Fort Wayne Radio: WOWO Celebrates 90-Years

A legendary radio station celebrates 90 years.

Once the "50,000-watt blow torch of the big business of broadcasting," WOWO 1190 AM radio began its run in March 1925 on West Main Street in Fort Wayne's downtown.

Ninety years later, having gone through several owners and even more changes, the station maintains a loyal audience in northeast Indiana and beyond, some of whom attended a special celebratory live show at Thursday night.

WOWO began broadcasting with 500 watts of power on 1320 kHz on March 31, 1925 and was owned by Chester Keen of Main Auto Supply Company.   Today the station has a power output 50,000 Day and 9,800 watts at Night.

WOWO 1190 AM (50,000 Watts-D, 9,800 Watts-N

Because WOWO's Nighttime Skywave Service caused WLIB, also 1190 kHz, in New York City to cease broadcasting at sunset each day and resume broadcasting at sunrise, Inner City Broadcasting bought WOWO in 1994 so that the Class A clear-channel license of WOWO could be reduced to a Class B, and WLIB, owned by Inner City Broadcasting could thereby increase its class from Class D to Class B. This reduced WOWO's potential audience—referred to as WOWOland—from much of the eastern United States to a much smaller local region in northern Indiana, northwestern Ohio, and south-central Michigan. Before the power reduction, when WLIB signed off at night, WOWO's air signal came booming through the speakers into the WLIB air studio.

The station's call sign was chosen to start with the letter "W" as required by the FCC for all stations in the United States at the time. During the 1920s, the FCC permitted either three- or four-letter callsigns, with three-letter call signs being preferred for brevity. By choosing WOWO for easy pronunciation as a two-syllable word, in some measure WOWO had a callsign that exhibited even more brevity than even the three-letter callsigns. Despite this, disk jockeys on WOWO were prohibited from calling the station "woe-woe" on the air until the late 1960s, when a contest was introduced to identify songs in which the "woe" sound appeared. The WOWO callsign was later backfilled as a tongue-in-cheek acronym: "Wayne Offers Wonderful Opportunities".

Click Here For More WOWO History

Today, WOWO airs a News/Talk format and currently has studios in a broadcast complex on Maples Road, on the south side of Fort Wayne. It has a three tower directional antenna on U.S. Highway 24, just northeast of Roanoke, Indiana.

WOWO began to simulcast on 92.3 FM on March 28, 2012 at noon.