Gallery of Old Michigan Radio Stations

Many – if not all - of us listened to the radio while growing up. We all imagined what it would be like to be on the air…a deejay…spinnin’ the hits, talking on the air, and making our friends jealous. We wanted to be on the air and play the music that we loved so much. We idolized the disc jockeys and wanted to be like them.

When the opportunity came to actually visit our favorite radio station, we were in awe. All these huge monster metal machines, reel-to-reel tapes, the newswire that was constantly spitting out the latest news, massive record libraries, hundreds of wires that seemed to go everywhere and nowhere…..and the deejay that was in the booth on the other side of a soundproof pane of glass.

However, some radio stations weren’t so lucky as to have all the equipment the big guns had. Many of these smaller stations were in some unknown shack in the countryside, or in someone’s home, or part of a downtown business building, or just a lonely little one-room tenement with an antenna that gave away its location.

Michigan’s radio station history is impressive and many of the broadcasters who worked at one have gone on to bigger things. Some bounced around the country from job-to-job. Others stayed put until their station closed down. And there are the handful that hung around for years and are still at it.

Any broadcaster will tell you – you may try to get out of the business and attempt to have a different career elsewhere, but radio gets in your system and it’s too hard to shake. That Walmart greeter you see once in a while may have been a deejay in his younger years.

The days of turntables, tape decks, knobs, newswires, and radio groupies are gone. Many old radio stations are gone, replaced by a larger, modernized building a few miles away.

Below is a gallery of some old Michigan radio stations – the way they used to be, and the way they never will be again.