WKLO's Consoles

[Travis]

What a great shot of WKLO's consoles (see Photos). I saw the one used during the 1970's when I paid a visit to Mason Lee Dixon, who had returned to Louisville and did a short stint at KLO in the late '70s. I recognized the pots as belonging to a Gates board and memorized every detail of the board so that I could later look it up in a Harris-Gates Intertype catalog at the Louisville Free Public Library. My memory has been fuzzy on this, but I found the board to be either a President or Executive model (both were very similar). The photo has been identified on this site as an image of the President model. Thanks to Mike Griffin for the photo.

[John Quincy]

Yes, it is indeed a Gates President model.

You can see a larger version of the board here:

www.historyofklif.com/pgtwo.html

I wonder why WKLO opted for the smaller version, being a big-city radio station. Heck, WBLG in Lexington (where I worked in the '70s) had the "big" version.

The way the President boards were intended to be set up was that all of your non-mic sources (cart machines, turntables, reel-to-reel decks, etc.) would be wired to play back through one of the pots on either side of the row of buttons, depending on whether you hit the top button or the bottom button. The buttons also acted as remote starts.