KWAK-AM Stuttgart taken down by tornado

[artmorris]

I was in Stuttgart (my hometown) over the weekend. The town was hit by a major tornado on May 10, 2008. One of the casualties of the storm was the tower of KWAK-AM 1240.

The sight of the missing tower and the demolished transmitter shack was heartbreaking.

The same night, one of the stations I engineer in Joplin, MO lost a transmitter shack. We've spent the past month getting the station back up to power. Fortunately, in my case, the tower and FM antennas survived in good condition.

My thoughts go out to Bobby Caldwell, owner and Scott Siler, manager at KWAK. I know exactly how you feel. If there's anything I can do to help, just let me know.

Art Morris
Contract Engineer
Aurora, MO
www.artmorris.com

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

Art, is the downed tower still the same location that has been used through the years for 1240?

This is NOT the first time KWAK has had a tower go down. The previous instance was not a COMPLETE failure, however. For those in other parts of the country, here is the setting: Stuttgart is, some would say, in the Mississippi Delta. It's flat, flat, flat. Lots of rice paddies, lots of cotton fields. Lots of ducks... thus the call sign: KWAK.

There are a lot of crop dusters that work the area. The way I heard the story was like this: It was beginning to mist and a crop duster pilot was on his way back to the airport after dumping his load on a field. To appreciate this you have to picture a converted bi-plane with open cockpit and a very tiny little windshield sticking up. The pilot was ducking down low to keep the rain out of his face and looking down and to his right to follow the road that runs in front of the old KWAK studios to do his navigation. There is a great bang and pow and the pilot finds himself, airplane and all, sitting on the ground. He gathers himself up and hitch-hikes back to the airport to report that he was knocked out of the sky by a bolt of lightning.

As they say on TV: "But wait, There's more".

With all those rice fields, you have to have water, and that means big wells on the farms. Over on the main street not too far from the station was Lane Well Drilling, I believe was the name. They welded together some well-casing pipes.... probably something over 100 feet in length, somehow they got them over to the station where a short stub of the tower remained upright. The well casing pipe was hoisted up and put up against the tower and they were lashed together.

That was there antenna until a new tower could be fabricated and shipped.

This would have been sometime around 1950 maybe. I was there in 1957-59 and the story was history at that time. They went on the air somewhere in the 1946 to 1948 time frame.

Ahhh, radio. Once a very colorful business, indeed.

 

[The Beave]

I was in Stuttgart (my hometown) over the weekend. The town was hit by a major tornado on May 10, 2008. One of the casualties of the storm was the tower of KWAK-AM 1240.

The sight of the missing tower and the demolished transmitter shack was heartbreaking.

The same night, one of the stations I engineer in Joplin, MO lost a transmitter shack. We've spent the past month getting the station back up to power. Fortunately, in my case, the tower and FM antennas survived in good condition.

My thoughts go out to Bobby Caldwell, owner and Scott Siler, manager at KWAK. I know exactly how you feel. If there's anything I can do to help, just let me know.

Art Morris
Contract Engineer
Aurora, MO
www.artmorris.com

Art I hear ya. If they could use some extra hands... I am on the road from the 6/30 on to whenever... I can afford a week or so.

 

[artmorris]

I didn't know that KWAK's tower had fallen before. I wasn't born until 1954, and hadn't heard that story.
But, it's the same tower that I remember all the years I lived in Stuttgart. When it was built, I'm sure that tower and studio 'house' were at the edge of town.
When I worked there (1970-1972), the studio was downtown and the old studio 'house' had been torn down.
Now, of course, it's in the middle of town, and the studio is back on the property again.
If it was me, I'd probably take the opportunity to move the tower outside of town.
Art Morris

 

[kudzooter]

Goat Roper Cowboy and artmorris...a little info in-between your Ricebird radio'ing...
It was Layne-Arkansas company that helped Mel & June Spann get it back up, in those WAAAAAY-pre-Viagra days. And yes, the tower and a very small shack stayed at that same site at 19th & Buerkle. Studios went downtown for several years, making that move sometime after I had to leave KWAK's security and head for big-city college in Tulsa. Remember doing some fill-ins for them at the Main Street place. They even had carts by then...but for some fershlugginer reason, as soon as you touched off the next cart, you killed the audio on the first one. Having gotten used to KAKC's skin-tight on-air production, and knowing that almost every cart in the room had a second or more dead-roll, I kept trying to guesstimate and start the next element early -- until Mr. Spann walked in and in that calm, don't-you-dare-even-think-
otherwise voice said, "Scooter...we may carry the Cardinals...but this ISN'T the big leagues. Just calm down and punch the button AFTER the first cart has ended." On a trip to visit my Mom in the late 80s or early 90s, I was surprised to find that they'd moved everything back
to the old site, but with a modern brick building. I'll be heading there for my 50th reunion in a few more weeks -- hope they've got the new
tower up by then...if not, it'll be only the second time in my life that I've seen that field without that stick in it.

 

[artmorris]

Oh man! Those old Gates cart machines made me crazy. You are absolutely correct. When you started one, it locked out the audio from the other. That made me absolutely nuts. There was simply no way to run a tight board, and frankly, they didn't care. I was one of those annoying little twerps that wouldn't keep his hands off the equipment. Sandy gave me a tongue-lashing once for trying to clean tape heads without his supervision and approval.

When I graduated from SHS in 1972, I got an all-night gig over at Buddy Dean's KOTN in Pine Bluff. What a breathe of fresh air. REAL RADIO! We actually had 4 Spotmaster 505's, and you could make them real tight. That operation was first-class.

KWAK tried to hire me back after I'd worked at KOTN for a while. I said 'no thanks'.

BTW, I'd love to hear your experience at KAKC. One of the few non-RKO stations to do the Drake format.
Art Morris

 

[kudzooter]

Art, KAKC was the FIRST non-California station to actually be consulted by Drake-Chennault. We had become so overly commercial, and KELi had done such a good job as a precision operation, that the bottom had fallen out for KAKC. Ironically, the Hooper and Pulse numbers that showed the fall, came right after KAKC had included a multi-page insert in the Tulsa papers, with the ridiculous banner "KAKC -- A Decade of Dominance." Anyway, owner S. Carl Mark and GM Bob Hoth managed to talk the Drake folks into coming in and showing us how to do it. I'd been PD just long enough to do some things I'm still mortified to remember -- :-[ -- and for some reason (probably, because they couldn't find anyone who really WAS a PD, who'd work for what I was making) they let me stay in that chair. Working with Drake, Bill Watson, Bernie Torres, and Betty Breneman was an education that would be in the "priceless" frame of a credit card CM. Summer 1967 in Tulsa was probably the most electric year of my life.
Back to the initial topic of this thread: I've just learned that Gingerich School (which was Buerkle Street Elementary when I did 5th and 6th grades there) and the Pam Pam have been cleared away and won't be back. Add those to KWAK's AM tower ... and when I head to Ricebird land in four weeks for my 50th reunion, the only memory spot I'll have left, will be the 17th & Main water tower "Yogi" Zimmerman and I got arrested for climbing when I was 17! :

 

[artmorris]

Yep, Stuttgart is a great place to be from, though I don't think I could live there anymore.
It's changed so much, or maybe I've changed so much. My Mom and 2 of my brothers still live there, so I'm down quite often. And, I've watched the town steadily change over the past 30 years. On the plus side, the Lennox plant and the rice mills still provide a lot of employment.
On the down side, the gang influence is so great they've had to institute uniforms in the Stuttgart schools. That's a HUGE deal for me. First Amendment and all.
I tried to call Scott Siler, manager of KWAK, to find out what their plans for the future of the tower, but he didn't return my call. Oh well.
Art