This is a photo I found online of the radio towers for KGGF-AM in Coffeyville, Kansas, but the configuration of four antennae is similar to what drivers used to pass along Highway 41 north of Oshkosh.
The folks who own WNAM — 1280 AM in Neenah, Wisconsin — announced last week they’re shutting the signal down on Dec. 31 after it served the community since May 1947, more than 78 years. I remember listening o Top 40 music and then “Music of Your Life” easy listening on WNAM during my first years in Wisconsin in the 1970s. I remember the four mighty radio towers looming over U.S. Highway 41 between Oshkosh and Neenah.
I started my career in AM radio but saw listeners start to migrate to FM with its higher fidelity, stereo signal. It makes me sad to see an AM station close, especially one that in brighter days was an integral part of a community’s soundtrack — of my life’s soundtrack.
Everything ends eventually, but it’s important to mark each passing. We are born, we grow and thrive, and we move on. It seems fitting that WNAM survived to approximately the life expectancy of a human; our organizations can feel like living entities.
The AM radio band is slowly going quiet. I may be almost alone in mourning, and maybe I’m only mourning the fact that I’m not a young man anymore, but that once-crowded and raucous electronic universe is where so many of my sweetest memories were made.
I never worked at WNAM, but I cherish memories of that radio culture.
