99% Invisible - 324- Billboard Boys: The Greatest Radio Contest of All Time

Episode Date: September 19, 2018

The year was 1982, and in the small city of Allentown on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania sat an AM radio station called WSAN. For years, it had broadcast country music to the surrounding Lehigh Valley -- an area known for malls, manufacturing and Mack Trucks. WSAN was about to undergo a complete identity change, from a country station and to a "nostalgia" station -- meaning Big Band, and soft hits from the 1950’s. They wanted a gimmick to hook new listeners, so WSAN decided to launch a good old-fashioned endurance contest, reminiscent of the pole sitting stunts or dance marathons popular in the 1920’s. They secured a local sponsor, Love Homes, to donate a prize: a single-wide modular home worth $18,000. It seemed like a simple marketing strategy, but WSAN had grossly underestimated just how much people would endure for a little economic security. Billboard Boys: The Greatest Radio Contest of All Time

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The year was 1982, and on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania, in the small city of Allentown, sat an AM radio station called WSAN. For years it had broadcast country music to the surrounding Lehigh Valley, an area known for malls, manufacturing, and Mac trucks, but the station was about to undergo a complete identity change. Well WSAN was coming off being a country station and becoming an nostalgia station. This is Ned Teeter. He was a DJ at WSAN at the time. And he says that as the station transitioned to nostalgia, meaning big band and soft hits from the 50s,

they wanted a gimmick to hook new listeners, something to lure people to the sweet sounds of the Andrew Sisters and Perry Como. So you had FM radio stations playing music with really nice fidelity. And then you had us playing music. So you had to be a little bit different. So, you know, they're shutting up and playing the hits. We're injecting something different into our air sound in this contest. Well, that was a little different.

A contest. WSAN decided it would launch a good old fashioned endurance contest, reminiscent of the pole-sitting stunts and dance marathons popular in the 1920s. The station secured a local sponsor called Love Homes to donate a prize, a single-wide modular home worth $18,000. And then they devised the scheme. WSAN had a billboard in Lehigh Valley advertising

the new Nistalgia Music format. They would get three contestants to ascend a 30-foot ladder to the billboard platform. And whoever stayed on that platform the longest would walk away with the new home. WSAN called it, that you'll love to live with us contest. It began in September of last year when radio station WSAN challenged their Lehigh Valley listeners to see who could stay the longest on a tiny shelf 30 feet above a highway intersection.

It was supposed to be a way to get people to know we had changed our format, look at our billboard, and give away a modular home for a sponsor. That's what this was supposed to be. It's not what it was. WSAN had grossly underestimated just how much people would endure for a little economic security. I don't know if this law of attraction or what, but I mean, in the weeks leading up to the contest, people were asking me, oh, you're out of the army.

You've been away. What are you going to do? I said, I'm going to be in this contest. This was before they even drew my name. This is Dalton Young, one of the three contestants that would eventually be chosen by WSAN. He was 22 years old at the time. He just been discharged from the army the month before. And he thought that sitting on a billboard above a highway sounded like as good an option

as any. Yeah, I mean, the economy was really not good at that time. Unemployment was outrageous. Dalton was so dead set on competing that he turned in a thousand entries. He'd carefully read the submission rules and realized that there was no specified limit to the number of times a person could submit. And it turned out he wasn't the only one who'd read the fine print and had a lot of time on their hands. Here's Ron Kisler with his wife Sue.

Something to do. Ron's not the chattyest person in the world, but what he lacked in conversation he made up for with determination. When he heard about the contest, he and Sue hand delivered over 4,000 entries directly to the WSAN station. I think we were trying for 4,000 when we added up and came up to 4,000 and 4, so that's what we send in. Ron and Sue had been dating for a year before the contest, and they were looking to move in together. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to get a place of their own.

I thought it was a quick and easy way to get a house. The last of the contestants was Mike McKay. He died in 2006. Back in the early 1980s, he was the only one of the three contestants who was married, and he was the only one who had a job. But even still, he couldn't afford to buy a home. McKay sent in an astronomical 47,000 entries to WSAN. He used a rubber stamp with the phrase, I need a home, and then cut out and signed every piece of paper. He submitted so many times the first 10 entries pulled by the selection team were his.

Yeah, my first impression of Mike was that he was kind of a winback, you know, kind of a full of bluster. Again, Dalton Young. But, you know, if you could get past all the bluster, you know, just had a big heart, you know, it's just a really nice guy, I think. Between the three of them, Dalton, Ron, and Mike submitted 52,000 four entries, and this sounds like a lot until you consider just how many total entries there were. The station received over half a million submissions. We had like Miracle on 34th Street, right? These bags of postcards on the conference table just piled up high.

There was a reason they were getting so many entries. Around the time the competition launched, the country was slogging through the worst recession it had seen in over 40 years. The recession began in 1981 when the Fed raised interest rates to try to fight rising inflation. It then dragged on all the way through 1982. Companies cut their spending to try to cope, and hundreds of steel facilities and manufacturing plants closed, including some in the Lehigh Valley. Places like Allentown, where WSAM was located, were hit particularly hard.

You gotta remember that this is ground- the rust belt, blue collar town. Steel's gone, Mac Trucks is threatened to leave, Champion Spark plugs is closed. The National Unemployment Rate was the highest since the Great Depression. An interest rate skyrocketed to 20% in 1982. If you were a blue collar worker and didn't already own a house at this time, it would be incredibly tough to get one. To many people, the idea of spending a little time on a billboard for a chance to win a home must have seemed like a pretty good deal.

People were looking for better times, better days. And that was a big part of this. This is kind of like a rust belt fairy tale. The contest officially started on September 20th, 1982. Dalton Young, Ron Kisler, and Mike McKay ascended the billboard to begin their stay. Towering behind them was an advertisement for the station, reading unforgettable 1470 WSAN. Here's Dalton again. Yeah, it was raining that day.

I remember it was kind of drizzly and crappy, a little bit damp and cold. And, you know, there was traffic blown by raining that day. I remember it was kind of drizzly and crappy, a little bit damp and cold. And, you know, it was traffic blown by throughout the day. Plains flying right overhead because it was right near the Lehigh Valley Airport. This was supposed to be a VELA 30 day event. This is Gene Wurley, another DJ at WSAN, and one of the contest organizers. Well, the name officially is Gene Wurley,

but almost everybody around here would call me early Whirly, and came from doing the morning shows. Whirly said that besides some local coverage when the guys went up, there wasn't that much fanfare around the contest in the beginning. Even though WSAN had launched the contest as a kind of promotion, they didn't do the best job of promoting it

with other media outlets. It was going on, people just weren't made aware of it. There wasn't mention on the other radio stations that they might have listened to. There weren't articles in the newspaper. There wasn't anything on the TV news that they watched. The accommodations on the Billboard were pretty bare bones. Each guy had a small tent, a radio, a landline telephone, and a chemical toilet, which is kind of like a tiny portapoddy.

It was almost like camping, only you were 30 feet in the air, surrounded by freeway traffic, and trapped on a billboard. We made the guys comfortable, we didn't torture them, we had your tents, you had everything going on in there. The billboard platform itself was about eight feet by 48 feet, and it had been divided into three equal sections by waist-high partitions. The organizers at WSAN wanted the contest to last long enough to draw some attention, but not forever.

They figured that by discouraging interaction between the contestants, they might keep the whole thing to a reasonable length. Yeah, we didn't talk at all for, you know, I don't even know we said hi to each other. But even if the guys weren't encouraged to interact with each other, they still had plenty of people to keep them company, from a distance. The contest required that the guys have their own support team to deliver food and to handle cleanup. Each contestant had a pulley system so they could raise or lower supplies in buckets or

on trays. Dalton's friends and families stopped by all the time to chat from below, Mike had his wife, and Ron's parents made sure he got everything he needed, and got rid of the things he didn't. Here's Sue Kisler. Well, his parents did a lot too, as far as bringing food. His dad was in charge of emptying the port of John. That was his job.

Sue and Ron were dating at the time, and Sue visited Ron every day except one when he was up on the billboard. Strangely enough, the contest might have even made their relationship stronger. Well, that's all we could do was talk, so we got to know each other a lot better in that time, because we talked every day and on the phone or with me at the bottom of the billboard. Aside from the essentials, each contestant was allowed to bring a non-essential item with them.

Mike McKay brought a guitar which he learned to play up there. Ron Kisler brought a copy of American Rifleman magazine. And Dalton. Yeah, I had some numb jokes up there. In fact, I think I got them as a gift for my birthday, maybe it was. As you can imagine, there was little room to do anything, and even less when Dalton had his numb jucks out. But there wasn't much to do, period.

Here's Ron Kisler on his daily schedule. Um, you know, wake up, have something for breakfast. This is the radio, hang out, have have something for supper and what's traffic? The routine was mind-numbing. Days quietly crept by, then months, September. Oh, wake up, I have something for breakfast. October. What's traffic?

November. This is the radio. But if they were listening to the radio in November, they might have heard a new song. One that would help transform their sleepy lives up on the billboard into something much bigger But if they were listening to the radio in November, they might have heard a new song, one that would help transform their sleepy lives up on the Billboard into something much bigger and stranger. The song was by Billy Joel.

And November of 1982, the song Allentown started climbing the Billboard charts, and it happened to be about the very town where WSAN was located. The song painted a vivid portrait of the economic hardship working class families were going through at the time. He was talking about companies like Bethlehem Steel and the Lehigh Valley, shutting its doors and eliminating nearly 10,000 jobs. Because of the song, the city of Allentown became a kind of stand-in for all the suffering rust belt towns in the Northeast and Midwest. Here's Dalton Young again.

I think he was talking about the economy, and it just happened that this contest was going on, and it wasn't stated that this contest is because the economy is so bad and we're going to try to give somebody a home that might not otherwise have one. But yeah, they both seem to work together really well. People started paying attention to Allentown and the contest. 81 days on the billboard from Mike McCay, Daphan Young and Ron Pistley in our WSAN, the 11 times you're left to live with this contest and so on. They're hanging in there. Pretty good.

And as this media coverage expanded, stories about the contest started to hit national newspapers. On December 9, 1982, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the response was immediate. The phones were ringing constantly all the lines. Here's Gene Early-Wirly, the WSA in DJ. And I have no idea what they're saying, except they're talking about people on a billboard. So by the time we got off the air, some information was gathered that said the Wall Street Journal

did a front page article on the billboard. Suddenly this little AM radio station which only had about a 50 mile range was peaking a lot of interest. Allentown, Pennsylvania has been receiving international publicity, no kidding from all over the world. You know, before social media and really even before the internet, some stories just did that and you didn't even really know how. This is Betsy Morris, the staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal who wrote that article.

Morris didn't expect the story to catch on like it did. Because of her story, Dalton, Ron, and Mike were fielding questions from people magazine, Rolling Stone, and Phil Donhue about their extended stay on the billboard. Dalton even remembers getting calls from Japan, New Zealand, and, on the landlines that they had up on the board. A French magazine ran a story in France about the contest, and for whatever reason, they put each of our phone numbers in the article. So all of a sudden, we're getting 150 calls a day from French people. You have no idea when you're writing stories stories which ones are going to hit a nerve.

I mean, it was interesting to look back and see all those, all that paparazzi outside the billboard later. But looking back, Betsy Morris understood why this particular story resonated. Then President Ronald Reagan had referred to America as the shining city upon a hill. But life was so hard in that shining city that three men had confined themselves to a billboard for months, all for a chance to win a home. There was something dystopian about it. I mean, the American dream was really shaky at that point. And while the guys in the billboard never said they felt exploited by the radio station, an air of desperation

did begin to seep into the contest as the months went by. How long do you think you'll be here? Well, maybe two years. I don't know. Depending on that, mostly. Sorry, I run that by again. I'd say probably two years. Maybe a year and nine months, a year and eight months,

come down for summer of 84, some of the summer person. They asked us how long we would stay up there, and I said, I don't know, two or three years, then I really meant it. I wasn't just provato, but I figured, okay, in order to save enough to get an $18,000 home, what would I be willing to invest in time, and I fought two to three years?

When December and January arrived, it started getting colder. The lowest recorded temperature was zero degrees Fahrenheit, so the guys were giving portable heaters to keep them from dying. A huge no-storm shut down the entire city, but it didn't stop the contest. According to Dalton, it was a welcome change of pace.

For me, it was a piece of cake. For know, for that, whatever, 24 hours or however long, 48 hours, the late Doug, everything out, it was, it was peaceful. You know, it was just so quiet and so peaceful. It was great. Actually, given everything the guys were going through, the isolation, the weather, the boredom, they were holding up surprisingly well. Here's an interview with Ron around the same time. The temperature has dropped to zero, most snow 24 inches. You must be talking to yourselves,

but how are you doing psychologically? Oh, I'm fine. You know. Okay. Don't Ron and Mike all made it through the winter and lasted into the spring. At this point, they'd spent Thanksgiving, Christmas,

New Years, and Valentine's Day away from their families, and still nobody intended to come down. And then finally, in March of 1983, after six months of basically nothing happening, something happened. It was one morning there was a guy out talking to Ron and Mike. A stranger that Dalton hadn't seen before was down below the billboard chatting with the guys.

He casually struck up a conversation with Dalton telling him that he was also a veteran. And we were talking about our experiences in the military and some of the partying we had done. At some point, I asked me if I got high and I thought at that point, we had some sort of a bond, yeah sure, I get high. I mean, he was on a billboard for six months. He asked me if I could get him some and I said, well, I gotta have a little like it part with.

So he stuck it in a cigarette pack and dropped it down to him. Dalton lowered down two joints and the stranger thanked him with a $20 bill. But I said, look man, really, just take it. He's an annoyanceist, I'm a cyst. And I thought, well, I don't, you know, 20 bucks, 20 bucks, I'm not gonna turn it down, you know? him with a $20 bill. I get a phone call early in the morning probably before 5 o'clock. This is Mike Chrysah, executive director of the HGF group, the company that was funding

the contest. He remembers getting a call from a contest organizer saying, you're going to have a good time telling the boss this one. Dalton got busted for drugs. I says, what? I says, how can it be selling drugs from, you know, 2030 feet up on a billboard? Apparently the stranger who'd solicited the pot from Dalton had been an undercover police officer because Dalton accepted that $20.

He was arrested on drug charges. It made the front page of the, uh, the Philadelphia inquire and I think the same day that the Reagan announced his missile defense system. So there's Reagan's missile defense system, and there's a Dalton being busted on the front page. Dalton was knocked out of the competition on day 184. I'm probably the only person in history to be arrested, so I'm part from a billboard.

And yes, there were plenty of rumors that Dalton had been set up. Maybe one of the other guys reported him to the police, or maybe one of the contest sponsors wanted to speed along the end of the contest. None of this was actually proven, but you gotta admit, it's really, really fishy. Ron and Mike both descended from the billboard to testify in court. They had breakfast, a quick shower, and then went right back up on the billboard to finish out the contest. But after Dalton's arrest, the competition felt different. Here's Ned Teter again, one of the WSAM DJs.

We have this contest and these people are becoming every man here. And it's a great story. It's heartwarming. And then over two joints of marijuana, Dalton gets pulled off the boat. And I think that's when things changed. I think that's when things went from how is this thing going to end to... how are we going to end this thing?

By this point, the competition had become a huge annoyance for town officials. The town commissioner even described the contest as a hymnoid and wanted it stopped. Officials here at Town Hall, equally disillusioned with the contest, have contemplated sending the housing inspector to evict the contestants. The billboard has no plumbing or smoke alarms, and the town's already sent them bills for residency tax, listing the billboard address. But Ron Kisler and Mike McKay had dug their heels in deep. Neither would come down unless they were coming down to a new home.

The station had received more publicity than it ever needed, and at this point it had become a burden. WSAN had the attention of the world, but nothing to say. We were radio guys, not PR guys, not marketing mavens, not really not on an international or national level. Ron and Mike lasted two months beyond Dalton's drug bust before WSAN caved and realized that enough was enough. When it became obvious neither man would quit and both threatened to stay forever if necessary,

the station declared the contest a draw and lured the men down by offering duplicate prizes for each. They had captured the attention of the region when they came down today. On June 7, 1983, Ron and Mike both stepped down off their respective ladders at the same time. They'd been up on the billboard for 261 days, nearly 9 months. And in that entire time, they had taken only one shower. The station had received some criticism around the contest. People had accused them of exploiting the guys. So WSAN actually upped the prizes to try to repair some of the damage done to their reputation.

Ron and Mike both walked away with a modular home, a Chevy Chavette, and a free vacation. This wasn't supposed to be this. It wasn't supposed to be this big international global, almost year-long thing. The men reacted very differently in their post-contest lives. Mike tried to recreate the fame he'd had when he was up on the board. That never really happened, but when he died in 2006, his obituary still referred to him by his preferred nickname, Billboard Mike. He was the guy that you would say, this was my high water mark, this defined me.

I think that Mike McKay was the one that loved it the most. He loved being Billboard Mike. At least he made off better than Dalton. I got six months probation and a $100 fine. Of course I do have a felony. So. Ron Kisler's quiet determination, on the other hand, probably got him the closest to that rust belt fairy tale

ending. He and Sue married shortly after the contest ended. They lived happily in their two bedroom modular home for 20 years, raised a daughter in it, and moved on with their lives. At the end of the day, you've got three guys that did something crazy to try and just get a little bit ahead of the world.

I mean, you remember, these guys weren't looking for a mansion or a jet plane, they're just looking for a start. ["Petka's A Very Special Thanks to Pat Taggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's A Very Special Thanks to Pat Taggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's A Very Special Thanks to Pat Taggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's A Very Special Thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's A Very Special Thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's A Very Special Thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's A Very Special Thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's A Very Special Thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's A Very Special thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's A Very Special thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's A Very Special thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's a very special thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's a very special thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's a very special thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's a very special thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's a very special thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's a very special thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's a very special thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." ["Petka's a very special thanks to Pataggerd and Frank Petka." [" episode was adapted from their fantastic feature length documentary, Billboard Boys. It's available right now on Amazon in iTunes. What happens when you take away all the billboards? They did it in a city in Brazil. We'll talk about that after this. In Allentown, a single billboard became a much bigger sign of the times, which started as a simple radio promotion ended up shedding light on a larger economic and housing crisis. Decades later, something similar would happen in Sao Paulo, Brazil, but this time it was about the removal of billboards that revealed a bigger story, which

Colestead is here to talk to us about. So in the early 2000s, São Paulo was just littered with advertisements, including around 15,000 billboards. And as this visual pollution got worse, people became increasingly frustrated, you know, at private companies being allowed to basically brand public space. So the mayor comes along and proposes a clean city law to get rid of all kinds of ads. Business signs, posters, bus ads, taxi ads, you made it, it all had to go.

Even handing out marketing flyers on the street would be illegal. That's so extreme. Businesses must not have been happy about that at all. Yeah, they really weren't. I mean, this was a city full of ads, and suddenly, they would be none. But this proposed law had a ton of public support, and predictably, business leaders fought back. Corporate lobbyists argued that it would be bad for the economy and would compromise real estate

values. They also tried to scare people with the idea that public tax money would be needed to remove all the supporting infrastructure, you know, like the polls and the scaffolding around these billboards. There is even an argument that commercial graphics were useful as wayfinding devices, you know, helping people navigate the city. Plus, at night, fewer lit-up signs would make the city less safe and so on and so forth. So I guess some of those arguments make some sense, but they all seem to be rooted primarily in self-interest. Absolutely. OK.

And in the end, the business advocates lost. The law passed, and businesses were given 90 days to comply or to start paying fines. And so the ads started going down, and suddenly the city did look different. And sure, some old architecture was uncovered, which was nice, but pulling down all those ads also revealed some other hidden aspects of the city. And so what kind of things are we talking about here? So stripping away huge billboards alongside

major roads, for instance, ended up exposing favelles, entire shantytown neighborhoods that had been visually fenced off by ads. And then on the sides of factories, where there were these billboards covering up windows, removing them actually revealed immigrants living where they worked. Essentially, they weren't being paid enough to afford rent. And the absence of ads in general, right, like sort of the decolorization of the city,

put a lot of focus on crumbling infrastructure, right? Suddenly, it kind of thrusts that into the spotlight. So what about all those concerns from business leaders about people not being able to wayfind or being too dark at night? I mean, not too surprisingly. A lot of those were a bit overblown. And it turns out that, yes, people can still find their way around cities without ads. And a lot of building owners ended up repainting their facades. So, a lot of structures ended up looking better and more distinctive anyway.

So this all started like a decade ago. Is South Paulo still totally ad-free today? Well, some ads have actually been allowed back up, but it's all much more controlled than it used to be. There's this new awareness about how things look and how useful they are. So for example, there are these interactive search engine ads at bus shelters that let riders look up the weather where they're going. And part of the deal is

that marketers have to actually take care of those bus shelters. So it's kind of like an adopt a highway program. You can put a little ad as long as you provide something good for the community. Yeah, yeah, it's like adopt a highway program with a, you know, a sort of technology twist. And I was actually just reading about something else that the current mayor proposed last year. His idea is to reintroduce exactly 32 billboards, each one for one of the 32 main bridges that run around the city. And the idea there is that marketers can advertise on these only if they agree to maintain that

bridge that, you know, each billboard is associated with. Like the bus shelters, they have to use some of the digital display space to actually show useful stuff, like traffic updates and the time and the weather. That's very cool. It's remarkable to see how a city goes about selectively reintroducing advertising once they start with a clean slate. Yeah, and it's something that, you know, most cities just aren't bold enough to do. Like, they just never, never get a chance to do that, right?

Yeah. And so when you do, you want to be deliberate. You want to make sure it's for the public good. Yeah, it's a really great experiment to sort of watch unfold. That's so cool. And we have some pictures of these on the website. Oh, yeah. The before and after shots are really quite stunning.

Cool. We'll check it out at 999PI.org. Thanks, Kurt. [♪ Music playing in background, playing inereef Yusuf, Music by Sean Rial." Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstead, is the digital director. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. The rest of the team is Avery Choffman, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Terran Mazza, and me Roman Mars.

Special thanks again to the Billboard Boys team who are just delightful to work with. Their movie is so fun to watch. Billboard Boys is available on Amazon and iTunes. Additional info is available at BillboardBoys.com. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI Orc. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But we have pictures of AdFilled and AdFree, so I'll follow. At 99PI.org. Radio Topeo from PRX.