A Visit to WSM

In late February and early March, 2002, your intrepid editors took a well-earned escape from the dreary northeastern winter to visit three of the southeast's most important cities: Atlanta, Birmingham, and Nashville. The highlight of our trip was a visit to the Brentwood, Tenn., transmitter site of WSM, where chief engineer Watt Hairston graciously gave several hours of his time to show us around the site and the fantastic collection of historic documents filed there. The photos shown here document only a fraction of what we saw and learned about WSM.

One thing we had already known when we decided to come on this trip was that WSM is not only home to one of the three surviving original Blaw-Knox diamond-shaped towers, but it is in fact the tallest such tower ever built. (Incredibly, at WSM we saw plans for a proposed 1,200-foot tower of this design -- but it was never built.) The other remaining Blaw-Knox diamonds are located at WLW in Cincinnati (which was built by the samw crew as built WSM's), at WBNS in Columbus, and at WFEA in Manchester. WBT in Charlotte had three of them, but they were severely damaged in a hurricane some years ago, and the towers currently on the site -- although built to the same design -- are not the original construction.

We went directly to WSM on our arrival at Nashville airport. After we left Brentwood, we headed directly down the road to Chattanooga to spend the night and see what towers that small southern city had to offer. We would return to Nashville a few days later.