I notice the pictures of the original WHAY transmitter building.  When I worked at WRCH/WRCQ in 1983-1985, that building had been remodeled into an apartment.  One Sunday night, I was on my way home from Washington, DC after attending an AM antenna seminar at the NAB.  Driving on I-84, I noted that only one of the five WRCQ towers was lit.  I looked at my watch (it was late).  I looked at the towers.  I called the FAA from home to report the tower light outage.  The next day, it was time to troubleshoot why 4 towers had no lights.  My assistant, Ray Halleck, and I schlepped out into the swamp and opened the gate on tower #1, the one closest to the building.  There, all around the inside of the fenced enclosure, was broken glass – red tower beacon lenses, red lenses from the side lights, broken light bulbs.  Checking inside the gates of the other 3 towers in the line showed the same thing.  Breaking out the binoculars showed that indeed, there were no lenses on any of the fixtures on the towers, and no light bulbs, either.  Turns out that Saturday night, the apartment dwellers had a “kegger”.  And, of course, when you’re snockered, it’s a lot of fun to climb those 275 foot towers and take out the light bulbs!  They make a cool noise when they hit the ground!!  Enzo DeDominicis, President of WRCH/WRCQ, was not pleased.  It was expensive to repair and relamp all those fixtures!

Also during this time when I was at WRCH/WRCQ, we built the new WRCH facility in the new Channel 61 building on Rattlesnake Mountain.  I fondly recall the upcoming Labor Day holiday weekend, when the Canadian tower crew was looking to get out of Dodge, and I pestered them (because Enzo was pestering me) to get the WRCH transmission line into our room so we could turn on the new transmitter.  They grudgingly agreed – and almost stopped when they realized the couple of tight bends they would have to make with 3-1/2” transmission line – not an easy chore.  I also recall going up the elevator in the Channel 61 tower with an Engineer from ERI, the antenna manufacturer.  WRCH used a panel antenna which wraps around the tower.  Conveniently, there was a landing platform directly behind the center of the antenna.  You couldn’t fall out of the tower, as the antenna effectively enclosed the landing platform.  But, I don’t get along well with heights.  I stood on the landing platform taking pictures, then turned to get back into the elevator to wait for the ERI guy – who had climbed over the antenna on the outside of the tower and was jumping up and down on one of the antenna elements – with no climbing belt!  With heart in throat, I asked what he was doing, and how he knew the element was properly bolted into place.  His response, “no one ever fell off a tower because they didn’t hang on!”.  Well, how about because they COULDN’T hang on???  Then there was Channel 61 testing into their transmitter into their dummy load.  We used to watch the test patterns clear as a bell (this was just the dummy load – no antenna connected) at the WRCH studios on Birdseye Road.  I remember the night they tested their antenna – full power – while it sat on sawhorses on the ground.  The next day, there was no grass in the area where the test was done!