The Endless West

Many moons ago, I posted a blog called “Where the West Begins.”  It pointed out that at one time or another, just about every town west of the Mississippi River has claimed to be the jumping-off point for a trip through that immense region of romantic legend.

My choice was Fort Worth, Texas, since, as I wrote then, “Fort Worth emerged from the prairie sod as a classic ‘cow town,’ a cattle-drive stockyards stop on the great Chisholm Trail.  And even today, Fort Worth’s ‘uptown cowboys’ in white and black Stetsons still holler at rodeos and ride mechanical bulls and line dance to the ‘Boot Scootin’ Boogie’ at clubs like Billy Bob’s” — in stark contrast to the sophisticates in Dallas, just to the east.

Throughout West Texas, huge stores sell nothing but hats and boots, belts and western shirts, jeans and even saddles.  In places like Amarillo, the hub city of the panhandle-shaped protrusion of northwest Texas, folks wear their broad black or white hats just about everywhere but church.  The wind’s usually blowing there, and I asked a cowpoke how he kept his big hat on.  “I make sure it’s good and snug and fits ever’ crease of my head,” he replied.

If you draw a straight line from Fort Worth up to Canada and down to the Gulf of Mexico, the West takes up about half of the United States.  That’s about four million square kilometers (3.1 million square miles) of breathtaking rock formations, arid wasteland, snow-covered peaks — but also ubane metro areas.

To give you a sense of this enormous and diverse place, I’ll relate a few stories from my travels.  It will take me more than one posting to do so.

*** 

Down Mexico Way

Let’s start down around Brownsville, at the very southern tip of Texas, where the United States, Mexico, and the Gulf of Mexico converge.  Lots of ordinary people live there, raising spinach, strawberries and such.  But this is also very much the turf of the U.S. Border Patrol, whose agents are on the prowl for illegal border “runners,” contraband, and smuggled humans.  It’s also home to predatory bandits on both sides of the border who pounce upon illegals, stealing what little money they have and sometimes killing them for good measure.

From Brownsville, the U.S.-Mexican border snakes 1,300 kilometers (807 miles) northwestward along the Rio Grande River to El Paso.  Then, with a couple of jags, it mostly straightens and shoots west through the desert, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.  In all, that’s a 3,700-km boundary that needs watching.  Despite the talk of a double fence and hi-tech network of security cameras the whole way, only about 19 kilometers’ worth are in place.

In the scrub brush far from border cities, there are no barriers at all.  One can simply walk over the line — admittedly into forbidding terrain.

So U.S. and Mexican agents drive rugged off-road vehicles, scouting the border as best they can.  Each month in the Brownsville sector alone, they nab 2,500 or so illegal aliens.  Most are young and looking to cross into the United States for just enough time to earn money at odd jobs or to steal goods to sell for U.S. dollars.

The Border Patrol used to send out lots of roving patrols, rounding up whatever illegals they could find.  More recently, in hopes of discouraging illegals from even trying to cross over, the strategy has been to saturate the boundary in populated areas with agents in stationary positions, illuminated at night by lights so powerful that their posts look like desolate football stadiums.

What happens when people are caught dashing across these no-man’s lands?

Almost nothing, which helps explain why so many young Mexicans and Central Americans try to sneak across, over and over again.  They are taken to a holding cell, where their identities and criminal records are checked.  If they’re not on a wanted list for serious crimes, they are driven to the bridge across the Rio Grande and set free.  They simply walk back over to Mexico.

Others, often older and determined to start a new life in the United States, pay polleros  — Spanish for “chicken herders” and also often called “coyotes” — exorbitant sums to help them elude patrols and get over the line.  This has led to tragic accidents — and mass suffocations in the blistering summer heat — involving illegals whom the heartless coyotes wedged into trucks like cattle.  So border agents hunt coyotes with special ferocity.

It’s hard, sometimes deadly, often sad work.  “You have to believe in what you’re doing,” one Border Patrol agent told me.  “Your heart really has to be in it.”

*** 

Some Like it Hot

Extreme South Texas could fairly be called Mexican-American.  Ninety percent of the residents of Brownsville, for instance, speak Spanish as their first language.  So it’s not surprising that there are little Mexican restaurants on many a corner as far north as cosmopolitan San Antonio, where spicy “Tex-Mex” food is actually a tourist attraction.

Tex-Mex combines such staples as flour tortillas with hearty Texas-style barbecued meat that’s been broiled over an open flame.  Since Mexico’s many regions offer endless varieties of peppers, there’s an infinite choice of recipes.  Mexicans use a lot of pork, but Texas is beef country, so that’s what you’ll get in most eateries.  Fajitas, made with steak, shredded cheese, and piquant salsa, for instance, are a San Antonio invention.  Two other staples on many a Tex-Mex plate are rice, seasoned with a few tomatoes, onions, or peas; and a gloppy concoction called “refried beans.”  Like tamales — stewed meat stuffed in ground cornmeal dough and cradled in dried corn husks — these beans are fried in lard and are incredibly fattening.

Little wonder San Antonio routinely ranks in Men’s Fitness magazine’s listing of “America’s Fattest Cities.  In 2009, it placed third, and two other Texas cities — Houston and El Paso — also made the Top 10.

All sorts of Texas immigrants influenced the tradition as well.  Germans and Czechs inspired the popular habit of serving Tex-Mex tacos and the like with lots of good beer.  There’s even a strain of Tex-Mex music, in which the accordion — originally a Northern Europe instrument — joins the traditional Mexican trumpets, fiddles, and mariachis.

Décor is one more part of the experience.  A typical Tex-Mex place is festooned with colorful hanging sombreros, serapes, paper flowers, and quite often, Christmas lights all year long.  Somehow, these vivid and lively surroundings, enhanced by a frozen beverage made with tequila, make what one San Antonio chef called “the rich food of the poor” all the tastier.

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The Hangin’ Judge

One of the legendary figures of frontier justice was a crusty old frontier judge whom actor Paul Newman played in the 1970s movie “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.”  Bean was known as “the law west of the Pecos” — a river in Southwest Texas that in the 1880s separated civilization from the truly wild West.  So firm was Judge Bean in his rulings that everybody called him “the hangin’ judge.”  There was even a hanging tree out front of his saloon, which doubled as his courtroom.  The bar, plus Bean’s home in the opera house that he built, and a cactus garden out back, are now part of a Texas welcome center in the tiny town of Langtry, near the Mexican border.

Most of the time, Judge Bean dispensed justice while sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch.  His law library consisted of a single volume of state statutes.  Often as not, according to accounts, he’d have the book upside down and just pretend to read from it.  The illiterate defendants didn’t know the difference.

After his verdict — guilty, mostly — he would fine most offenders, stick the money in his pocket, and invite everyone, including the defendant, in for drinks on the house.

Even though he was the “law” in West Texas, Bean made a dollar any way he could.  Once, he staged a world heavyweight match that had been banned in Texas.  He moved it to a sandbar in Mexican territory in the middle of the Rio Grande River.

Bean named his bar the “Jersey Lily” and the town “Langtry,” out of fascination with actress and singer Lily Langtry, from Jersey, England.  He never met her, but he saw photographs and read articles about her.  The old bachelor stayed up late into the night, writing Lily letters.

Sometimes she wrote back!

Judge Bean built the opera house in hopes that Lily would one day come visit and sing.  No luck there.

At one time, 1,700 people lived in Langtry.  They were railroad construction workers who soon moved on, leaving Roy Bean as the only permanent resident.

Even though it’s still in the middle of nowhere, the town is growing again.  When I visited a few years ago, 30 people lived there!

***

Ouch and Double Ouch

Wide-open West Texas spaces aren’t good for much other than drilling for oil and raising cattle.  The latter is more of a sure thing, so Texans raise millions of “cows,” as they call them all.  Something like 40 percent of all the red meat eaten by Americans comes from cattle raised in West Texas.

And just as in the western movies, ranchers still brand their calves to make sure the ownership of each animal is clear.  Afterward, however, they don’t usually get together and sing the way Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and the Sons of the Pioneers did on the silver screen and TV.

Clint Eastwood played a cowhand in the television show “Rawhide” that glamorized cowboy life.  But the “rope, throw, and brand ‘em” part of a cowboy’s responsibilities referenced in the show’s theme song is anything but glamorous.  It can be downright unnerving to visitors, since cows, separated from their calves that have been herded into a pen, are bawling mournfully for their young ones the whole time.

The first task is heating the branding iron — not in a crackling fire, but using a butane torch.  It’s cleaner and easier, and there’s not much wood to waste on fires in West Texas anyway.  When the iron’s ready, a cowboy opens the gate into a big ring, and a single calf is driven out.

No sooner does it think it’s off for a romp than a skilled roper flicks out his lasso and snares the calf around the neck.  That brings the young animal up short and puts the first glint of terror into its eyes.

Then two other cowboys hustle over and toss the unfortunate calf onto its side on the ground, while a third cowhand ties another rope around three of its hooves.  In a flash, it’s dragged to the cowboy with the branding iron, restrained with more ropes so it can’t kick anyone, and seared with the hot iron.  Not red hot, since that would leave an open sore that would get infected, but hot enough to leave a permanent mark on the calf’s tough hide.

The idea of such a mark is an ancient one.  Egyptians branded oxen on the rump as early as 2000 B.C.  Today in Texas, famous cattle brands are as well known as corporate symbols.  Slaughterhouses carefully check for them, but a clever rustler can alter one.  A “1,” for instance, can easily be made to look like a “7.”  That’s why many brands are deliberately elaborate.

But back to our miserable calf.

In less than a minute, the creature is branded, vaccinated, gets its ears cropped, and, if it’s male, endures castration.  The neutered bull-calves will become gentler “steers,” content to grow fat and tasty.  Calves’ ears are distinctively clipped so the hands can quickly tell the males (right ear notched) from the females (left ear cut).  In large Texas herds — some reach 2,000 head — each animal also gets a numbered “bangle tag,” similar to a plastic luggage tag, stapled to an ear as an individual ID.

An aside: You may have heard the cowboy song that trills, “Yippy ti yi yo, get along little doggies.  It's your misfortune and none of my own.”   These doggies, pronounced “DOAG-ees,” aren’t canines.  They’re orphan calves whose mothers died, perhaps while giving birth.

To top off branding day, there’s one more procedure that must seem like a pastureland frolic compared to what the calf has already been through.  It’s a huge injection of vitamins and antibiotics.

About a year and a half from this day, when the calves have grown into fat and sassy adults of 450 kilos (almost 1,000 pounds), just about all of the males, and some of the females, too, will be sides of beef, hanging in a processing plant.  Many heifers — female calves who have yet to produce their own calves — and a very few unneutered bull-calves will live on as breeding stock for future generations of beef on the hoof.  But these days, most ranchers rent bulls with proven bloodlines for stud.

All in all, branding day is a most unpleasant occasion on a calf’s calendar, and no treat for squeamish visitors.  For ranch hands, though, it’s just another day to rope, throw, and brand ‘em!

***

Don’t Fence Me In

It has often been written that the Colt pistol tamed the American West.  Others say it was the plow, which turned empty grass prairies into cultivated farms.  Or the railroad, which brought refinement east from San Francisco and west from Chicago.

But a strong argument could be made that it was, instead, an object no bigger than your second toe that truly gave men and women mastery over the rugged western countryside.  It was a sharp metal barb, tied every few centimeters along two twisted strands of wire.

Barbed wire, or “bob wire,” the white settlers called it.  Plains Indians, who had roamed the prairie freely for centuries, called it “the devil’s rope.”

Farmers who had moved west wanted to protect their precious water and keep great herds of cattle and American bison called “buffalo” from trampling their crops.  They wanted fences.  But there was not enough wood in the West to build the quaint rail fences they were used to — not enough stones for walls, either.  Stringing plain wire did not work.  Burly beasts easily trampled it and rumbled on.

The settlers found their answer in barbed wire.  An Illinois farmer named Joseph Glidden had invented the most successful variety.  A young farmhand would climb Glidden’s windmill with a strand of wire in hand.  He’d slide the sharp, curled barbs down the wire from on high.  Others below would space them and hold them in place with a second piece of twisted wire.

Barbed wire was a big seller.  A man named John Gates sold 12 million kilos of it a year in Texas alone after a simple demonstration.  He herded about a hundred longhorn steers into a corral in the San Antonio plaza and bet everyone that not a one of them would break out.  The crowd whooped, dogs barked, and the steers were scared half to death, but none broke out of the pen.

Ranchers loathed barbed wire.  Their herds had always run free, since steers need endless stretches of the dusty plains to search out vegetation.  During cattle drives to railheads, cowboys simply picked the shortest route — never mind whose land they had to cross.

Deadly range wars were fought over barbed wire.  Sometimes fencemen would drive in posts and tack up wire from huge rolls on their wagons, only to have cattlemen follow right behind and tear the fences down.

Barbed wire would first be used in wartime by both sides in the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the 20^th Century, and thousands of men died among barbed-wire entanglements along the trenches of World War I.  Barbed wire was also a haunting symbol of suppression at the Berlin Wall during the Cold War.

You still see it throughout the American West, doing the same job it did a century ago.  And if you’d be absolutely fascinated by 200 or so varieties of this prickly wire, take a trip sometime to the little Texas Panhandle town of McLean and tour a museum devoted to the devil’s rope and some artifacts of old U.S. highway 66 that runs through the Texas Panhandle.

While you’re there, you’ll also get a good look at historic artifacts of Route 66, the old, two-lane highway from Chicago to Los Angeles that’s been subsumed by modern interstate highways in many places but still runs through McLean.

***

Little Armored One

Well, we haven’t even gotten out of Texas on this first leg of our western expedition.  I thought I’d close with a personal story that amused me.

One day, Carol and I were driving down one of the forever-long roads that folks in Texas are always building.

“Eeek,” Carol shouted.  “An aardvark!!!”

Of course it wasn’t the little burrowing African animal whose long, sticky tongue snatches termites.  Texas has millions of termites, but likely not a single aardvark in the wild.

What we saw and nearly turned into road kill was another odd-looking animal that ranges from Texas all the way down into South America.

It’s an armadillo.  There may even be a country song about the armadillos of Amarillo.

The locals call them “Texas speed bumps” or “anteaters on the half shell,” referring to the ugly little creatures’ scaly bands that look like a lobster’s belly.  But these are more leathery than brittle.

Ugly?  Check out their rat-like tails.

Even though they’re sturdily plated, few armadillos survive an encounter with an automobile.  While they can scoot pretty fast, they kind of hop when they’re excited – right up into your bumper.

Armadillos are prehistoric creatures, 300 million years old.  In his famous 1980 book on Texas, American author James Michener devoted a whole chapter to them.  Perhaps, too, you’ve seen Charles Russell’s classic Old West painting of Plains Indians on horseback, shooting arrows at fleeing buffalo.  Somebody made T-shirts out of this, but on it, the Indians are shooting at giant, galloping armadillos.

Truth is, armadillos are more fright than flight or fight.  Attacked, an armadillo will curl into a ball, hiding its little pink head and soft belly under its armor.

The reason that I know a bit about these pocket-sized dinosaurs, other than Carol’s alarm at encountering one, is that we ran into a fellow named Jalepeño Sam.

As his name suggests, Sam Lewis makes great chili.  But he also raises armadillos near San Angelo, Texas.  Not as food — though I have heard that some Texans toss armadillo meat into their stew — but as pets and to race.

Sam showed me an armadillo up close.  I declined his invitation to cuddle one.

These mammals have no teeth, but their long snouts and powerful front claws can quickly burrow into sandy soil to escape predators or paw after food.  “They’ll latch onto a worm with their sticky tongues and suck him out of the hole,” Sam told me, “just like a kid eatin’ spaghetti.”  Armadillos also eat bugs and lizards and little snakes.

Sam races these critters at county fairs, chili cook-offs, and that sort of thing.  He brings his own portable wooden racing pen, about 12 meters long.  Set a couple of armadillos in there at one end, and the first thing they’ll try to do is dig.  They can’t tunnel through the floor, of course, so Sam gets them off and running.

How?

“Well, you get in there with ‘em and blow on ‘em,” he told me.

“You blow on them?” I replied, amazed.

“Yup.  An armadillo doesn’t look like he has hair on him, but he has coarse hair.  You excite the hair on an armadillo, and he’s gone!”

Armadillo races.  Little doggies.  Boot scootin’ boogies.  Jalepeño chili.   Part of the American West, Texas-style.

***

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

 (These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Festooned.  Festoon is a French word for a wreath or garland, and originally to festoon a room was to hang many of these decorations.  The term has since been broadened to describe lavish interior decorating of all sorts.

Railhead.  The end of a railroad line and often the staging area for the shipment of materiel in war zones or livestock in remote areas.  In the American West, cowboys sometimes had to drive cattle thousands of kilometers to reach a place where they could be loaded onto trains heading for eastern slaughterhouses and markets. 

Rustler.  A livestock thief.

Serape.  A long, colorful shawl traditionally worn by Mexican men.

Tequila.  One of several potent Mexican “mescal” liquors made from the fermented juice of the spiky-looking agave plant.  Legend has it that you’ll find a worm in the highest-quality tequilas, but this is a marketing gimmick by certain brands.

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Our Temple of Radio

Let’s say you’re a longtime, enthusiastic Voice of America listener who has the opportunity to visit the United States, and someone like me, right now, informs you that there’s one place in America where you can find:

There’s even an interstate highway sign pointing drivers to an amazing VOA complex

• the site where VOA transmitters once sent the mightiest signals in international radio history into the heart of occupied Europe and elsewhere during World War II;
• a three-in-one museum that chronicles VOA’s story, the saga of wireless communication going back to Marconi, and local broadcasting history in rich detail;
• a large and beautiful park named for the Voice of America where you can hike, fish in a 14-hectare lake, sled down a long hill, get a match going on one of 24 soccer fields or a cricket pitch, bird-watch in meadow that’s an official wildlife preserve, let your mutt loose in the “Wiggly Field” dog park, and even get married!
• a university learning center that also carries the name of the Voice of America;
• and even a good-sized VOA shopping center, of all things.

You would surely assume that such an immersion experience would be in Washington, surrounding VOA headquarters on Independence Avenue and the National Mall. Or somehow squeezed into downtown New York City, where most VOA programming originated during the war.

Those choices are too obvious, of course. I must be teasing you about the location for a reason.

OK, so where is Cox Road?

Indeed, the place where you’ll find the Voice of America “brand” on dozens of buildings and signs and thousands of lips is nowhere near the nation’s capital or the Big Apple. I can assure you that there isn’t a VOA shopping center, university extension, wildlife preserve, or dog park anywhere near our nondescript Washington headquarters building or the VOA news bureau in congested Manhattan.

To picture their location, take your right hand and make a “V for Victory” sign of the sort for which Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, was famous.

Your fist is the pleasant and prosperous Midwest city of Cincinnati, Ohio. And your two uplifted fingers are busy interstate highways, the index finger heading north toward Dayton, Ohio, and on to Detroit, Michigan; and the middle finger angling northeastward to Ohio’s capital city of Columbus and the Great Lakes port of Cleveland.

Inside the V, what was once the rural township of West Chester has exploded from 39,700 population in 1990 to more than 62,000 today as housing subdivisions, shopping malls, business parks, hospitals, and freeway exit clusters of gas stations, restaurants, and motels have gobbled up almost every clod of dirt.

We’re getting warmer!

Save, that is, for a pretty, 253-hectare (625-acre) oasis 650 kilometers (400 miles) west of Washington where you can get that unparalleled Voice of America “fix.”

Why there?

As announcer Fred Foy intoned on the old Lone Ranger radio show in the 1940s, return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear for the fascinating answer.

Powel Crosley at age 20 or so, before he made his first million

The story begins with a man who, early on, had nothing to do with the Voice of America, or even broadcasting. Now mostly forgotten outside Cincinnati, Powel Crosley, Jr., an inventive industrialist, had his heart set on building inexpensive automobiles but would one day be known as “the Henry Ford of Radio.”

Lots of people drove Crosleys home and grabbed a beer or sandwich from their Crosley refrigerators in the 1940

Crosley had only modest luck making cars, but he – or rather, he and his engineers – did invent the first car radio and push-button radio, and the first auto with disc brakes. And, over in his appliances division, the “Shelvadoor” – the first refrigerator with shelves in the door – the first portable refrigerator, and the first fax machine. It was at his Crosley Field, too, where his Cincinnati Reds baseball team would inaugurate night games “under the lights” in 1935.

Powel Crosley became intrigued with broadcasting when his son asked for a radio set as a “toy.” Revolted by their exorbitant cost, Crosley was soon building radios and their components himself. By 1924, the Crosley Corp. was the world’s largest manufacturer of desk radios and large radio cabinets of the sort you see families gathered around in old photographs.

Crosley the radio man wanted to give people a good reason to buy his product, so he constructed a 20-watt transmitter in his home and began broadcasting to his neighbors.

Within ten years, the entire country would be listening, not through some network but to Crosley’s WLW – “The Nation’s Station” in Cincinnati – which generated its own elaborate programs, including the first “soap opera” using a resident company of actors and musicians. Many of them – singers Doris Day and the Mills Brothers among them – would become American superstars.

Broadcasting on medium wave at 500,000 watts – ten times the power of any other U.S. radio station then and to this day – beginning May 2, 1934 with the throwing of a switch by President Roosevelt in Washington, WLW bounced a signal off the ionosphere from coast to coast and beyond. Rival stations complained bitterly of unfair competition and interference with their signals. And when some of them began haranguing the federal government for equal power to mount their own superstations, Congress in 1939 rid itself of the controversy by capping every station’s power, including WLW’s, at 50,000 watts.

This early informational booklet shows the unusual shape of WLW's 224-meter (735-foot), 200-ton tower that blasted its signal clear across the continent

The WLW megastation’s programs emanated from Crosley’s downtown appliance factory, but its enormous tower – taller than the Washington Monument – sat 40 kilometers away near the little town of Mason, Ohio, in those same farm fields that we mentioned earlier. For good reason. A half-million-watt signal bouncing around downtown buildings would have played havoc with other electronic signals and drowned out every other station in town.

Fast forward to the early days of World War II, when Nazi Germany, too, had developed 62 powerful transmitters, shortwave in this case, pointed across Europe and reaching as far away as South America. German broadcasters poured out propaganda aimed at softening resistance to Nazi aggression and diverting America’s attention. Japan, too, operated 42 long-range transmitters flooding the Asian nations it was in the process of subjugating.

There was no equivalent American response, since the nation was trying mightily to stay clear of war. The signals of only 13 shortwave stations, programming innocuous entertainment, emanated from America’s shores at the time.

Powel Crosley’s WLWO – or WLW Overseas – was one of them. From two towers next to the WLW monster in those corn and alfalfa fields, it beamed orchestra music, comedy shows, crime dramas and “westerns” to Europe and Latin America with 75kw of shortwave power. Following Japan’s bombing of the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941, and America’s immediate declaration of war on Japan and Germany, President Roosevelt summoned titans of industry and pleaded for help in countering Axis psychological warfare. WLWO began beaming German- and Italian-language broadcasts supplied by the Voice of America’s predecessor agency, the Office of War Information, operating out of New York. WLWO broadcasters like Robert Bauer, who had escaped Nazi Germany by an eyelash, gave the Third Reich a dose of its own bluster. Bauer, an Austrian like Adolf Hitler, could mimic the Führer’s speech impeccably. He would give faux rally speeches in which “Hitler” would dissolve into stark-raving lunacy – which, of course, wasn’t far removed from reality. The real madman, in turn, was heard to rail against “those Cincinnati liars.”

WLWO and other American-based shortwave stations also carried the very first words of the new Voice of America in February 1942, when newsman William Harlan Hale said in German from New York, “The news may be bad or the news may be good; we will tell you the truth.”

During a break in the president’s meeting with the moguls, Crosley Corp. Chairman James Shouse called his top engineer in Cincinnati and asked if the company could build 200kw shortwave transmitters with directional antennas that could be aimed at Europe, Africa, and South America.

“I don’t know, but I will sure give it a hell of a try,” replied the engineer.

These are some of the mammoth pillars, sunk far into the ground, that supported VOA’s Bethany towers

And so it was that the U.S. Government purchased a 250-hectare (625-acre) stretch of hillocks, meadows, and alfalfa fields in southwest Ohio, just down the road from Crosley’s WLW transmitter complex. This new “Bethany facility,” named after a local telephone exchange, was ideal because of its location far from coastlines that were viewed, in those anxious days after Pearl Harbor, as vulnerable to Axis attack. Besides, power from companies in Cincinnati and Dayton was readily at hand. (And boy, would Bethany need it. Once the plant was up and operating in September 1944, the Federal Government would pay the electric utility companies almost $900,000 a year for “juice.”)

Needless to say, the Bethany project got “AA-1” priority, obtaining all the glass vacuum tubes, steel, and copper it needed, despite the strict wartime rationing of such materials.

There in bucolic West Chester within a year and a few days, Shouse’s men, including Clyde Haehnle, who is still an active broadcast-engineering consultant and one of the VOA museum’s board members, constructed an impressive building the size of a small city’s airport terminal.

Here’s the Bethany transmitter site and some of the towers that it controlled.

A former board member and the project’s architect, Jim Fearing, calls it a “temple of radio,” Why so fancy for a top-secret installation, off-limits to, if not out of sight of, the public? “Powel Crosley was a showman,” says board member Dave Snyder, the facility’s supervisor in its final days. Crosley thought, perhaps, that he’d be getting control of the building back once the war was over. “You’d go up an impressive set of stairs to what we called ‘the fishbowl,’ from which you would see the whole transmitter concourse,” Snyder added.

Three of the old Crosley transmitters, photographed at the VOA Bethany site in 1968

Inside the handsome edifice, “RF,” or radio-frequency, transmitters converted low-wattage signals incoming on telephone lines into powerful ones, and six 175kw shortwave transmitters – the strongest in history, plus 24 directional shortwave antennas sent programming, ultimately in 52 languages, skipping off the ionosphere to overcome the earth’s curvature to precisely pinpointed target areas abroad.

“These shortwaves are not like those of our standard broadcast band,” an early VOA broadcast informed its audience. “They are the siege guns of radio, the heavy artillery – guns of war that can hurl explosive facts against weapons of lies and confusion, anywhere in the world.”

A Collins transmitter panel, including its signal’s “flow chart”

For those of you who “speak engineering,” I’m told that these manually tuned Crosley transmitters were later replaced by even more powerful, remotely tuned 250kw Collins units.

According to one report, the Crosley engineers had to overcome “horrendous” technical problems in mounting the new transmitter site. “New tubes had to be designed [and built from scratch], 24 high-gain rhombic antennas improved, [and] ‘re-entrant termination’ advanced to keep antennas from simply melting. . . . It was the most sophisticated antennae system ever devised.”

Funny things happened out in the antenna field from time to time. Not always so funny if you were involved, however

John Vodenik, who spent a decade at Bethany and now works in VOA’s Network Control Center at our Washington headquarters, recalls the day when an “electric blue” flame shot from one of the Collins transmitters, melting a hole in the aluminum side panel and setting off a popping sound matched only when various wildlife species would meet their demise atop one of the 300-ohm transmission lines, or when accumulations of ice would create a “light show” of arcs among the wires. The building did not burn down during the blue-flame incident, but the station crew had to take the panel to a local auto-body shop for repairs. Every once in awhile, though, VOA engineers had to call in the local fire department to extinguish flames triggered by lightning strikes in the alfalfa. The government had allowed a farmer to continue planting and plowing right in the antenna field.

The entire complex was surrounded by chain-link fence and closely guarded by military sentries, some of whom slept in the observation tower above the transmitters and control rooms. Guards would remain through the Cold War years, after which engineers could finally allow in curious citizens and passersby for impromptu tours.

You would not have found a single microphone at the Bethany site. It was pragmatism – and paranoia – at work. What if enemy agents were to seize control of transmitters that could be redirected to different parts of the world in ten minutes?

This model of VOA’s Bethany station, sold as part of fundraising for the new National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting, includes a good look at the observation tower

VOA’s Bethany site, like others in California and North Carolina, was considered a “relay station,” passing along, rather than originating, programming from Washington and New York directly to international audiences or to other such stations in North Africa, Pacific Islands, Asian locations, and elsewhere. For a time, Bethany even connected with relay stations aboard destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea.

In 1945 Powel Crosley, still determined to build and market inexpensive automobiles, sold WLW and all other Crosley broadcasting properties, though Crosley engineers continued to operate VOA’s Bethany site until Voice of America personnel took over in 1963.

Early VOA Bethany Station engineers weren't a jeans-and-T-shirt crowd. The dress and attention to detail were professional all the way

Beginning in 1951 during the Cold War, arrays of “curtain antennas,” strung among gigantic steel support towers, were added to Bethany’s broadcast arsenal. These arrays were oriented at different angles facing Europe and parts of Africa. Exactly where could be changed quickly during station breaks while the transmitters were briefly shut off. But to do it, crews of three had to hustle out back in all types of weather and flip a series of handles by hand in a “switching matrix” of telephone poles and wires that still survives. It looks like a small power substation. Switches would freeze so solidly in the dead of winter that engineers had to attach lit propane torches to poles, reach up and melt the ice in order to throw them. Sudden shifts in frequency came often, too, to outfox Soviet engineers who were adroit at jamming shortwave signals.

Down goes one of the Bethany towers. Old-timers had wanted to keep them, but the prevailing view was that even unelectrified, they were a safety hazard, too tempting to daredevil climbers

Operations continued at the Bethany Relay Station six final years after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, hastening the end of the Cold War. With the advent of satellite transmissions, the need for the aging Ohio facility had declined. Pressures on the VOA budget, plus our agency’s steady move away from shortwave broadcasting except in parts of the world where medium wave, FM, and television broadcasting had yet to take hold, hastened Bethany’s death knell. The site was decommissioned in September 1995, and its landmark towers were pulled down soon thereafter.

With the closing of the Bethany station, it was time to tell its story, if succinctly, in a historical marker

There was another factor working against Bethany as well. Its ever-increasing number of neighbors did not find the interference from our powerful transmitters amusing. We can laugh at the stories of a radio signal causing windshield wipers to spontaneously erupt, neighborhood downspouts and one fellow’s entire furnace to throb with music, and a nearby church’s public-address system to break into VOA Spanish in the middle of the minister’s sermon. Nearby bedsprings were a good VOA signal carrier, too. But things got so bad that the local telephone company passed out anti-interference filters; and car and truck manufacturers would run new models up and down Tylersville Road, testing their shielding against the radio behemoth’s signals.

In 2000, shortly after the Bethany site was formally transferred to West Chester Township, Bill Zerkle, the parks and recreation director, was visited by his boss. “We’re getting the VOA property,” he told Zerkle, and as part of the agreement this old transmitter building is to become a museum. “So buddy, you go for it,” Zerkle recalls the superior’s instruction.

The preserved VOA transmitter building and grounds are dwarfed by the rest of the site. They lie at the bottom middle, to the right of the shopping center parcel

Miami University’s “Voice of America Learning Center” has an impressive home

The site was carved into several pieces. Thirty hectares in the southwest corner – thankfully only that corner given the glut of civilization already in the area – was sold to shopping-mall developers for a “Voice of America Centre” shopping plaza. Eight hectares went to Miami University, one of Ohio’s state universities, for a learning center. Once built in a halls-of-ivy-style columned structure complete with classrooms and meeting spaces, it began serving 21st century-style “swirling students.” These are often working adults with what the VOA Learning Center’s Rod Nimtz calls “fluid student experiences” who are compiling college credits evenings or weekends and adding them to those earned years earlier and elsewhere.

In addition to lovely natural features like this fishing lake, the VOA Park will one day add a performance amphitheater, whose crowds may be ripe customers for the VOA museum

The county’s “metroparks” system got 80 hectares as a nature preserve, a recreational site – including a sledding hill that attracts snow-lovers from three states – and a lodge for receptions, dances, and those weddings that I alluded to earlier.

The little piece that remained of the project, including the transmitter building, was left to the township for that unspecified museum.

Zerkle, who left the parks department to become president and CEO of the National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting in 2007, set up shop in the deserted, unheated building. It had been toasty warm in the days when its transmitters, full of large and red-hot tubes, were, in architect Fearing’s words, “sucking up 3 million watts” of power; so hot were the tubes that some transmitter components had to be cooled in vats called “water jackets,” whose rising steam heated the building. Now Zerkle was spending his winters in sweater, coat, and hat, surrounded by little space heaters. He and volunteers from a group called the Veterans’ Voice of America Fund, later renamed The National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting Fund, began money-raising, and in 2008 they secured enough funds to create the museum master plan.

The “National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting” will one day, perhaps soon, incorporate four “visitor experiences,” two of which are already in place:

Just a few of the items, some of them now truly priceless, at the Gray’s Wireless Museum portion of the building

• Gray’s History of Wireless Museum, which had previously resided in the hallways of Cincinnati’s public television station. One of the largest assemblages of antique radio and telegraphy equipment in the country, the collection is named for Jack Gray, a onetime Marconi Co. shipboard wireless operator and Bethany Station engineer who began displaying artifacts in his garage.

Some of the displays at the Greater Cincinnati and Ohio Museum of Broadcasting wing of the building, such as this children’s-show exhibit, are lighthearted

• and the Greater Cincinnati and Ohio Museum of Broadcasting, put together by Cincinnati broadcaster Mike Martini, whose nonprofit Media Heritage organization has gathered thousands of oral histories, photographs, radio scripts, early radio shows, and the private memorabilia of area broadcast pioneers. Some of this material had literally been rescued from trash bins after a previous broadcast museum was closed and “mothballed.”

A third component, now under construction, is a reincarnated working amateur, or “ham” radio station, WC8VOA, whose operations will be fully visible to visitors. Technicians had run the amateur station on the premises during the Bethany station’s operating lifetime.

A restored control room console

The fourth and key ingredient, of course, is the building itself – with all of its control rooms, giant transmitters, and switching equipment, augmented by recorded stories of VOA employees and those behind the Axis, Iron, and Bamboo curtains who received transmissions from Bethany. From the moment the gates to the property were thrown open after the feds left town, international visitors have shown up unannounced, knocked on the door, and asked when the museum would open. Some then told riveting, even heroic tales of surreptitiously listening to VOA’s words of truth and hope in occupied lands.

The pièce de résistance will be a Grand Concourse and a VOA Gallery. The former will feature an overhead oval screen so that the story of "America's Voice" can be dramatized using a 360-degree multi-media presentation. Actors will also portray VOA notables and broadcasters. The interactive VOA Gallery will use artifacts, hands-on displays, and a large-scale model of the Bethany Station to focus on the station’s role in World War II and the Cold War.

The museum will also offer a gift shop, a grand tour of the restored VOA transmitter facilities and control room from half a century ago, and, outside, such experiences as walks along paths carefully sited along the azimuths of the Bethany antennas’ signals. Maybe even the restrooms will be part of the tour. “There were two,” Gray’s Museum Secretary-Treasurer Bob Sands notes. “One for employees and one for gentlemen”!

Visitors are sure to find the site’s switching matrix fascinating

Earlier this summer, West Chester Township commissioners agreed with the museum’s board that the VOA Bethany site, properly promoted as a companion tourist attraction to the nearby King’s Island amusement park and a museum complex inside Cincinnati’s ornate downtown train terminal, could draw 30,000 or more visitors annually. They allocated $1.4 million to fix the Bethany building’s crumbling glazed-block exterior, replace every door and window, and install floodlights and ramps for disabled visitors. The move gave the museum board confidence that the search for the estimated $14 million needed to complete a world-class museum will bear fruit.

The degree to which the federal government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), VOA’s parent agency in Washington, will support the VOA Museum in Ohio with funds, artifacts, or special permission to present VOA programming has yet to be determined.

Distant shortwave listeners who record the time, date, frequency, and nature of a program that they hear and send in the information get a confirming, souvenir QSL card, like this one from the Bethany site, in return

“At its core the story here is not about technology,” Bill Zerkle told me, with considerable passion. “It’s not even about radio or the old days. It’s about a strategy for spreading freedom and democracy that is so simple – to just tell the truth.

“What these people here did was to pull together the inventions that evolved from Marconi and create state-of-the-art technology that enabled professional VOA media people to tell the truth about this great country. It’s a story they believed in – still believe in – and one that resonates with the people of this area.”

This is a conception of a gallery to be incorporated into the new VOA Museum. It will focus on the site’s role in World War II and the run-up to the Cold War and include a model of the Bethany Relay Station site

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Bucolic. Rustic, pastoral, countrified.

Soap opera. A serialized radio, and later television, romantic drama, aimed at a female audience and frequently sponsored by the makers of soap powders.

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