While this isn’t a great quality image, just a photo of a photo that was displayed at Bob Gay’s funeral, it shows him on the air at an unknown radio station.
I’m pleased to share two recently digitized airchecks of Bob Gay from 1972, when he was the evening DJ at WCBM-AM 680 in Baltimore. Sixteen years later, he would become my high school radio teacher in Little Rock, giving his students real-world instruction on how to develop the skills needed to work in radio and land their first jobs.
Bob was a native of Newport, Arkansas, and went by Bob Galen on the air. He had a lengthy career in broadcasting, working at radio and television stations around the country. Fittingly, he encouraged his students at Metropolitan Vocational Education Center, part of the Little Rock School District, not to limit their careers by staying in one market, but to look for opportunities wherever they could find them.
After starting his career in his hometown, Bob worked at stations in Little Rock, Memphis, Marion, Alabama, and Burlington, North Carolina. In the early 1970s, he was hired at Baltimore’s WCBM, then one of the city’s top-rated stations. Owned by Metromedia, WCBM featured personality-driven DJs playing a middle-of-the-road format that mixed current hits with oldies. The station also had a strong local news presence.
Earlier this summer, I spent a couple of Sundays with Bob’s son, Russell Gay, whom I met at Bob’s funeral in 2024. I wrote about Bob and his influence on me shortly after his death. Russell has kept his dad’s reel-to-reel tape machine in working order, and together we digitized some of Bob’s old tapes, including these two recordings.
One reel contained a scoped aircheck that was edited into a demo tape featuring highlights of a WCBM airshift. Russell said his dad was constantly sending tapes to program directors at other stations, always looking for his next opportunity. The other is an unscoped hour of Bob, beginning around 6 p.m. during a WCBM local newscast. After the newscast, there’s an awkwad bit of interplay between Bob and the anchor before he launches into his evening shift. Commercials, jingles and full songs make this recording especially fun to hear.
AUDIO: A scoped aircheck of Bob Galen, likely from October 1972 on WCBM-AM 680 in Baltimore. DOWNLOAD
AUDIO: An hour-long unscoped aircheck of Bob Galen on WCBM Sept. 27, 1972. This includes a local newscast, traffic report, commercials and other elements. DOWNLOAD
The booming voice, the constant wisecracks, the interplay with the jingles, the way he asks listeners, “How the heck are you?” — it was a different era of radio. These recordings, particularly the full hour, are a wonderful time capsule of what personality-driven AM radio sounded like more than half a century ago.
There’s also a personal connection that makes hearing these recordings meaningful to me.
One day in my radio class in 1988, Bob played us a tape of himself on WCBM. The sound of that recording has been bouncing around in my head ever since. I’m grateful to Russell for finding these tapes all these years later and allowing me to digitize and share them.
Digitizing one of the reels of Bob Galen on WCBM on June 14, 2026.
Last year, Russell also gave me several cassettes from his dad’s collection, including recordings of a couple of Little Rock stations that I’ve previously posted here. Among them were three hours of KARN-AM 920 from 1977 and a 90-minute recording of R&B station KOKY-AM 1440 from 1975.
It’s a joy to be able to preserve recordings like these before the aging tapes deteriorate further, and to share them online so others can enjoy hearing what radio was once like.
Veteran reporter, editor and manager at newspapers, radio and television stations. I’m also a photographer, historian and author, having written the 2017 book Rock Island Railroad in Arkansas.
