at the station but we could certainly speak to the new program director, and we were connected right away.
The new program director turned out to be someone that we highly respected and admired. His name was Art Roberts. He was, among other things, a famous DJ from the glory days of WLS, The BIG 89. He had the nine to midnight shift there for many years. To say that our jaws dropped when he answered the phone is an understatement.
It turned out that the previous program director had left in the middle of the night and had pretty much cleared out the studio of carts and records, leaving them with very little to play. Art needed a source of music and we were his answer.
I explained to Art what we had been doing for the previous guy and he said that he would like to take a look at our collection, so we invited him to come over and have a look. He was impressed enough to hire us on the spot and we became the music directors of the station. According to Art, we were an unusual hire, since the job of music director was usually given to either the program director or to one of the DJs that was very familiar with the format of the day. We were not DJs at the station. We worked mostly at night and each night we would cart about fifty songs which would be added to the playlist once Art played them on his show the next afternoon.
We had a wonderful time working at the station and I am sure that we would have been there a lot longer if it hadn't been that the station owner decided to change the format and fire virtually everyone there. There is a long complicated story about how all that happened. Maybe someday we will write it here for you to read, but it is much too long to go into in this section.
I should point out that Art remembered us later in his life and wrote about the two blind friends that he hired and how well we did in helping him at the radio station. If you would like to read what he said about us you can still find it on his website Artroberts.com. He has since passed away, but the site is still there. It is a wonderful site that is a great tribute to a great guy that gave us a chance and we will always be grateful to him for that.
After leaving WGLD we entered into an agreement with another oldies station called WFYR where once again we supplied certain oldies for them. It was for a special show that they were doing to commemorate some sort of anniversary. We knew going into it that it wasn't going to be a pertinent job.
We provided them with what they needed and things seemed to be going pretty well, until it came time for them to pay us. Guess what! They refused to pay us what we had asked and they had agreed to pay. They told us that it wasn't worth what we had asked. The thing that really upset us was that they had already recorded all the music they wanted from us and there was nothing we could do to stop them from playing it. We could have sued them I suppose, but we didn't have any money to hire an attorney. Ah how I love the radio business.
 Bolting down WTND-LP's tower
We currently own a LPFM station here in Macomb, known as WTND-LP and we broadcast twenty four hours a day seven days a week. We still send programs to a satellite network and we are also on the ACB radio network. That is the American Council Of The Blind Radio Network.
You can direct any questions to darryl@tomanddarryl.org or tom@tomanddarryl.org. He gets top billing, and I have no idea why that is.
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