Any AM stations operating on day power for the Super Bowl?

[mvcg66b3r]

I call it the "Super Bowl STA". Inspiration by Kevin Redding.

 

[CTListener]

I call it the "Super Bowl STA". Inspiration by Kevin Redding.

When I was living in Arkansas in the late '70s, KWAK 1240 Stuttgart used to stay on daytime power on Friday nights in the fall -- high school football.

 

[davideduardo]

When I was living in Arkansas in the late '70s, KWAK 1240 Stuttgart u

You mean the station whose letterhead proudly proclaimed, "The Duck Capital of the World".

That sounds like the seat of a true Duck Dynasty.

 

[cyberdad]

You mean the station whose letterhead proudly proclaimed, "The Duck Capital of the World".

That sounds like the seat of a true Duck Dynasty.

Then there's the other Stuttgart....the one which was an annual business desination for me. The one in Germany, and home of Mercedes Benz. There's even what looks likes a giant Mercedes hood ornament perched atop the roof of the train station. Which is the largest building in the downtown area. Wonder how much it has in common with the Stuttgart in Arkansas.

Anyway, I doubt that there's much....if any..."football power" going on for Super Bowl radio broadcasts. Staying on day power for football power is pretty much a phenomenon for local high school football games broadcast on small town radio stations. It's an attempt to provide better service for local advertisers and listeners (probably in that order) for a hometown audience for a live event of local interest unavailable anywhere else. Unlike the Superbowl which is available on every television set in the United States.

 

[CTListener]

You mean the station whose letterhead proudly proclaimed, "The Duck Capital of the World".

That sounds like the seat of a true Duck Dynasty.

My first job was in Stuttgart, three years as a one-man sports department at the local paper, covering lots of high school sports plus down-home stuff like tractor pulls, bass fishing tournaments and the city's pride and joy, the annual World Championship Duck Calling Contest. You have not lived until you've spent six hours standing in raw, late-November Arkansas weather watching men, women, boys and girls position themselves behind a faux duck blind (so the judges can't see them) and honk their way through an elaborate series of calls. No room for improvisation, precision is all that counts. I was young and eager back then, and enjoyed just about everything I had to cover just for the pure novelty of it all, but when my second WCDCC rolled around, I found myself wishing I could change places with one of our general assignment reporters, who got to cover the Queen Mallard Pageant -- no joke, and the girls were very pretty; a recent winner went on to become Miss Arkansas.

Being a fan of country music and southern cuisine, I enjoyed my time down there, as different from my hometown of Boston as Stuttgart was. Never ran into any outright prejudice (being a Yankee, and Jewish, I somewhat expected some), and found the folks down there generally open and friendly, if a bit naive. Two examples: On Election Night in 1980, I had to cover a girls/boys basketball doubleheader in Humphrey, pop. 818. I got to the gym around 6 p.m., two hours before polls closed, and the lady at the door greeted me and asked, "Who's winning?" She was absolutely sincere, actually thought the media had access to running vote totals! I explained to her that that's not the way elections work and she was genuinely surprised. The other example was my experience with an African-American high school student who was working on the paper's weekly Youth Page. One night, we were both in the office -- she working on a story about the FFA, me finishing a feature on a local basketball standout -- when she asked me if I was Jewish. I said yes. Wide-eyed, she followed up with, "Does that mean you're from Israel???"

I ran into the KWAK people a lot on the job, sharing the press box for football and occasional American Legion baseball games. The thing that got me about the station -- which was a family operation back then -- was that it never called itself "Quack." The call letters were always spelled out. For a while they used the positioner The Sporty 1240, then Country 1240, but never Quack. Odd.

 

[CTListener]

Then there's the other Stuttgart....the one which was an annual business desination for me. The one in Germany, and home of Mercedes Benz. There's even what looks likes a giant Mercedes hood ornament perched atop the roof of the train station. Which is the largest building in the downtown area. Wonder how much it has in common with the Stuttgart in Arkansas.

Very little, other than a large number of families with roots in that area of Germany. (A little town just east of Stuttgart is called Ulm.) The largest buildings in town are grain elevators belonging to three large rice and soybean operations. Agriculture is the foundation of the economy. The ducks attract hunters to flooded paddies after the harvest is done.