Summer, 1946. Looking toward Church Circle. The movie playing at the State Theatre is “The Enchanted Forest” (Maltin gives it 2-1/2 stars), released in December, 1945.
The war had been over for a year.
This is a real photo postcard (RPP). EKC paper (available from 1939 – 1950).
Forty-six years ago, I began the first permanent rock show on WKPT-AM. John Dotson had “Sounds of Summer” the previous year, but it ended when he went back to school or left town or something. It was a good show and broke the Easy Listening hold on that staid, NBC-affiliated station. So, I swooped in the next year, ditched “Teenage Terrace”, (which I had been on when I was in high school, from 5:00 to 6:00 pm, as I recall, with Marty running the board and we students, when we showed up, sitting at the table in the news studio) and had the 6:00 pm to midnight slot all to myself as “The Midnight Sun”.
Since this was before 8-track tapes in cars became widely available, I was a success, as it were, with the kids cruising Broad Street. Then, the tapes came and I eventually moved into the afternoon Drive Time slot. The fact that, for the most part, I had to buy my own records for the show and management had the nerve to put something like this cloth sticker out helped me leave it behind. “Like it is”, my ass. The phrase was a joke by this time.
The ellipse is 4″ on the horizontal axis and 2-1/2″ on the vertical.
This, of course, is on the corner of Main and Broad Streets. It was a bank off and on for decades. Back in the 70s, there was a watch repair shop across the front of this building (the portico and columns were gone at that time). An earlier pencil drawing I did of this location shows the marks of where the roof of the watch shop was.
Bob Lawrence's Kingsport 