The Chicagoan helped shape Charlotte’s radio industry for more than two decades.
When Harriet “Sis” Kaplan and her late husband, Stanley Kaplan, bought a Charlotte AM radio station in 1965 for $550,000, they knew the market was ripe for change. More than 50 years later, fans of Big WAYS 610 still reminisce about the radio station’s iconic
promotions and memorable songs and skits they heard during in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Sis grew up in Chicago, where her father, Leslie Atlass, had started the Windy City’s leading news radio station, WBBM, in the 1920s. After graduating from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, in 1955, she worked in public affairs programming for CBS in Chicago, then produced a baseball-oriented television talk show.
Sis met Stan at a broadcast convention in Chicago in the early 1960s. They married in 1964 and lived in Boston for a year before moving to Charlotte.
During a visit to see if Charlotte was a viable market, Kaplan noticed that the city’s leading AM station, WBT, was airing a religious program rather than reporting election results. This gave her the idea to add a news operation at WAYS. But the Kaplans’ decision to shift the station’s format to Top 40 music was key to its success as rock ‘n’ roll music gained popularity.
Charlotte broadcast executive Jim Babb, who was general sales manager at WBT at the time, studied the Kaplans before they arrived. “We knew three months in advance, they were coming,” Babb says. “I came to the conclusion that it was going to be a different market with Stan, who had a very robust personality. And Sis’ family had been well-known in broadcasting. I knew they’d come well-prepared for a competitive situation.”
A famous Big WAYS promotion was a treasure hunt that offered $10,000 in $1,000 increments, buried around the region. Babb tried to convince WBT to counter the contest with something similar. But the station’s conservative management wouldn’t budge. “It’s still one of the greatest ideas I’ve heard in 60-plus years and one of the most successful,” Babb says. “It bothered me that it worked.”
The Kaplans recruited radio personalities from around the nation, including the late Jay Thomas, who became a famous TV sitcom and movie actor. Big WAYS alums Robert Murphy and Scott Slade became radio stars in Chicago and Atlanta, respectively.
“The radio talent was a different style,” Babb says. “They took it more to the edge than what had ever been presented in the Charlotte market. It appealed more to the young people, but that was what many advertisers were seeking.”
Charlotte TV weatherman Larry Sprinkle worked for the Kaplans for 13 years as an announcer and operations manager.
“Sis was enthusiastic about what the station could do and how it could stay on top,” he says. “In the early ‘70s, a female in management was rare. She inspired other females to get others to get into the business.”
In 1970, the Kaplans bought an AM station in Jacksonville, Florida, then added a Charlotte FM station two years later. The latter, WROQ, cost about $300,000. As music listeners shifted to FM stations, ratings declined at Big WAYS, prompting the Kaplans to change to a news-and-talk format in 1982.
With sales and news staff in place for radio, the couple started a group of weekly newspapers around Mecklenburg County, challenging the Charlotte Observer. It morphed into The Leader newspaper, which Charlotte’s Shaw family bought in the late ‘80s and resold to the Kaplans several years later. The paper was disbanded in a bankruptcy
filing in 2002.
In 1989, the Kaplans sold WAYS and WROQ to CRB Broadcasting for $13 million. Stan, who died in 2001, and Sis were inducted into the inaugural class of the Charlotte Broadcast Hall of Fame in 2015. Earlier this year, the Council for Children’s Rights honored Sis as the first recipient of its HOPE award, recognizing her 15-plus years of volunteer service to the nonprofit.
Sis lives in Charlotte’s Dilworth neighborhood and serves on a committee that works with development and rezoning projects. Her daughter and son-in-law, Leslie and Bruce Schlernitzauer, own Porcupine Provisions Catering in Charlotte.
Comments are edited for length and clarity.
I came down and I did the due diligence of Charlotte. It looked like a growth market. The radio signal carried into the area of the growth, which was southeast. The station appeared to be something we could afford.
It was quite a culture shock to move here, much more for me. There weren’t a lot of working women in positions of decision-making. I’d be on a call, and they’d say, “Who do you have to talk to make a decision?”
We took over the market. We ran 10 treasure hunts [offering $1,000 to the winners.] The FCC said no more treasure hunts because people started digging up property where the treasure didn’t exist.
Larry Sprinkle was part of the morning show. He did lots of voices. He played jokes on people. He sent Stan out on a sales call that didn’t exist. He did things to any new disc jockey. The truth is many of the antics that went on then couldn’t go on today, from a standpoint of offending a lot of people. (Sprinkle has worked for Charlotte’s WCNC TV station for 38 years.)
The station had a national reputation because it was well-programmed and had a big audience and a lot of sponsorship. We became the No. 1 station in Charlotte.
I handled programming and Stan handled sales. We worked together, not always well. We had arguments. Our deal was that if it were a major decision and if we couldn’t agree, we just wouldn’t do it, regardless of how pissed off the one person would be.
Things are much better for women, but still have a long way to go to become equal. Things are better for white women than for people of color. There are still blocks there that exist and will have to come down at some point.
Ford just announced they won’t be putting AM radio in
the cars. I think it’s another nail in the coffin. There are AM stations still doing well, but not a huge number of them. I don’t think radio has a bright future. (In May, Ford said it will install AM radio in 2024 models after complaints from customers
and regulators.) ■
