The photos below came from former WAKY Chief Engineer Bob Newberry who writes:

"I was Chief Engineer at WAKY for a couple of years between October 1979 and October 1981. I replaced John Timm who was Chief at the time. He had just ordered the new stand-up studio furniture and Auditronics console for the showcase studio up front. I received the enjoyment of installing it all. I also had to teach the Duke how it all worked and boy that wasn’t easy. The loud color stripes were painted down the hall while I was there but they weren’t my idea.

"I remember John Timm had a some kind of buzzer and light hooked up to come on when the jocks consistently ran the board in the red. Boy did the jocks hate that. That building was so long it seemed like a mile cable run from the front to the back where the STL racks were.

"There used to be a department store of some kind in that building. It had very high ceilings. When you got above the false ceiling of the radio station there were catwalks and room to stand up. All the original façade of the department store was still there. An inquisitive person could silently join any meeting just by standing over the office of their choice. Then there was that big wide open basement -- If those walls could talk!

"Jerry Shea was my most capable assistant. Mike McVay then Bob Moody were the programmers and George Francis then Alan Gantman were my General Managers.

"I was there when Multimedia bought WVEZ. At the time their studios were at the transmitter site on Floyd’s Knob. Jerry and I built a new studio, production room and rack room at the back of the building. We installed brand new transmitters for WVEZ (Harris FM-20K) and WAKY (Harris MW-5). I was the one who had the newer sign installed up front and had the logos painted on the rear of the building. I was a much younger lad back then but I really did enjoy the Schulke Radio Productions format on WVEZ. I was sent to SRP in New Jersey to sit at the feet of the masters, Jim Schulke, Phil Stout and Irv Joel to learn how to finesse great sound from the Beautiful Music format.

"I wish I still had that MacKenzie loop tape repeater. It had the WAKY shout on it, the same audio on your home page. It would get stuck sometimes and Bill Bailey would start hollering on the air for somebody to 'come in here and stop this crazy thing!!!' The ITC triple decker proved more reliable and won out and the shout was transferred to cart.

"When I got there it was only a couple of weeks before the new furniture and board arrived so I don’t remember the old stuff that well. I remember we of course wanted to stay in the same raised control room up front so we rebuilt in place while we ran a couple of days or so from one of the production rooms. The MacKenzie was in the bottom of one of the three racks in the wall where the transmitter remote control and some other stuff was.

"What I remember most about it was there was no more inputs on the Gates console they were using, so the McKenzie was actually attached to the program bus of the board. There was no way of shutting the audio off if it ever got stuck, and get stuck it did. The MacKenzie recued the tape to the beginning with a piece of aluminum foil just like an 8-track from a car. It held the tape in little metal cartridges and the shout was the only one left when it got pulled."