Jack Steck
WFIL Radio
circa 1956
In 1991, the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia, then a chapter of the National Broadcast Pioneers, recorded 7 Oral History interviews. These were part of a national project. On Tuesday, August 20, 1991 in Havertown, Pennsylvania, Marguerite sat down to talk with Jack Steck, program director for many years at WFIL Radio & TV. Also in the conversation was Florence Steck, his second wife. Florence also worked for decades at the WFIL stations.
Fortunately, we kept the masters and sent dubs to the national group. Where they went after that, we do not know. This audio is encoded from the original audio cassettes.
This recording also had some technical problems. Throughout this recording, the microphone would cut out every once in awhile. They probably were not aware of this until after the interview was completed.
The original running time of this recording was 62 minutes in length. However, we removed the sections where the mike kept cutting out. There would be large sections of the interview where there was no problem (like 10 minute segments) and then there were sections where the mike would keep cutting out with lots of "dead air."
Where we removed sections with mike problems (the audio was so bad that you couldn't even determine what they were talking about), we usually went to the next question unless they were still talking about the same topic when the technical problem cleared up. We cleaned it up as cleanly as possible. It took about 10 hours of editing to prepare this recording. Because of the technical problems, we lost about 3 minutes with the running time now being 59 minutes.
However, what we do have runs and flows smoothly. The audio is divided into two sections. However, once you have the audio playing, it will proceed automatically from one section to the next with only a couple seconds of dead air in between.
We hope that someday we will find a "perfect" version of this interview. Be assured that if we ever find a better copy, we will upload that version. However, this interview is so historic we felt that we had to offer it in the current form.
From the official archives of the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia
Photo originally donated by Broadcast Pioneers member Bill "Wee Willie" Webber
© 2008, Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia
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The e-mail address of the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia is pioneers@broadcastpioneers.com