WOWO — the Voice of WOWOland

No Fort Wayne medium ever reached further into the city's life — or beyond it — than WOWO. The station was first licensed to the Main Auto Supply Company and signed on March 31, 1925, with 500 watts, from studios above the store at 213 West Main Street; it had been put on the air, in the manner of the time, to sell radio sets. Its builder-owner circle overlapped the city's other first station: Chester Keen of Main Auto had a hand in both WOWO and the Lauer Auto station that became WGL. On September 18, 1927, WOWO was one of the sixteen pioneer affiliates of the new CBS network. Fred Zieg bought the station in 1928, and in August 1936 sold it to Westinghouse Broadcasting — the first station Westinghouse ever purchased, joining the Group W family it had founded in Pittsburgh and Boston. In 1930, by the station's documented claim, WOWO made the first live broadcast of a basketball game anywhere, the seed of Indiana's basketball-on-radio culture.

The signal made the institution. On March 29, 1941, under the North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement, WOWO moved to 1190 kilohertz; on February 1, 1954, from new towers on U.S. 24 near Roanoke, its power rose to 50,000 watts day and night — the legal maximum, on a clear channel whose skywave at night carried Fort Wayne across the eastern United States and Canada. The audience had a name: WOWOland. Its citizens were farmers, above all. Bob Sievers — morning man for the better part of fifty years, farm director, and the station's folk philosopher — with newsman Jay Gould began weaving farmyard sound effects into their program in late 1945, and out of that experiment grew the "Little Red Barn": the daily morning show named for Nancy Lee and the Hilltoppers' song "In a Little Red Barn (on a Farm down in Indiana)," with live music on Saturdays long after recorded music became the norm. The weekday Barn closed August 7, 1989; its final edition aired December 7, 1997. Around Sievers stood a bench the clear channel made regionally famous — Gould, news director Dugan Fry, meteorologist Earl Finckle — and from 1953, Bob Chase, who called Fort Wayne Komets hockey on WOWO for sixty-three seasons, more than 4,500 games, his "radio rinkside" carried into twenty-eight states: the longest single-franchise tenure in North American sports broadcasting after Vin Scully's, recognized with the Lester Patrick Trophy in 2012.

The giant was diminished by a transaction, not by listeners. Westinghouse sold WOWO in 1982, and after passing through Price Communications, the station was bought in 1994 by Inner City Broadcasting of New York — which wanted the 1190 frequency's New York co-channel, WLIB, freed at night. In 1995 WOWO surrendered its clear-channel status; it still runs 50,000 watts by day but drops to 9,800 watts at night, and the eastern-seaboard audience went with the dark. The station completed its turn to news/talk in 1996 — taking, among other programs, the Rush Limbaugh show that WGL had carried first in the market — and remains, in the Current chapter's words, the region's news-talk radio institution. The towers still stand on U.S. 24; the signal that once defined a region's mornings is now a local voice with a long memory.

Sources: History of WOWO Radio (historyofwowo.com), from Sam DeVincent's station timeline (1925 sign-on; 1927 CBS affiliation; 1936 Westinghouse purchase; 1941 move to 1190; February 1, 1954, 50,000 watts; the Little Red Barn's 1945 origins and 1989/1997 closings; 1994 Inner City purchase); Allen County Genealogical Society, WOWO place record; Scott Fybush, Tower Site of the Week (2012) (the 1995 clear-channel surrender and present 9,800-watt night operation); NHL.com and the ECHL (November 24, 2016) for Bob Chase's 63 seasons and 4,500 games.