The Flood Waters Came and Went

A lot of former radio people from Williamsport have found this BLOG by accident, believe me I am glad you did! Thanks for your input and contributions.

And now, as Paul Harvey would say, "The rest of the story."

Agnes, Was No Lady!

If I remember somewhere around June 20, 1972 the rains came to Williamsport in the form of what was left of Hurricane Agnes. Now rain is nothing new to Pennsylvania and Williamsport, many severe floods over the years had struck including the "Great Flood of 1936" remembered by many as the worst ever! So when heavy rains were forecast from Agnes, nothing more than a few eyebrows raised at WMPT, after all, urban legend was that cows stood on the little knoll where the station was built during the '36 flood and didn't get wet, so surely this little storm would not threaten "The Mighty 1450." I might point out that WMPT was located outside the dike system that protected South WIlliamsport.

n 1972 WMPT was the "Powerhouse" of radio broadcasting, holding off challenges by WLYC, under the new ownership of Alpha Broadcasting as well as changes at WWPA, and even staid old WRAK was picking up steam. At the time I was working the all night show, called oddly enough "The Watts Watch." It was the first, and at the time the only 24 hour station in Williamsport, I must say that show was one of the more interesting things I have ever done. There is a whole strange yet wonderful class of people who belonged to "The Land Of The Living Dead." Mrs. Louise Swartz, who was the overnight switchboard operator at Williamsport Hospital, named it that! The WMPT lineup at the time included long time veterans Ron Shobert, and Harry Seltzer, Myself, Caesar Mattioli, Jon Paul, Bill Byham, Clyde Thompson, Dolly Wilt, Steve George, and David Lee (Mosteller). We had done away with block programming and had adopted a top 40 AC format with the all night show being easy listening contemporary, you couldn't beat the sound. Dave was opening his pocketbook, we had new jingles, he was upgrading equipment (new transmitter, audio processor, etc) and Caesar was doing a great job of getting us music service.

The day that the rains began in earnest, I had a first date with a girl I had met when she and a couple of mutual acquaintances stopped into the station to pick up a prize. Anyway, she was going on vacation at the "Jersey Shore" with her folks and at lunch that day we made plans to get together again after she came back, as I too was headed out of town to Indianapolis to visit an old friend. I think it was that day WMPT received a brand new CBS Volumax Audio Processor, at the time it was "THE THING" to make your signal really HOT, that in conjunction with the new CCA transmitter and new ground system would really improve our signal. Anyway, Dave and I mounted it in the control room equipment rack planning to hook it up when I got back from my time away. It never was on the air before it had a complete factory rebuild.

At the time of the flood I lived with my parents along the Loyalsock Creek in Barbours. The land was actually "creekfront" but the house was some 75' above "The Sock" so no flood waters ever reached the house, although there was damage in the cellar to the furnace, and water pump from groud water. As I said I was woking the all night shift at WMPT and I remember I went home looking at the creek at "Slabtown" and Shore Acres, Best Beach and other places thinking "Wow that is really high." Normally I would have stopped at Bud and Betty Bells' Airport Restaurant for breakfast, but that day I chose to go home and get some sleep as I had been up early the day before for my lunch date. Anyway, I was sound asleep when my mother knocked on my door, sometime about noon and told me the Plunketts Creek Fire Dept. was being called out to evacuate people along the creek. I was a member there and at First Ward in South Williamsport and my Father was Asst. Chief at P.C.F.D. so it was only natural for me to get up. As I drove over the old Barbours Bridge the water was higher than I had ever seen it, there was water in the roadway at the end of the bridge. As I looked around I saw Plunketts Creek Engine 25 in front of Hank Borowski's General Store. So I stopped to see what was up. They were "at draft" in the cellar and trying to move his freezers out. Before long the water was rising so fast that it was decided to abandon that task as we might lose the only pumper the department had. Well to make a long story even longer I spent the next 4 days with P.C.F.D. and our firehouse became the emergency center for the area. We were fortunate that the Ladies auxiliary had purchased a generator for the department just the week before and that kept some lights, the base radio, freezers, and coffee pot going. We were also fortunate to have L.P. gas stoves in the kitchen so with the food we got from Hank's we fed fire fighters and residents. It was during that time, while the phones were still working that I learned that the staff was ready to abandon WMPT. We actually had phones for a while and I filed reports with WRAK.
Fast forward to June 25 or so, I took and ambulance call into WIlliamsport so I found a way to get from Barbours to town. While I was in town I called Caesar Mattioli and asked if I could crash at hisapartment. He told me about the station and how he Steve George, Bill Byham and Jon Paul had to wade through deep water to get out. He didn't know how much water the station had received but said before they left they set stuff on top of desks and the office counter. The next morning the water was down enough for all of us to go to the station and assess the damage. I remember after our initial inspection of the station and finding the water had just about made the ceiling we were all standing in the parking lot talking. I looked at Dave and said , "ya' know if cows stood here in '36, they were mighty damn tall ones." We then set about the task of moving stuff out of the station to the sunny parking lot hosing it out and using case after case of Dow Bathroom Cleaner on all the electrical stuff.

As luck would have it, I had some of the remote gear, a Shure mixer, a portable turntable, and a couple of mics from the sports kit in my car, so as an experiment we set them up jumpered the FM control line to get it back on the air, and started to play some music late that afternoon. Dave said, "I wonder if anyone is listening, why don't you give the phone number and ask for requests." SO I did, and YES I got some, we had one phone set up, one that was in Dave's second floor office and we were surprised. By the next afternoon, with the help of Glenn Sherman from WRAK, Carl Steinbacher from WWPA, and Warren "Lommie" Lomison from Lomison Sound (he had a music service way before Muzak) we had the Gates Dualux working on one channel, which was ok, The old Gates 16" turntables, one cart machine, and the CCA AM transmitter all in operation, well sort of! When we got into the CCA Transmitter we found that the modulation transformer was shorted out, BUT someone got the bright idea that if we insulated it from ground it might just work! What did we have to lose? Now what can we use? AH HA! old vinyl L.P.'s, we had to pry the record library apart with a fire department portapower so most of albums that were on the outside were damaged. It worked! Dave figured that we could only get about 110 watts at high power out of a 1 KW transmitter, BUT the ground system was so wet, we had damn near as strong a signal as we did before the flood at 1KW. We set up operations in the old lounge/production studio and gradually got back to normal? Since for the most part we had no production facilities, we either dubbed stuff while we were on the air, when we got the second channel of "the board" working, or did production after signoff. We started back on the air with regular programming within 5 days of when we first came back in the building. Cables across the floor giving way to my now famous line, "if it is temporary for more than 3 weeks, it is considered permanent! During that time we actually did two remotes, 3 days from the Lycoming County Fair, and I did a remote from Tri-State Discount Center. That was probably the last time I saw ALL the staff really pull together as we had a goal, sound as good as possible, and make sure the listeners didn't turn their dials to the left!

One bad thing we found, was that the cinderblock walls held water for some time, and it was not un-common to find a stream coming out from under the wall. Oh then there was the fish! The back half of the property was quite low and held a pond for some time. Yes, people came in to fish but the pond dried up before they got them all, so, we wound up with lots of dead fish. Eventually Lyle Keeler, Fire Chief of Independent Station 9, used them in his garden that he had just outside of the ground radial system! Lots of good stuff to eat that year!

I stayed for two or three months after the Agnes flood, but by then I noticed that WLYC was really putting a move on in the market. J.T. Kelliher had sold to a company called Alpha Broadcasting, who owned WGGO in Salamenca, NY and also was a computer services company. I applied and was hired part time and shortly there after I started the second all night in Williamsport on WILQ (WLYC FM). So, for a brief period of time, once again I was the ONLY all night voice from WIlliamsport.

The next time, my life and times and the characters I met at 1050 LYC and Q105, it was a lot of fun! (at times)