In this letter to the editor, the author comments on Paul McLane’s column, “I Love the Sticks.” Radio World welcomes letters to the editor on this or any story. Email [email protected].
I very much enjoyed your thoughts about your love of and fascination with towers. I’m right there with you, and I’m sure my wife does eye rolls unseen by me when I lock onto a tower somewhere.
Paul’s trip down memory lane, reminiscing about looking out the back door of WNRK(AM) at the antenna towers brought back similar memories for me.
It was 1977 and I worked 4 p.m.–midnight at KWAS(FM) in Amarillo, Texas. The studio was in the old channel 7 transmitter building at the base of an 800-foot rectangular tower. The TV station had long before moved to a new location on “Texas’ tallest tower!” a few miles to the northwest, so the KWAS studio and transmitter and two other full-power FM transmitters occupied the building.
I would step outside during a long record after dark and look up at the tower. I remember the flashing top beacon illuminating the crow’s nest around it with pulsing red light, and I remember the sound the ever-present high plains wind made blowing through the tower and guy wires. I climbed that tower once, when we had an antenna problem, and got a close-up look at what I had many times looked at obliquely from the ground.
Years later, I returned to work at that site once again, this time as chief engineer of a new UHF TV station. KWAS had by then moved its studio into town, but in that same building was the master control for the TV station with the RCA transmitter in the next room with a big window in between. That stint at that site didn’t produce great memories. I was glad to see it in my rearview mirror.
According to the ASR database, that tower is gone now. The three FM signals and the TV moved to a newer tower a short distance to the northeast. But the Google Earth image, dated February 2025, still shows the tower and guy wires in place. So its demise is either recent or the database is wrong.
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