By George McClure, ENS, (’55-’57)
– Winter Park, Fla.
Here’s how we got “Music for Dining” on the T-bonne during the time I was on board. There was a FM station in Norfolk, WRVC, owned by a tobacco company in Richmond where there was WRVA.
Our ship’s entertainment system at that time had only an AM/short-wave radio. But WRVC broadcast nice instrumental music (Montovanni, etc.) at dinnertime. So I went to the other Radio Shack and bought a FM receiver.
I had built a nice hi-fi amplifier before joining the Navy, so brought it up from Florida over one Christmas, put it in my stateroom (next to the radio shack) and used it to pump the dinner music through the ship’s entertainment system.
When we were in the shipyard in Charleston in 1956, I bought a mast-mounted FM antenna and had welders install it on the signal bridge (cost: 5 pounds of coffee) so I could reach more FM stations.
We could even get some stations while underway along the coast of the U.S.