Welcome to another edition of Willoughby Hills!
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It’s been a heavy summer. It’s been unbearably hot and humid for long stretches. It’s been either really dry or monsoon rains, with little in between. It’s the kind of summer where it’s hard to feel optimistic about the future, and getting too nostalgic makes me feel guilty.
But I’ve allowed myself one nostalgic pleasure this summer: listening to FM radio by our swimming pool.
Growing up middle class outside Cleveland in the 1990s, FM radio was everything. My parents bought me a clock radio for Christmas when I was in first or second grade. I used to use the sleep timer function to fall asleep to Lite Rock 106.5 which played things like Michael Bolton and Phil Collins.
By fifth grade, Jammin’ 92.3 was the cool station that played mid-90s pop with a little alternative, hip hop, and R&B mixed in. Every night, they had the “Big 9 at 9” where they would count down the top 9 most requested songs of the day. Basically TRL before TRL.
The coolest part was that random people would call the station and get to “guest DJ” by introducing each song with a little greeting. They usually sounded something like:
“Hey, this is Holly in Cleveland Heights and I want to say hi to all my girls at Roxboro Middle School, especially Stacy, Jodie, Irene, and of course Lily-Ann. Tonight’s Number 5 song is ‘All My Life’ by K-Ci and JoJo, right here on Jammin’ 92.3!”
It was glorious.
One year, probably the summer after fifth grade, one of our friends threw a party to commemorate the last day of school. Somehow during that party, we came up with the idea that we should guest DJ on the Big 9 at 9. I remember going around and writing down everybody’s name so that we could list all maybe 35 kids in attendance during our intro.
We called in and were selected. We were told which song to introduce and then the DJ started recording our intro. I was reading the list of names into the phone when I got cut off. “You can’t say that many names, kid. Pick like 5. At the most.”
We scrambled and tried to figure out how to pare our list without it losing meaning. I remember the party host got named and maybe a few others. I’m not sure which song we introduced, but maybe a half hour after our recorded phone call, my voice was playing on Jammin’ 92.3 for not only the entire party but all of Cleveland. What a thrill!
By middle school, alternative rock was the scene and 107.9 The End was the coolest station. In heavy rotation were Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins, Bush, and No Doubt.
The morning show on The End was hosted by Howie Greene, who I used to think of as Cleveland’s Howard Stern. Probably because he was a Jewish guy from Brooklyn with a thick New York accent who hosted morning drive radio. Because otherwise, he wasn’t that similar.
I was able to find an email address for Howie and pitched him as the first guest on the public access show my friends and I were developing. We met him on a bench outside of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and talked for maybe 30 minutes about his life and career.
I was devastated when The End switched format around 1998, dropping alternative and becoming a hip hop station. For the final four or five days of the station, they simply looped R.E.M.’s song “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” day and night. I listened to that song maybe 100 times during that period.
One night, I had it on in my room when the song ended for a final time. The familiar, somewhat snarky voiceover guy came on with a prerecorded station ID: “W-E-N-Z, Cleveland Heights, Cleveland.” Then a few beats. Then loud hip hop music started playing with a new station ID for the format with a very different voice. It was the end of an era.
By high school, FM radio’s prominence had faded. I had some disposable income from mowing lawns, working at neighbor’s houses, and cashiering at Toys R Us, and a lot of that went towards buying CDs. This was also the era of CD-R drives where we could burn our own music at home and Napster, the first mass platform for downloading digital music files (even if it was super illegal).
As an adult, my FM listening habits were almost entirely checking in on the news on NPR or sometimes listening to Boston’s classical station WCRB. I even interviewed the GM of that station on my podcast, Anthony Rudel.
Tony brought a rock station programming sensibility to a classical station, which I appreciated. He also emphasized having local voices on air to announce songs and provide little slice of life moments. It made the station feel more human, especially in the era of iPod Shuffles, Spotify, and generic music feeds on FM. (Tony has since retired and now publishes Sonescape here on Substack).
As for how FM radio came back into my life, it was complete happenstance.
Two years ago, I was looking for a “job site radio” to have around the house for doing yard work. I wanted something that worked off of power tool batteries that I already owned and that allowed a connection to my phone. Ideally, Bluetooth, but hardwired would be fine too.
I ended up buying an older Dewalt radio off of Marketplace for $10. It uses the same batteries as my drills and saws, but it also has a regular, attached power cord for times when I’m close to an outlet.
Here’s the thing: this radio is probably at least a decade old and it only has two options: listen to FM radio or attach a phone via a headphone cable.
This seemed like an easy idea when I bought the radio, but given Apple’s disdain for a headphone jack, it’s become more complicated than it’s worth. I was always trying to find that USB-C to headphone dongle that I had misplaced. As such, instead of providing a gateway to the worlds of Spotify or Pandora, this unit has instead just been a glorified FM radio.
As I’ve written about before, our new house has a swimming pool, and for the last two summers, this radio has become a fixture when we all swim.
I’m still learning the local stations out here in Western Massachusetts, but this summer, we stumbled upon 94.7 WMAS and it’s become our poolside companion.
My kids are now the age that I was during my prime FM radio years, and I can’t help but remember those good old days, as WMAS feels a bit like a time machine.
Their format is “pop” in the broadest sense, without getting too specific to any time period or sub-genre. Off the top of my head, in the last two weeks or so, I’ve heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel, “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter, “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day, and “Bad” by Michael Jackson to name just a few.
WMAS brands itself as “Your Official At Work Station” and it very much sounds like what the receptionist at a dentist’s office would have playing at low volume near their desk. It’s pretty vanilla music, designed for mass appeal. The K-Mart circa 1997 of radio stations. Not memorable, but not terrible.
In the afternoons, when we have the radio on most, there’s about four or five songs that play at a time, followed by an ad break of maybe four or five minutes. The commercials playing on FM radio today sound the same as they did 30 years ago and they’re advertising the same types of businesses: local restaurants, cell phone companies, car dealerships. Lots and lots of car dealerships.
There’s a local DJ that comes on occasionally to talk between songs, sometimes even throwing to a meteorologist from the local news station to give a weather update. The local DJs are on during the day, although WMAS picks up John Tesh’s syndicated radio show in the evenings (the same John Tesh who was a guest on my podcast and shares a birthday with me).
The station also gives away concert tickets with some regularity. Just like in my childhood, they will play a “speed dial” sound, then the DJ will announce that caller nine will win tickets to an upcoming show.
My kids have enjoyed trying to win. We missed out on Shakira tickets entirely because the phone lines were jammed. When they were giving away Darius Rucker tickets, our call made it through, but we were caller five, not caller nine. We’ll probably keep trying though. Maybe one day we’ll get lucky.
WMAS has been a new discovery for us, but it’s been broadcasting to Western Massachusetts on the FM dial since 1947 (and was originally the FM simulcast of an AM station using the same call letters dating back to 1932).
Today, the station is owned by Audacy, a media conglomerate with more than 200 radio stations in its portfolio, although it has gone through many owners over the years.
Oddly enough, Roy Cohn, the political operative, Nixon/Reagan associate, and mentor to Donald Trump, once owned a stake in WMAS. Because it’s impossible to write anything in 2026 without it somehow also having to namecheck Trump.
I haven’t been able to find out much about why Cohn bought the station or even many details of what it was like under his ownership, but I did find somebody on Facebook that remembers him at a Christmas party for the station showing off photos of J. Edgar Hoover in drag. So that’s something.
I’m sure for locals that have spent decades listening, WMAS has fallen a long way from the peak of local radio. I feel the same way about what has happened to the radio scene in Cleveland.
Still, there’s something nice about listening to music on somebody else’s terms. To have a playlist determined by a human DJ, not a computer algorithm.
The best days of radio may seem long gone, but according to one set of data, 46% of listening time in cars still belongs to AM/FM terrestrial radio. Car companies have been removing AM radios from new vehicles, but that doesn’t mean people stopped listening.
I’m sure the amount of people using terrestrial radio at home is much lower than it once was. Those undercounter radios in kitchens are a thing of the past. Same with those Bose Wave radios that people used to keep in fancy living rooms. Aside from around the pool, we almost never have a radio playing music over the air.
Still, there’s something distinctly summer about having generic pop music play over the FM waves. It makes me feel like a kid again. And my kids get a taste of my childhood too.
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You need to level up — get a boombox, tape your faves off FM radio, and play your mixed tape on a Walkman as you sit by the pool. That’s what I do in 2026!