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WOWO was not Fort Wayne's first station, only its biggest. The city's first broadcasting thread runs through Chester Keen and the Lauer Auto Company: Keen built a transmitter and put a station on the air in the early 1920s — the station-history record dates his WCWK to 1921 in one telling and its license (as WHBJ, to Lauer Auto) to March 3, 1925, in the FCC-derived record, with earlier Fort Wayne experimenters WFAS (1922) and WDBV (1924) already gone — and in 1928 Keen sold to Fred Zieg, who renamed it WGL. WGL and WOWO ran as a duopoly under Zieg and then Westinghouse until 1945, when the end of duopoly sent WGL to Philo Farnsworth's Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation, and from there to the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel — a newspaper owning the rival paper's competitor's station being entirely normal in the era's cross-ownership. The call letters were reinterpreted in the News-Sentinel years as "Wayne's Great Lady," for publisher Helene Foellinger; the gloss is carried in media-history accounts and is printed here as the tradition it is. WGL moved from 1450 to 1250 in the late 1940s, pioneered the talk format in the Fort Wayne market, and was among the first stations anywhere to carry the Rush Limbaugh show before it moved to WOWO in 1996.
The Journal Gazette's answer came on November 15, 1947, when WKJG radio signed on at 1380 — the first full-time AM station in Fort Wayne after the war — owned by publisher William Kunkel's Northeastern Indiana Broadcasting, a Mutual affiliate that joined NBC Radio in 1956. The WKJG calls left radio in 1971, when the AM became WMEE and the FM sister at 97.3 became WMEF; the top-40 format migrated to FM in 1979 and the 1380 frequency passed through country and later identities to its present sports format — the station still carries the WKJG call letters, restored in the 2000s, under different ownership from the television station of the same name. FM itself began in Fort Wayne as an experiment: Westinghouse's W49FW broadcast from October 12, 1942, at 44.9 megacycles, became WOWO-FM at 96.1, and was signed off in late 1953 when Group W judged FM unprofitable — a verdict the next three decades reversed, as FM took music, then audience, then primacy from AM across the market. Public radio arrived through the university: WIPU signed on June 5, 1978, on the Indiana-Purdue campus; rescued by its listeners' organization in 1982 as WBNI, it grew into Northeast Indiana Public Radio, whose news station, WBOI, moved to the stronger 89.1 signal in a 2004 frequency swap and became, in October 2005, the first FM station in northeast Indiana to broadcast in HD. The Christian network WBCL, from Taylor University's Fort Wayne lineage, is in the Religion and Current records.
Sources: WGL (AM) reference history and Scott Fybush, Tower Site of the Week (December 9, 2022) (the Keen/Lauer origins and the two datings; 1928 WGL renaming; 1945 Farnsworth sale; the News-Sentinel purchase; the 1250 move; talk-format and Limbaugh firsts); Media Confidential's Fort Wayne chronology (the "Wayne's Great Lady" gloss, printed as tradition); WKJG reference history and Fybush (1947 sign-on; 1971 call changes; NBC affiliation); History of WOWO (W49FW, 1942; WOWO-FM's 1953 sign-off); WBOI reference history (1978 WIPU; 1982 rescue; 2004 swap; 2005 HD first).