WEEI (850 kHz) is a commercial sports gambling AM radio station licensed to Boston, Massachusetts, serving Greater Boston and much of New England. Owned by Audacy, Inc., WEEI is the Boston affiliate for the Audacy-owned BetMGM Network and Westwood One Sports, serving as a gambling-focused brand extension of its main sports radio station in the market, WEEI-FM. The WEEI studios are located in Boston's Brighton neighborhood, while the station transmitter resides in the Boston suburb of Needham. In addition to a standard analog transmission, WEEI is available online via Audacy.
Historically, the station is perhaps best known by its former WHDH call letters, under which it operated from its establishment in 1929 until 1994; it then became the second home to WEEI following an intellectual property purchase. After WEEI's local programming moved to 93.7 FM in 2011, the station became a full-time ESPN Radio affiliate in 2012, and a sports gambling-focused station in 2021.
History
WHDH (850 AM)
Early years Originally located in Gloucester, Massachusetts, WHDH was founded on June 20, 1929, by Ralph Matheson. It was a daytime-only station broadcasting at 830kHz (leaving the air at local sunset in Denver, about two hours after sunset in Boston, to protect the signal of KOA in the Colorado capital city). WHDH was Matheson's second station; he had started WEPS on November 26, 1926. Much of WEPS' programming consisted of broadcasts to, for, or about fisherman, given Gloucester's status as a major port for the fishing industry. The WHDH license was issued in December 1928, a month after WEPS was forced to share time with WKBE in Webster on 1200kHz; WEPS was sold to Alfred Kleindienst, owner of its share-time partner (which became WORC in Auburn, near Worcester, a year earlier), in February 1930, with WEPS being moved to Auburn and consolidated with WORC on May 5. Matheson kept WHDH, which moved its studios to Boston on November 6, 1930, though some programming had originated from Boston for some time beforehand, and the transmitter remained in Gloucester until a 1932 move to Saugus. With the move, WHDH broadened its programming, but still included some reports for fishermen. In subsequent decades, WHDH would claim WEPS' history as its own.
The 1941 North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement moved WHDH to 850kHz, and allowed the station to broadcast on a full-time basis. WHDH was able to increase power to 5,000 watts and go full-time, but not without protests from KOA, one of the dominant class A clear channel stations on 850 AM. For two years, from 1943 until 1945, WHDH was the local affiliate of the Blue Network, the former "NBC Blue", replacing WBZ as Blue affiliate; WHDH ceded the affiliation to WCOP after the Blue Network also chose to affiliate with Lawrence's WLAW (the facilities of which were subsequently sold to WNAC).
Purchase by the Herald-Traveler In 1946, shortly after World War II, the Boston Herald-Traveler newspaper purchased WHDH, by this time again an independent station. In 1948, the station moved its transmitter site from Saugus to Needham, west of Boston, where the station would be able to increase power to 50,000 watts with a directional signal aimed east to protect KOA and other stations on 850. The station also expanded into FM broadcasting on March 31, 1948, with the sign-on of WHDH-FM (94.5 FM, now WJMN).
While not first in Boston to adopt a popular music and disc jockey format with hourly newscasts (WORL was the first), a combination of a powerful signal, top-notch personalities like Ray Dorey, Fred B. Cole, Bob Clayton, Norm Nathan, news anchor John Day, and a mid-morning women's show hosted by Christine Evans (also billing herself as Chris); along with live coverage of Boston Red Sox baseball, Boston Bruins hockey, and Boston Celtics basketball, made WHDH one of the most popular stations in the region in the post-World War II era. In the late 1950s, Jess Cain joined the station, first co-hosting the morning show with Dorey, then as solo host when Dorey moved over to television. Cain would remain at WHDH for 34 years. By the early 1960s, Hank Forbes and Alan Dary had joined Cain, Clayton, and Nathan on the WHDH staff.
In the 1950s and 1960s, WHDH, along with WBZ, had among the strongest lineup of personality disc jockeys in Boston radio history. While the two stations for the most part programmed different kinds of music, both had very talented air personalities who were "household names" in the Boston area.
Perhaps the station's best-known on-air personalities outside of Boston were the comedy team of Bob and Ray, who did a comedy-and-records show at WHDH before they departed for national fame in New York City. The station employed a popular MOR (what today would be called "adult standards") music format, which would also include soft rock songs by the end of the 1960s. The station also had specialty shows playing jazz and big band music.
Sports coverage While WHDH was never "all sports", it was easily Boston's top sports station during the 1950s through the end of the 1960s. It referred to itself "The Voice of Sports", a sub-branding of the station's overall imaging as "The Sound of the City". For 30 consecutive years, from 1946 to 1975, WHDH was the flagship station of the Boston Red Sox, featuring play-by-play announcers such as Jim Britt, Ford C. Frick Award-winning Curt Gowdy, Ken Coleman, and Ned Martin. From 1946 to 1949, it also broadcast the Boston Braves, the city's National League baseball club (the Red Sox and Braves then only broadcast home games, thus the teams shared the same announcers and did not have schedule conflicts). After the Braves left WHDH for WNAC (the forerunner to WBIX and WRKO) in 1950, WHDH began broadcasting all Red Sox games, home and away.
The station also aired one of the first sports-oriented talk programs, although without telephone calls. "The Voice of Sports" was a Saturday night feature for years, usually hosted by Don Gillis and featuring sports reporters from the Herald-Traveler. It was a panel discussion program featuring lively debate about sports for an hour and represented the sum total of sports talk on Boston radio in that era. The title was also used for a sports talk program when telephone sports talk began to take hold in the early 1970s. It was an afternoon telephone sports talk hosted by Leo Egan which ended after the station was sold to John Blair Broadcasting.
During the winter months, WHDH and WHDH-FM were the flagship stations of the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association and the Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League, employing such announcers as Johnny Most, Fred Cusick, and Bob Wilson. For a single season, Jim Laing was the announcer for Bruins games and brought candor to the job. He was fired for being too frank about a team that finished sixth in a six-team league. In the mid- and late 1960s, when both the Bruins and Celtics played, one of the teams (usually the one playing at home) was heard on AM; while the other (usually the team playing on the road) was heard on FM. WHDH also was the radio home of Harvard University football in the autumn, including 1968, the year of Harvard's famous 29-29 "win" against arch-rival Yale, considered one of the greatest college-football games ever played.
In addition, the original WHDH-TV (channel 5), which took to the air November 26, 1957, was the flagship station of the Red Sox television network from 1958 to 1971.
Impact from loss of television license WHDH began to lose its valuable properties in 1969, when the Bruins and Celtics were wooed away by WBZ. Soon afterward, the Boston Herald-Traveler Corporation's license to operate channel 5 was revoked by the Federal Communications Commission, and was given to one of the groups of businessmen that challenged its license (Boston Broadcasters, Incorporated); on March 19, 1972, channel 5 became WCVB-TV. Stung by the loss of its highly profitable television station, the Herald-Traveler was put on the market, and acquired by the Hearst Corporation in June 1972; the Boston Herald-Traveler Corporation, left with just the radio stations, then changed its name to WHDH Corporation. Less than two years later, WHDH and its FM sister station (by this time called WCOZ) were sold to Blair Radio, a national radio station advertising representative; the deal marked Blair's entry into station ownership. WHDH then elected to not renew its contract with the Red Sox upon its expiration following the 1975 season, citing financial losses; the broadcasts moved to WMEX starting with the 1975 postseason. WHDH did not carry Sox games again until 1983, when it became an affiliate of the Campbell Sports Network, based out of WPLM and WPLM-FM in Plymouth; Campbell moved the broadcasts to WRKO following the 1985 season. The station's last major sports property was the New England Patriots during the late 1980s.
Blair modernized the WHDH format, bringing it from the adult standards-oriented MOR sound to more of an adult contemporary approach. Veteran disk jockeys were replaced by personalities with a top 40 background, such as former WRKO personality Tom Kennedy (the DJ, not the game-show host), Bob Raleigh from WPGC in Washington (owned by Richmond Bros., owners of WMEX), Sean Casey, who was formerly with WOR-FM in New York and Bill Silver, the well-known voice of per inquiry advertisements who put the phrase "but wait there's more" into the national lexicon. The music was carefully researched and became more contemporary to appeal to an adult demographic but without a rock and roll style presentation; for all intents and purposes, WHDH played top 40 without any hard rock and with more non-current material. By the early 1980s, WHDH began to focus even less on music and more on personality, while playing more music and having less talk than rival WBZ. Air talent then consisted of people such as Dave Supple, Tom Kennedy, Jim Sands (who did a popular Saturday-night oldies show), and Tom Doyle (who by the early 1980s was Cain's co-host).
By the mid-1980s, WHDH was moving toward more of a talk format and on August 22, 1988, the station dropped music abruptly; although the station had been playing more music than WBZ, that station would gradually phase out music over the next several years. During its talk radio days, programs hosted by Larry Glick (who moved from WBZ in 1987), Avi Nelson, David Brudnoy (who would later go to WRKO, and finally, to WBZ), among others, were featured. During this time, Blair, following a takeover by Reliance Capital Group, chose to sell its English-language broadcast stations to focus on the Spanish-language Telemundo television network; in March 1987, it reached a deal to sell its entire radio group to Sconnix Broadcasting. The deal separated WHDH from its longtime FM sister station (which had become WZOU), as Sconnix chose to spin off WZOU and retain its existing FM station in the Boston market, WBOS. In 1988, WHDH became an affiliate of the NBC Radio Network.
David Mugar era