Gary Reeder
Back a hundred years ago when I was in radio,
Saturday, December 17, 2022, 13:06

besides being a DJ I had my 1st Class license which made me (on paper) a chief engineer. I had been been fired a couple of times at a couple of radio stations for publicity stunts on my morning show. It was something that was normal back in the 60s and 70s. But the radio station was owned by the Gov. of Kentucky at the time and he not only didn't like rock & roll he didn't like the silly crap that went on from time to time on the air. The listeners liked it but the owner of the station didn't.

Anyway I probably either told WB (Scott Boggs) this story or may have shown him some of the pictures, but I knew every radio station had to have a chief engineer on call at all times and his license on the wall. I also knew there was a company in Dallas that gave a 24 month course I could take to be a chief engineer. I also knew they had an 8 week course that did the same thing, except it was a memory course. I signed up for the 8 week course and was lucky enough to pass the test and get my license. I then signed on with a radio station in Clarksville Tennessee to do the morning show but also I had my license on the wall which saved them a lot of money hiring a real chief engineer to be on call.
I didn't know that along with the chief engineer duties which was checking the various readings on the transmitter and signing the daily logs there was another thing I had signed on to do. That was to climb the station towers to change the bulbs. In Tennessee during the summer it was not unusual for the tower to get zapped by lightning and the bulbs get burned out. The station was a short way from Ft. Campbell and they had aircraft coming and going all times of the day and night so those bulbs had to be changed right now.
The bulbs on top of the tower were about 18" in length. The fixture was like a capsule. Two wingnuts, one on each side, were loosened and the top half rotated over against the bottom half and the two big bulbs unscrewed and the new ones replaced and the top half rotated back over and tightened.
One thing I didn't mention was the tower was a bit over 350 feet high and like the fellow below mentioned I had to jump on the concrete base that one of the tower legs sat on so as not to get my ass fried. I had a big belt with steel circles on each side. When I got to the top I would hook one end into the other end. Like in the picture of the guy climbing the tower there was no hooking on until you get to the top.
Heights don't bother me, but spiders and wasps do. I think every time I climbed that tower during the summer there would be a big wasp nest under the base of the bulb fixture and when I got inside the fixture where the bulbs were there would be several large spiders taking up residency. I had talked to a professional climber before my first climb who told me to make sure and carry with me a can of pressurized bug spray. I found out my first climb why.

That tower was to be a baby climb compared to a couple of others in the area. Somehow I got the reputation for being dumb enough to climb radio station towers. The hardest I had to climb was a bit over 1100 feet tall. It took me about 3 hours to get to the top, and besides the two big top bulbs I had to change the small side bulbs that were every 100 feet or so along the way.
Now I sure didn't get paid what that fellow in the picture did. I got $100 per hour which usually meant an extra thousand in my pocket. Good friend and Misfit Larry Farley who I did a lot of ground hog hunting with asked me a time or two if I had climbed a tower that morning. I told him I did and he said he could tell as I was white as a sheet. I tried to time my climbing to a Sunday morning so I could still do some hunting in the afternoon. My wife at the time also gave me hell everytime I climbed as she said he same thing Larry did, that I was white as a ghost. I think that was due to the high pressure but she said it probably had to do with being scared shitless. I guess that was possible, especially when I had to climb that tall tower.
One other little thing. On one of the tall towers I climbed I carried a camera with me and took pictures from the top of the tower about every 50 degrees in a circle. The newspaper in the area posted those pictures in their newspaper. A few days after that an officer from Ft. Campbell came to the radio station and asked me if I still had the pictures I took. I told him I did. He asked for the camera and told me I might have taken some pictures of things on base that they didn't want shown to the public. So I gave him my camera and a few days later he returned it and asked me not to do that again.
So climbing towers was sorta fun and the extra money paid for a new groundhog gun or two. So that made it worthwhile.