Step into ‘The Time Machine’: Hampton Roads DJs build new oldies station unlike any that’s been built before

Who knew there could be a new type of oldies station?

Turns out, there can be.

Hampton Roads proved it this year with The Time Machine Radio Network — a public radio station strictly about music, no news bulletins allowed, where the tunes play endlessly on.

The Time Machine is 100% devoted to rock, soul and pop music, primarily of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and owned by WHRO Public Media.

The nonprofit had an official launch party for its newest station Oct. 1 after two years of hard work by two of Hampton Roads’ most well-known radio personalities.

Paul Shugrue and Jerry Carter are longtime — maybe a little old-school but ultimately still rocking — radio hosts whose voices have traveled over airwaves, out of stereos and into ears for something close to the past half-century.

When WHRO acquired Chesapeake’s WFOS 88.7 FM in 2020, Shugrue and Carter were called upon to help revamp the acquisition, turning the old station into its new-oldies iteration, The Time Machine Radio Network, which can also now be heard in Virginia Beach on 99.3 FM.

“I’m not the music guy here,” said WHRO Public Media CEO Bert Schmidt. “But I have smart people here. Paul has really been the guy who decides what does and what doesn’t work, and fortunately, Jerry has been amazing. So yeah, my role really was to say ‘Yes’ to a no-brainer offer.”

That offer came at the height of the pandemic.

One day in the summer of 2020, Schmidt’s phone rang with an unexpected caller: Superintendent of Chesapeake Public Schools Jared Cotton.

“Jared called me and said, ‘Bert, do you want a radio station?’” Schmidt remembered. “It was literally that simple.”

The radio station WFOS had been a school-owned operation since 1955. It was founded at Oscar Smith High School in South Norfolk as a teaching school for students considering broadcasting careers. Chesapeake Public Schools took ownership of the station licensee when South Norfolk and Norfolk County merged in the early 1960s to form the city of Chesapeake.

The running of WFSO continued to be popular for Chesapeake-area students through the 1990s. Student interest, however, started to decline in the new millennium.

The school district discontinued students’ access to the station in 2015 when WFOS became primarily operated by volunteers from the local community — people who thought it’d be a fun something-to-do in their down time.

When professionalism at the station waned, Schmidt said, the district became stuck with an out-of-date facility outfitted for a modern radio station with few listeners that, at that point, was unaffiliated with any actual schools or students.

“They were spending a couple hundred thousand dollars a year on the station and were like, let’s redirect the money,” Schmidt explained.

In 2020, WHRO Public Media bought the radio station for $1.

WFOS become part of the the WHRO holdings that includes five TV stations, the classical music station WHRO 90.3FM, the news station WHRV 89.5 FM and the streaming radio service for blind listeners The WHRO Voice.

Schmidt remembers the excitement surrounding the acquisition. But, then came the tough part.

“Okay,” he said, “what are we gonna do with it?”

WFOS needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, modernized and strategically rebranded to fit a need in the Hampton Roads market.

“We wanted to make a unique music station for our community and play music not currently heard on local stations,” explained WHRO Public Media Chief Content Officer Heather Mazzoni. “We are very used to serving niche markets and this is something our on air personalities and staff can really explore and have fun with!”

WFOS was renamed The Time Machine Radio Network, and Shugrue was made its music coordinator.

Shugrue is known for hosting of a variety of popular shows over the years on WHRO stations, such as “Out of the Box with Paul Shugrue” on WHRV 89.5 FM.

He’s been speaking over Hampton Roads radios for so long that strangers will sometimes interrupt him in the middle of routine, personal phone calls to ask, Hey, are you ...?

“I think I was calling to get an estimate from a construction company, and yeah, the guy recognized my voice and asked me who I was,” Shugrue said, laughing. “That’s fine. I’m always prepared to be recognized like that.”

Shugrue brought his decades of radio experience into cultivating The Time Machine’s sound.

“I’ve been exposed to just about everything. I know what songs were big and what wasn’t big. I know what was a cult hit and what was an over-the-top hit or nothing at all. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to do,” Shugrue said. “We mix in a little bit of that really big stuff and a little bit of the cold hits too.”

But Carter holds down The Time Machine’s prime-time, rush hour, drive-time segment with his show the “Blues Traffic Jam.” From 3 to 7 p.m. weekdays, the charismatic DJ plays a selection of classic and contemporary blues music.

“It’s just like, I’m a Baby Boomer. We can’t stand today’s music,” he said. “We don’t want to hear that crap. Don’t nobody like it. The radio stations are suffering.”

Carter began his radio career in 1972, and has worked for over a dozen stations since. Over the past 50 years he’s cultivated personal philosophies and theories about disc jockeying.

“I’m a social worker. I’m not a DJ,” Carter said, noting that he has a study of his audiences. “After a while, you know who’s listening to your show, after a couple of months, because you get the same girls calling.”

Carter, 75, says he has a time-developed gift of — knowing the demographics of his audience, at any given hour of the day — providing his listeners with what they need to hear, when they need to hear it, to relieve some of those rat-race, working-life, stressful blues.

For example, he said, if it’s rush hour, then a good DJ isn’t going to play a slow, romantic ballad. You kidding?

That’s not what you’d do. Instead ...

“You might say, ‘Words of wisdom to those of you who are lost.’

“So, you might play something by Sly and the Family Stone,” Carter continued. “You wouldn’t play a bunch of slow songs at 5 o’clock in the afternoon when you’re going through that damn tunnel.

“It’d drive you crazy.”

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com