on simulcasting, requiring more of FM programs to be original and adding substantially to programming costs. As debts mounted, former News Director Edwin V. Johnson recalled, most of the staff was released. That left Johnson and an engineer playing all taped programs from the newly introduced Presto-brand commercial reel-to-reel tape recorders. Johnson, who joined the station in June 1951, changed his status to part-time, but remained until his retirement in 1985. WHAV-FM was dark by 1953 and its transmitter ended up 30 or so miles away at WCRB. The virtually insolvent WHAV AM was sold in 1954 to Edward I. Cetlin and Henry R. and Morris Silver. The Silver brothers were owners of a successful Manchester bottling company and former owners of WFEA in Manchester, New Hampshire, and WKXL in Concord, New Hampshire. Free for the asking, WHAV AM’s new owners would revive 20,000-watt WHAV-FM on 92.5 MHz in 1959. Stereo did not come until the 1970s for WHAV-FM when it aired an automated "beautiful music" format. A power increase to an effective radiated power output of 50,000 watts was partly financed by WPRO-FM, a Rhode Island station on an adjacent frequency (92.3 MHz) as a condition of its own power increase, as former Chief Engineer Ted Nahil once remarked. Tom Bergeron, who would go on to host Hollywood Squares, America’s Funniest Home Videos and more recently, Dancing With The Stars, got his start on WHAV in the mid-1970s. Later sales and switch to Spanish In 1981, WHAV AM and FM were sold to Northeast Broadcasting Company in a distress sale stemming from an FCC investigation (initiated by copywriter Madolyn Roberts) into equal employment opportunity issues. The FM station went on to become WLYT and later WXRV. That owner is now known as Beanpot Broadcasting Corp., a Delaware corporation with principal offices in Bedford, New Hampshire. WHAV (AM) was turned over to Eastern Media of Methuen, Massachusetts in 1995. Eastern Media became known as Costa-Eagle Radio Ventures Ltd. when the owners of the Eagle-Tribune bought a 49 percent stake in the company and returned to broadcasting (the company previously owned WLAW and WLAW-FM). Costa-Eagle would go on to purchase WCCM from Curt Gowdy Broadcasting Corp. Similarly, the owners of the Eagle-Tribune formed ETP Ventures Inc. in 1998 and purchased the Haverhill Gazette. Ownership of WHAV and the Haverhill Gazette'' had come full circle. WHAV would dub itself "Radio Impacto" and