After 56 Years, A Sale at WCAP

August 13, 2007 - North East Radio Watch


*Is there any other commercial station in MASSACHUSETTS that's been in the same hands as long as WCAP (980 Lowell)?

The station signed on June 10, 1951, owned by Maurice Cohen and his two brothers, and while the brothers have since passed on, the station has remained under Cohen's control for all this time.

That's about to change, as Cohen announced this morning on WCAP's morning show. He's selling the station to a group of local investors led by Chelmsford real-estate agency owner Sam Poulten, local developer Brian McMahon and Andover radio consultant Clark Smidt, under the "Merrimack Valley Radio, LLC" banner.

"It's been almost a two-year courtship," Smidt told NERW, describing his long negotiations with Cohen for the purchase of the station.

Smidt says he's known Cohen since the early seventies, but it was only in recent years that he began exploring a purchase of WCAP.

"A good friend gave me the idea that rather than looking for stations in northern New England, this makes sense because it's right next door to me," Smidt said.

The purchase, valued at $2,660,000, was financed locally by Lowell Five Cent Savings Bank, Smidt told NERW in a weekend interview.

"The chairman of the board of the Lowell Five knew Mr. Cohen, knows the situation, believes in Lowell, and said if the fourth largest city in Massachusetts can't support a good am station, he'd be surprised," Smidt said.

The veteran consultant, whose Boston radio career included the creation of new formats at WBZ-FM (106.7, now WMJX) and WEEI-FM (103.3, now WODS) will be serving as WCAP's general manager once the deal closes. He promises that Cohen, who's nearing age 90, will continue to have an open door at the station. And he says he expects to keep WCAP's talk format, adding more local content and boosting the station's local sales efforts, which have flagged in recent years.

NERW's take: We can't even pretend to be unbiased about this sale. WCAP, as we've said often, was your editor's first paying stop in the radio business almost two decades ago, and the station has always held a special place as a result.

Even back in the early nineties, it was no secret that the Cohen brothers regularly received offers to buy the station, and that those offers were routinely considered and dismissed. After the passing of Ike Cohen a few years back, and as Maurice passed the 80 mark, it appeared that the offers (which kept on coming) were beginning to be taken a little more seriously.

Knowing as we do the fate of so many AM signals these days (consider our erstwhile competition at WCAP, WLLH, which today functions mainly as a booster signal for a Boston AM rimshot that itself is struggling to stay afloat - or consider WESX and WJDA out by the shore, now doing "doller a hollar" foreign-language religion), we're not surprised that Maurice held out for a buyer who'd commit to maintaining the legacy he and his brothers built at WCAP over 56 years.

In Smidt, who's also a longtime friend to this column and its editor, WCAP's future appears secure. He brings to the station both a solid grounding in the business end of radio and decades of programming experience, and we look forward to watching the station begin to emerge from the sort of suspended animation in which it's been hovering through the last few years of sale rumors. (It's a credit to the current staff of WCAP that they've been able to keep producing good local radio amidst the uncertainty.)

At the same time, there are plenty of challenges for a station like WCAP in the early 21st century, with all the other news and entertainment choices vying for its potential listeners' attention.

Can a standalone AM still make it with a hyper-local approach? We'll be watching closely - along with all the many other alumni of WCAP who still care deeply about the station.

(And to answer the question we posed at the start of this issue: beyond the Massachusetts borders, there is at least one station in the region that can boast a longer continuous ownership, if one allows for transfers within the same family. Ken Squier's father put WDEV in Waterbury, Vermont on the air in 1931, and the station remains under family control almost 80 years later.)