By Steve Cichon | steve@buffalostories.com | @stevebuffalo
The holidays are bringing the first installment of several new features on Buffalo Stories.com. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll regularly be sharing from several categories in our expansive audio archive.
The first is “The Weekly Otto.” With at least 48 hours worth of John Otto shows on tape, plus many more interesting audio clips from his own personal audio collection, there should be plenty of material to keep us going for quite a while providing regular audio looks back at one of Buffalo’s all-time favorite intelligent men of the people and most missed voices in the night, on the radio, on the telephone (at long last, don’t you know.)
Another soon-to-be regular feature is The Ben Bass Memorial Jingle of the Week.
Buffalo Radio good guy Ben Bass passed away unexpectedly in 2014. Ben was often irascible and difficult to deal with– but he had a heart of gold, and was always doing what he could for others. Aside from 40 years as a broadcast engineer, radio disc jockey, and ham operator, Ben was also a great collector of commercial and radio station jingles.
Upon his death, a handful of Ben’s friends got together to buy up as much of his jingle collection as possible– it’s a veritable history of Buffalo radio. This archive includes jingles, production pieces, and station IDs from the 1950’s through the 2000s from dozens of Western New York– many of which it’s almost certain that Ben had the only remaining copy. Stations big and small… Jingles good and bad… We’ll be offering regular segments from more than ten hours worth of jingles from Ben’s collection.
We’ll also be repackaging classic Staffannouncer.com pages here on Buffalo Stories.com. I started working on Staffannouncer.com in 2003, at a time when many of Buffalo’s pop culture treasures weren’t even mentioned on the Internet.
It’s hard to imagine typing “Irv Weinstein” or “AM&A’s” into Google and getting no results, but that’s the way it was. Staffannouncer.com was my way to fix that.
I built a great 2004 website from code, by myself. A dozen years later, the look and some of the information needs some updating. I’ll be taking care of both of those things as I migrate all of the still-relevant pages and information from Staffannouncer.com here to Buffalo Stories.com.
