WOWO - the day the earth stood still

Long ago, I worked for one of the rockingest-ever news organizations, Group W News (the old Westinghouse Broadcasting). Part of that included a stint at 50,000-watt WOWO in Fort Wayne. There's a great history site for the station historyofwowo.com that brings back those great radio days.

There are photos of station mementos and lots of airchecks, including a couple with yours truly. (I've mentioned the site before, but Webmaster Randy Meyer, who is doing this out of a love for the station, has put up a tremendous amount of new stuff in recent months.

And Nick McCormac now has sent me this great other site about a legendary day in WOWO's history - the day the Emergency Broadcast System went haywire and WOWO had three states thinking there might be a nuclear attack under way.

And why do they call me "Darling Doug Fisher"? You've gotta listen to find out. (MP3)

Good times. Not to be too over-the-top nostalgic, but those really were fun days in radio - even if we did occasionally scare the beejezus out of people.

Earl Finckle - Mr. Weather - dies

When I worked at WOWO, Earl Finckle, who died this past Friday, was the voice of weather. His slightly raspy, down-home voice fit right in at the station, which pumped his forecasts out across the Midwest and near South with its 50,000 watts.

Listeners didn't seem to care that Earl wasn't in Fort Wayne -- or most of the other cities where he was the voice of "the weather." Or that sometimes the telephone line noise almost drowned him out. More often than not, when people in Fort Wayne talked about the weather, I remember hearing back, "What does Earl say?"

His Central Weather Service was in Chicago, and there's something right with the karma there -- the city of broad shoulders was home to the man on whose intellectual shoulders rested many the fortunes of farmers, pilots, and just plain folk wanting to know if it was OK to go to the lake.

The Chicago Tribune reports that Finckle died Friday in Highland Park Hospital. He was 81.

You'll find several snippets from his forecasts on the airchecks on the WOWO history site.

It's a reminder that no matter how many computers, databases, interconnected networks and flashy green-screen graphics, one of the most powerful forces has always been a person's judgment to make sense of it all and personality to make us listen, read or watch.

Thank you, Earl, for reminding us of that day after day, even though we didn't know it at the time.

WOWO history

Early in my career, I had the great fortune to work for Group W - the old Westinghouse Broadcasting in Philadelphia and Fort Wayne.

Fort Wayne's WOWO, at 50,000 watts, clear channel was the most fantastic place to work in the mid-1970s. DJs with great pipes and great personalities like Ron Gregory, Chris Roberts, Calvin Richards and Bob Sievers. And a great newsroom with folks like Dugan Fry, Jerry Hoffman, Bill Fisher, Ed Kasuba, Debbie Lowe and Art Salzberg -- and immediate on-air access to the famed Group W network.

Now, Randy Meyer has put together a wonderful tribute site to the old "WOWO 1190." He's done it up right at http://historyofwowo.com. It's got airchecks (the 1973-75 one of Calvin Richards and Ron Gregory (MP3) was the beginning of my stint there - a snippet of one of my newscasts is very near the end - 43 minutes in), some of the great old jingle packages (MP3), photos, etc.

If you really want a taste of what music-news radio in its heyday was like, head on over to the site. I've got to go rooting through the attic to see if I have anything left to send Randy. Anyone else out there with old WOWO mementos, consider contacting him as well.

In memoriam: Bob Sievers

Word comes today that a former and dear colleague, Bob Sievers from WOWO in Fort Wayne, Ind., has died at 90.

I worked with Bob and the other great folks at WOWO (Jerry Hoffman, Dugan Fry, Bill Fisher, Art Saltsberg, Ron Gregory, Chris Roberts, Bob Chase, Ed Kasuba and many others) in the early 1970s, during the end of the station's heyday. There was a reason WOWO gushed green ink, and it was Sievers. He and Jay Gould and the morning "Little Red Barn" show brought in numbers that station managers would sell their mothers for.

Of course, being 50,000 watts full-time helped (the station no longer is 50K at night -- the Wikipedia entry on the station is pretty complete).

But Sievers was someone special -- yeah, corny, old-style, with a set of pipes aspiring radio folks would kill for. But most of all he knew people and cared about people. It came through on the air and in person. He always had a kind word for young staffers like me. The number of public appearances he did would kill many of today's DJs. And I never once saw him not stop on the street and have a chat and hearty handshake with whoever had hailed him. In these days of celebrity and glitz, you don't really know real celebrity unless you knew Bob.

I'm honored to say I got to work with him and knew him -- as I am about all the WOWO crew from those days. The station is a shadow of its former self, but Sievers' broadcast legacy will always be a little larger than life. The world is a little emptier for his passing.