KCAC Farewell Broadcast

Listen to the KCAC Farewell Broadcast, from August 14, 1971:



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Here's a link to Tom Wright's original post on receiving the collection of tapes from Jeff and Jennifer Crawford featuring this broadcast, and here are some informal comments from Tom about the particular recording featured here:

"It runs about 26 minutes. The sound quality is not very good but it's amazing that this tape exists at all. It seems to run a bit slow but I'm not proficient enough yet on the gadgetry to fix it. When I tried to speed it up just the tiniest bit, it sounded like everybody was on helium, so I decided that a little slow is better than a lot fast.

It was really a trip to hear this tape 36 years after listening to the original broadcast. I remembered certain things precisely but had totally forgotten about others - like how Bill stops in the middle of his big, emotional farewell to plug a garage sale because he'd promised to do it earlier but had forgotten.

You'll hear a couple of glitches, or things that sound like glitches. The tape starts with Hank Cookenboo (at least I think it's Hank, maybe it's Marty slowed down by the tape) giving his own farewell speech, and at one point he just stops and there's dead air for 12 or 13 seconds - I think he got too choked up to go on. After some commercials, Compton comes on and starts to play a Moody Blues track, but the taper stopped part way through and then started again with Bill's farewell address. I don't know how much time elapsed while the tape recorder was turned off, but after that it runs uninterrupted though the end of the very last song. Everything that I remember from the original broadcast is on the tape, so I don't think the edit actually eliminated anything more than the Moody Blues song and whatever music came after it.

In the final fade, the last few seconds of KCAC's existence, you can hear someone yelling 'Tom! Tom!' That wasn't part of the broadcast - it was background noise picked up on the mic being used by the taper. The 'Tom' in question, according to Jeff Crawford, was the boyfriend of Lawrence Richardson's sister; she was the taper. Jeff and Lawrence were friends at the time. The sister's name seems to be lost to history (at least I don't recall Jeff ever mentioning it to me), as is her reason for recording so many hours of KCAC in the first place - but I'm sure glad that she did."

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