That old transmitter site on Shawnee Road was still in use by Buffalo Radiomarine until at least 1980 (when I visited it while an operator was on duty), and I'm sure, more recently than that. The frame building where the operator and her transmitters were situated, had some old outlines on the floor which were where the original 1000 watt WBEN transmitters were located before we moved out to Grand Island in 1940 (still on 900 kHz, though upgraded to the final 5,000 watts DA-N--we wouldn't relocate to 930 until March of 1941).
THat shack was not only the old WMAK transmitter location when they were a fulltime station on 900 kHz running CBS programming before they went dark in mid-1930, but when the Buffalo News bought out the original WMAK and (after taking it dark for a couple of months) relaunched it as WBEN on September 8, 1930, that was the first WBEN transmitter site. The towers you saw from Shawnee Road, much-modified over the years, were once the support towers for the longwire that sent WMAK and later WBEN programming out to the world from the late 1920s to 1940.
The WMAK which preceded WBEN on 900 kHz during the 1920s (and may have been Buffalo's real pioneer radio station, possibly even predating WGR by a month or two in 1922) shouldn't be confused with the later daytimer using the same call letters. (That station also went dark, and the callsign later used during the post-World War II era by Nashville, Tennessee's principal Top 40 outlet. None of those later WMAK stations have any link except call letters with the facility that in the fall of 1930 became WBEN.)
I found all this out when Larry Levite and Jim McLaughlin asked me to research WBEN's history as what we believed to be our 50th anniversary was approaching in 1980. And it was indeed our golden anniversary as WBEN...but the predecessor station, the original WMAK, was somehow purged from the official record sometime during the Buffalo News organization's long ownership of the station. We opted to respect tradition and make September 1980 our public golden anniversary celebration date, figuring there must have been a reason, since lost to history, for not counting WMAK as a direct ancestor. I've often wondered what it was. Was the orignal WMAK a station that somehow had acquired a bad name in Buffalo following the onset of the Depression, and did the Butler family (which controlled both the newspaper and the radio station) want to make a fresh start? I know something like that is what happened in Rochester when WXXI acquired its AM station in 1984--and opted not to make any reference in station histories to its predecessor, WSAY, even to this day because of the controversy that surrounded Gordon P. Brown's final years operating WSAY. Could that lopping off of the first eight years of WBEN's history have had the same backstory in those long-forgotten times? Is there anyone out there who knows? We had records back to September 8, 1930 (including WBEN's first license) in our old archives at the transmitter site...but nothing on the prior history of WMAK. Is there someone out there with the records we didn't have, or even some old stories to tell?
The pole atop one of the towers in later years, btw, held some yagis and ground-plane gear for WBL's VHF marine operations.
