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May 29 - June 5, 2003
Heading into Upstate South Carolina
 In
last week's installment of our recap of our March visit to the
Carolinas, we spent a Sunday morning (March 23, to be exact)
tooling around the tower sites of Columbia.
Leave Columbia on I-26 heading west, and any South Carolinian
will tell you you're heading "upstate" - the only area
outside of our home region of western New York that we know of
that's so regularly identified by that moniker.
But before we get all the way "upstate," an important
stop is in order. For years, we've exchanged news and DX tips
with a fellow named Powell Way, who works at a little radio station
called WKDK, 1240 on your dial in Newberry, South Carolina.
On this Sunday afternoon, he's at the station...and the station
is on the way to our next overnight stop near Greenville, so
we plan to spend a few hours meeting the estimable Mr. Way and
seeing his station.
It turns out that Newberry is a neat little town, complete
with a well-preserved Victorian downtown that still seems to
have a vibrant retail scene (although not on a Sunday, particularly!)
  Following
Powell's directions, we find ourselves at 3000 Hazel Street on
the north side of town, admiring a well-painted tower and a neat
brick building that's home to WKDK. (And, yes, there's a cemetery
around the corner - so we had to get the "graveyarder in
the graveyard" shot!)
Like that guy wire? In case it's not clear what's going on
here, this is not a directional array with a 24-degree
tower #2; no, that little bit of tower is meant to elevate the
guy wire above the public street in front of the station so that
the wire doesn't get hit by a truck. (Again.)
The paint job on the little tower is just a nice extra touch...
Heading inside, we take a break to eat lunch while admiring
some of Powell's collection of vintage radios. Then it's tour
time, as we check out the main transmitter, of the RCA BTA-1
family (complete with the "New Look" blue paint job),
glowing tubes and all...and tucked back in the corner, a 1940s
Raytheon 1kw unit that still works.
You can't quite see it in this picture, but there's an Optimod
in the rack between the two transmitters (and also, for old time's
sake, an Audimax/Volumax combo!)
 WKDK isn't the only
station in Newberry, either: before we leave town, we head down
to the south end of Newberry to Glenn Street Extension and WKMG
(1520), which is playing R&B oldies this Sunday afternoon.
For the last few years, WKMG has shared its call letters with
channel 6 in Orlando, Florida; I have no idea what "WKMG"
might stand for in Newberry, but Orlando wanted the calls to
stand for Katharine Meyer Graham, the legendary leader of the
Washington Post Company and Post-Newsweek Broadcasting. (Post-Newsweek's
WPLG in Miami stands for her late husband, Philip L. Graham.)
From Newberry, it's just 20 miles or so up the road to Union,
South Carolina.
If Union is known at all these days, it's because of Susan
Smith, the local woman who killed her children in 1994 by driving
her car into a lake, then blaming it on an imaginary black attacker.
The case made national headlines back then, but nine years
later Union has receded into small-town normalcy - albeit with
a particularly outstanding local radio station.
WBCU (1460) has been a fixture of life in Union for more than
half a century, most recently under the ownership of Art Sutton's
Georgia-Carolina Broadcasting (a staunch and proud supporter
of NERW/fybush.com, by the way - thanks, Art!)
WBCU's long history as a part of the Union community was even
documented in a book published a few years ago, A Perfect
Union by Bob Doll (author of Sparks out of the Plowed
Ground, an excellent history of small-town broadcasting.)
While the big guys await word out of Washington about how
many dozens of stations they can own in the major markets, folks
like Art are keeping an older ideal of radio alive, superserving
their little communities with programming that may not always
be slick (in fact, we didn't quite catch a legal ID on WBCU as
we passed through, though we're assured that was an anomaly)
but is always well connected to the people it serves.
WBCU's studios sit right on Main Street; alas, an attempt
at "prettying up" downtown a few years back resulted
in the loss of the very nifty illuminated "W B C U"
letters on the front of the building. The three towers are west
of town on Lukesville Road near Buffalo, S.C.; WBCU has a construction
permit to move down the dial to 820 kHz at a different site.
From here, we headed into Spartanburg, one of the major cities
of the upstate region; next week here on Tower Site, we'll lead
you on a whirlwind tour of Spartanburg, Greenville and more.
See you then!
 Want to see more neat sticks all year
round? Nashville's WSM (at right) is one of the more than
a dozen Tower Site images featured in the 2003 Tower Site Calendar,
still available from Tower Site of the Week and fybush.com.
If you liked last year's edition, you'll love this one: higher-quality
images (in addition to WSM, this year's edition includes Providence's
WHJJ; Mount Mansfield, Vermont; Buffalo's WBEN; KOMA in Oklahoma
City; WTIC, Hartford; Brookmans Park, England; WPAT, Paterson;
Four Times Square, New York; WIBC in Indianapolis; WWVA in Wheeling,
W.V.; WGN Chicago and more), more dates in radio history, a convenient
hole for hanging - and we'll even make sure all the dates fall
on the right days!
This year's edition is still available in limited quantities!
And this year, you can order with your Visa, MasterCard,
Discover or American Express by using the handy link below!
Better yet, here's an incentive to make your 2003 NERW/Site
of the Week subscription pledge right now: support NERW/fybush.com
at the $60 level or higher, and you'll get this lovely calendar
for free! How can you go wrong? (Click here
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with a major credit card...)
You can also order by mail; just send a check for $16
per calendar (NYS residents add 8% sales tax), shipping included,
to Scott Fybush, 92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester
NY 14618.
Thanks for your support!
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