WPLP

WPLP AM was the first 24-hour news/talk radio station in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area. It began broadcasting at 570 AM on December 4, 1978. Its image name was "News/Talk 57 WPLP: The Talk of Tampa Bay."

The 570 dial position in Tampa Bay began in 1966 as WFSO (not related to the New York State-based current station using those call letters), a low-power, daytime-only station operated by Elwyn Johnson and his son Dan. Under the image name of "Big 57," WFSO was a Top 40 station that evolved in the early 1970s into hard rock. The station was purchased in 1978 and converted to WPLP.

The owners of the new talk station was a conglomerate of three investors, including Paul Bilzerian, who would later go on to become a corporate raider, and Michael Spears, a Dallas radio personality. Bilzerian and the other two investors bickered over finances and soon the station went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to be reacquired by Dan Johnson.

By 1984, the station was owned as a standalone AM by Guy Gannett Broadcasting, and broadcast out of a modified trailer that sat off the then-unpaved 82nd Avenue North in Seminole, and on the edge of a swamp; the dirt road and swampy location were the objects of frequent jokes on WPLP and other stations (who nicknamed it "Plop 57" in a corruption of its call letters). It was an affiliate of CBS News and of Larry King's syndicated late-night radio show. Popular local personalities over its ten-year history included John Eastman, David Gold, Dave Scott, Richard Shanks, Tim Coles, Tedd Webb, Ken Charles, Don Richards (a newscaster who was also the station's program director) Nanci Donnellan, Valerie Geller, Gordon Byrd, Chuck Harder, David Fowler, Rick Samples, and Bob Lassiter. Among the news people who cut their teeth at WPLP in the early days are John McConnell, Terry McElhatton, Dave Hayes and Steve Triggs.

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