Century marks

 Today in this locale WOWO radio celebrates its 100th birthday, and again I'm in Vermont on a crystal clear winter's night, twirling the dial in the old late-model conveyance. Nine hundred spins past and then 1000 and then 1100, and right before 1200 comes up the voice of Bob Chase suddenly booms out at me from across the Green Mountains and 750 miles.

"AAAND HERE COMES WILLETT INTO THE ZONE ..."

Fort Wayne Komets hockey, by god. Chaser barking the play-by-play as if he were riding shotgun with me beneath a spray of stars flung like diamonds against the night sky.

That's what I think of when I think of WOWO, back when it was still those mighty 50,000 watts and went all across the eastern half of the nation.

People in North Carolina and Ontario and, yes, Vermont knew Bob Chase and Komet hockey, because of WOWO. Young girls danced barefoot on a West Virginia road to its music. The late great Atlanta Constitution columnist Lewis Grizzard even mentioned it obliquely in one of his pieces, writing about hearing a hockey game in Fort Wayne, In. one night.

If you knew nothing else about the Fort, you at least knew WOWO. It made the city far more recognizable within a far larger orbit than it ever would have been otherwise.

And now it's 100 years old, and God bless it. Went on the air in 1925, when the Klan ran Indiana and even its governor wore the sheet and hood. It was a dark time, and there were darker times ahead -- the crash of '29, the Great Depression that followed, two young black men hanging from a tree in Marion like Billie Holliday's strange fruit -- and then would come World War II and telegrams freighted with heartache arriving from places of which no one had ever heard: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Bastogne.

WOWO was around for all of it. And of course much, much more.

If you grew up here and are of a certain age, WOWO was the voice of your mornings, especially when winter put its foot down and the snow piled up. That's when Bob Sievers would read off the school closings, either gladdening your heart or gently breaking the bad news that, yes, you'd best be headin' for the bus stop.

Jay Gould would be there with him, giving us the hog and soybean futures. Dugan Fry, too, later on. And of course Nancy Lee and the Hilltoppers would provide the musical accompaniment, singing endlessly about that Little Red Barn on a farm down in Indiana.

Now it's all these years later, a whole century of them, and so much is different, surprise, surprise. Bob Chase is gone and the Komets come to us from another station these days. The 50,000 watts are gone, too, WOWO having powered down a good space of years ago. And, like so many other AM entities across the last 30 or 40 years, it's become a megaphone for hard-right politics and the purveyors of same.

From Nancy Lee and the Hilltoppers to Joe Rogan and the like: Now there's a long and winding road for ya.

And yet ...

And yet, few threads run through this city's last 100 years the way WOWO 1190 AM does. Few trace memories of a particular time in this particular place are not informed by it. If it has reached the century mark of its existence, it has just as surely left a century of indelible marks on this city. Fort Wayne's tapestry would not be complete without it.

Nor would a certain long-ago night in Vermont, beneath those stars like diamonds.