The station associated with these towers has been through more incarnations than any other in Worcester (and perhaps in Massachusetts). It went on the air in October, 1926, as WAGS, a five-watter on 1200 licensed to Somerville, a Boston suburb. It would later become WLEX, licensed to Lexington (of Revolutionary War fame), and eventually settled on a frequency of 1410 kHz. As WAAB, the station made the move to Boston under Shepard Stores ownership, took the NARBA frequency shift to 1440 kHz, and then in the aftermath of the duopoly rule moved out here to Worcester. It spent a few more decades as WAAB, spawning FM sister WAAF along the way, later had some brief success as Top-40 WFTQ ("14Q") with such luminaries as Donna Halper, Don Kelley, and Steve Leveille, and finally came to a crashing halt in 1991.
The station was LMA'ed to WEEI (590 Boston) to extend WEEI's sports-talk format to Worcester under the callsign WVEI, and followed WEEI's programming when it moved to 850. After a brief stint with local sports programming as WWTM ("Worcester's Team"), 1440 was sold (along with sister WAAF) to Entercom, and returned to the WEEI simulcast. (As with WEEI's Rhode Island outlet, another station in the market owns Red Sox rights, so the simulcast is not full-time.)
Copyright 2004, Garrett Wollman. All rights reserved. Photograph taken 2004-08-07.