WHAV

WHAV was an AM radio broadcasting station at 1490 kHz from 1947 to 2002. Today, the call letters are associated with a not-for-profit Internet and low-power radio station whose audio is also carried, in part, by a number of public, educational, and government access (PEG) cable television stations. The 1490 frequency now has the calls WCEC.

The original WHAV

WHAV's story began during World War II in the offices of The Haverhill Gazette, a daily newspaper serving what was, in the middle of the century, a shoe-manufacturing center 30 miles (48 km) north of Boston. The Gazette, as early as 1944, planned an FM radio station, but had to wait for the end of wartime controls on new construction. John T. Russ announced on April 14, 1945 in the newspaper that "The Gazette long ago recognized the need of a Haverhill radio station and has long been in agreement with your premise that a newspaper is the logical proprietor of a broadcasting service, especially because the dissemination of news is the primary task of both press and radio." He defined WHAV’s mission during the inaugural March 16, 1947 broadcast: