Bart Ritner

I became familiar with Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters when we used to go to sleep listening to WPTF radio in Raleigh.  As the second radio station in North Carolina, and still the second most powerful in the state with its 50,000-watt broadcasting tower, WPTF was beloved throughout central North Carolina.  I often listened to Bart Ritner, who was with the station for 39 years and is credited with having one of the first two-way radio talk shows in the country.  Their FM affiliate was renamed WQDR-FM in 1972 – the call letters stand for “quadrophonic” (four-channel stereo), which station managers mistakenly thought was the wave of the future; but this was still one of the first album-oriented rock stations in the country. 

(November 2014)