A radio wave goodbye

 I guess this is the part where I go Full Geezer.

I guess this is the part where I put down my morning coffee, set aside my morning gruel, and snarl like Ebenezer Scrooge at what a hellscape the world has become. How Time has eroded the eternal verities, and what the hell, Time? You couldn't just stay in one place? You couldn't wave your magic Rolex and make it so stuff didn't keep happening, and progress was stopped in its tracks, and change was made illegal in all 50 states plus Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands?

Dammit, Time. Why do you have to keep on keepin' on?

I say this because the announcement everyone knew was coming came down yesterday, and there went another piece of my childhood/adulthood. After 71 winters, the Fort Wayne Komets and WOWO are parting company. If you want to listen to the K's, you don't tune in 1190 AM anymore. You tune in something called WXKE, wherever that is on your radio dial.

Everyone called it a simple business decision yesterday, and it is. In every way conceivable, leaving WOWO for XKE makes perfect sense, because it's 2024, not 1955 or '65 or '75. Even in Full Geezer mode, I get that.

But there are simple business decisions, and then there are simple business decisions. And this one isn't simple at all, no matter how blithely it's presented as such.

You air certain programming for the better part of a century, see, you become synonymous with that programming. And 71 years of the Komets on WOWO -- 71 years of them droppin' the gloves and raggin' the puck all the way into the zone and shoot/rebound/SCORE! -- makes them blood kin. 

Play word association across the greater part of those 71 years, after all, and a whole swatch of America knew what "Fort Wayne" meant. It meant WOWO and Komet hockey and Bob Chase. If you knew nothing else about the Fort anywhere in the eastern part of the U.S., you knew that.

I've told this story a million times before, but it bears repeating: One night I was sitting in a hotel lounge in Gettysburg, Pa., and I got to talking to some of the locals, and someone asked where I was from. And when I said "Fort Wayne, Indiana," one woman immediately brightened.

"WOWO! Komet hockey! Bob Chase!" she exclaimed.

Of course, Bob's been gone eight years now, and years before that WOWO's mighty 50,000 watts got powered down. And so WOWO and the Fort Wayne Komets are not conjoined twins anymore in the American mind. If WOWO is known for anything these days, it's for the same endlessly aggrieved babble of right-wing talk radio you can hear in a million other places.

And yet ...

And yet. And yet.