With the recent DVD release of the City Gardens documentary “Riot on the Dance Floor,” the time seemed right to share another trio of early 1980s ads that ran on WPRB for concerts at this venerable/dilapidated Trenton venue.
March 17, 1989 is the date of one of the most famous first round NCAA Tournament games of all time – 16 seed Princeton’s one point loss to top-ranked powerhouse Georgetown.
While the contest has only grown in legend since it was played, re-airing hundreds of times on ESPN Classic and being called “The Game That Saved March Madness” by Sports Illustrated, the following recordings have been heard by only an exclusive few since original broadcast.
From WPRB’s transmission of this famous game, here are pre-game interviews with senior captain Bob Scrabis and head coach Pete Carril.
Both were taped between Selection Sunday and the Tigers’ trip to Providence.
Thanx IV Sharin’ was an Internet phenomenon in a pre-Internet world.
A talk show that aired Sunday nights into Monday mornings on WPRB in the mid-to-late 1980s, the program was one of the few in the station’s history to take live phone calls from listeners – a jerry-rigged hand-crafted “seven second delay” involving two reel-to-reel machines and a well-placed pencil pushed into a wall the only safety net keeping potential obscenity from getting over the air.
Since the immediacy of the computer age and social networking was at least a decade away, interaction between audience and the show’s many hosts beyond the telephone line was primarily made up of letters sent to the station during the week (a fair percentage courtesy the incarcerated) that would then be read on the air – often requesting other fans of the show to contact them directly.
If you listened to Thanx IV Sharin’ on a regular basis, repeat callers began to pop up frequently, almost all under aliases I can still rattle off today such as “Dad,” “Packy Vomit,” “God,” “Jane Pod,” her brother “Bill Pod” and “Chris Makepeace” (not the Canadian actor of the same name).
I can only imagine how this underground community of unconnected misfits would have flourished further with the Internet at its disposal.
As a grade schooler growing up in central New Jersey, I would try to stay up late on Sunday nights, pressing “record” on the longest cassette I had when my eyes became heavy so I could listen to as much Thanx IV Sharin’ as possible on the way to school the next day.
I have fond memories of walking around Europe with my family one summer with a tape (or two) of TIVS in my Walkman on repeat.
Even though I would become a DJ at WPRB in 1988 and have always been fairly comfortable speaking into a microphone, I was terrified of calling Thanx IV Sharin’ and could never bring myself to phone in. In my young mind the show’s rotating hosts were impossibly quick-witted and I’ve always been a subpar improviser.
Going through old boxes at my parents’ house recently, I’ve found several letters I started writing to “Arlo,” “Beetle Bailey,” “Gordon Wu” and “Golf Ball Head” Ken Katkin that I never felt were decent enough to add a stamp to.
As a longtime admirer of Thanx IV Sharin’ from afar, I’m delighted to instead present this pair of beautiful listener postcards sent to the station during the show’s initial run. To me they exemplify how creative and devoted the show’s listeners were.
You can read some of Ken Katkin’s Thanx IV Sharin’ remembrances here.
If you have old airchecks, recordings or ephemera related to Thanx IV Sharin’, please contact us as they would make for great WPRB History posts!
A trio of early 1980s ads that ran on WPRB for concerts at Trenton’s venerable/dilapidated City Gardens, paired with the original scripts for two of these commercials. There’s more where these came from!
In 1991, Jim Nantz from CBS Sports recorded this series of promos for the upcoming slate of Princeton men’s basketball broadcasts on WPRB. Audio courtesy princetonbasketball.com.
Here’s what WPRB was playing in April of 1989. Amazingly, half of the top 10 are still active today! When’s the Spiral Jetty reunion?
A slideshow showcasing the proud, decade-spanning tradition of WPRB DJs photographed wearing Ramones shirts.
Have a shirt to share? Please send a picture our way!
When a reunited Detention came to record a live session at WPRB in 2010, Kevin Shields gifted this 1981 playlist for the show “Decline & Fall.”
Mark Dickinson and Lloyd Handler (aka “Larry Void”) started “Decline & Fall,” WPRB’s late night punk/hardcore show earlier that year. The program’s run spanned the entire decade, with the hosting torch passed several times over into the eventual hands of Ethan “Eddie Mosh” Stein and “Slammin'” Sam Youakim.
During the mid-late 80s, Chris Mohr would periodically host special editions of the show re-titled as the “All Fall Decline & Fall”, and would feature music only by The Fall.
Punk specialty shows have continued to air sporadically on WPRB over the years. From “Hey You Kids Get Off My Lawn” to “Punk vs. Metal” to “Totally Wired.”
Perhaps someday, the Decline and Fall franchise will be re-animated.
I was young when I fell for radio. I fell asleep listening to Phillies games and reruns of radio serials like The Shadow on the local AM station. I got my broadcasting license at a summer camp in the Poconos and waged a one-man war on behalf of heavy metal at age 11, even though people had to be within a few hundred yards to hear it. A local alternative station in Ohio introduced me to Nirvana and Joy Division. My father had done play-by-play on WPRB for Princeton basketball as an undergraduate in the 60s. I loved radio, and I knew about PRB, but I didn’t know that the radio station would bend the course of my whole life.
