You might say time travel is one of the things we all like best about the holiday season.

Who can’t resist jumping on the nostalgia bandwagon when our senses are assailed by the sight of twinkling lights, the smell of balsam or the taste of eggnog, and the feel of frosty air?

For me, it’s sound that triggers the Christmas spirit and fuels my memories of radio in L-A some 50 years ago.

At this time of year, the airwaves were filled almost entirely with carols or seasonal songs.

We tuned our tube-driven AM radios to WLAM and WCOU. That’s where we found a comforting mix of local on-air personalities.

Walter Beaupre was one of those early broadcasters at WCOU. He shared stories of those days in articles he wrote in the early 1990s for “Radiogram,” a publication for enthusiasts of OTR (old-time radio). His descriptions of behind-the-scenes antics at the station are delightfully candid and informative.

Beaupre was a freshman at Bates in 1944 when the college’s famed debate and speech professor Brooks Quimby asked him, “Do you drink?” Somewhat befuddled, Beaupre replied that he did not drink, and Quimby said, “Then, would you be interested in a night announcer’s job at WCOU?”

Beaupre explained that the job opening was the result of a recent fiasco related to boredom and booze on the station’s night shift. It seems, he said, “an announcer decided to put on the air a specially-made transcription announcing the end of World War II. The phony transcription featured the voices of President Roosevelt, and other dignitaries, thanking God for the sudden, unheralded Allied victory.

That lapse of judgment was called “a cruel hoax during the darkest hours of the war” in local news reports.

WCOU apologized, Beaupre said.

He said most of the key personnel at the station were away in service to Uncle Sam. That included the owner, Faust Couture (from whose last name the call letters were taken), station manager and ace sportscaster John Libby, chief announcer Bob Payne and announcer/musician Laverne “Miff” Coulton.

“So it was business manager Oscar Normand who – all in one fateful evening – interviewed me for the job, showed me how to run the RCA console and turntables, pointed out the pile of commercial copy, watched me as I stumbled through the routine for a while, and left me to my own devices,” Beaupre recalled.

When WCOU came on the air in 1938, it was one of only seven stations in Maine. It broadcast the Yankee and Mutual networks.

The Couture family (also owners of WFAU in Augusta) pioneered French-language newspapers in the United States. Beaupre recalled that the first floor of a Lisbon Street building housed the newspaper Le Messager, while business offices for the radio station took up most of the second floor and the two studios and control room were on the third.

Live local shows were a staple of the broadcast day. Beaupre fondly remembered Roselle Coury, “a raven-haired song stylist from Berlin, N.H., who broke into radio by buying her own air time, selling spot announcements within her shows and arranging for the additional musical talent. She drove the six hours from and to Berlin every day.”

WCOU eventually hired her full time.

“Roselle Coury was a first-class talent in every respect – a terrific speaking voice and a fine pop singer,” Beaupre said. “There were few women, local or network, on the airwaves in the ’40s and ’50s any better than Roselle Coury.”

Marion Payne Louisfell was Coury’s frequent accompanist on the organ and Steinway grand in Studio 1, and she had a noontime show called “Gaslight Serenade.” She was a sister of Maine’s U.S. Senator Frederick G. Payne.

Beaupre said WCOU was pioneering FM radio in 1947 when he had an idea for a stereo broadcast. Just place an AM and an FM radio a few feet apart in the same room and you had stereo sound of the dual-cast show he called “Conversations in Music.” One microphone picked up the Hammond organ and voice of Marion Payne Louisfell, and a second mike picked up Beaupre’s voice and his piano playing.

He said it may have been the nation’s first commercially sponsored 13-week series in stereo.

After his broadcast days, Beaupre became a University of Rhode Island educator. He was nationally known for his work on clinical methods for improving voice/speech instruction for the deaf and in 1984 he wrote “Gaining Cued Speech Proficiency,” a manual which is still considered to be a leading text in the field. He died in 1998.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and an Auburn native. You can e-mail him at [email protected].