POWERGRAMS

13 Early WSY logo featured Vulcan, in a nod to Birmingham. "It has been the constant aim of those in charge of the station to make it yield the greatest amount of good to industry, agriculture, commerce and, in a word, to the State of Alabama and its people," stated an article about WSY in the March 1923 Powergrams. Just a few weeks earlier, the station moved to a bigger studio in the radio department on the top floor of the Loveman, Joseph & Loeb Department Store. The move allowed the station to install a more powerful antenna, strung across two towers on the store's roof. One of WSY's most popular offerings was religious programming on Sundays, provided by five of Birmingham's most prominent churches. The station ran cables to microphones installed on the pulpits of Highlands Methodist Church, First Baptist Church, Independent Presbyterian Church, Southside Baptist Church and First Methodist Church. Morning and evening services from one of the five churches were broadcast live every week, and the feature "is by far the most popular with listeners, as is attested by hundreds of letters received from one end of the country to the other," according to a 1923 article in Manufacturers Record, a national business publication. "One elderly, retired gentleman who has lived most of his life in the very shadow of a church, confessed that his radiophone had brought him to worship, or rather had brought worship to him, for the first time in forty years," wrote Manufacturers Record correspondent Richard M. Johnson. In another letter to the station, a farmer in rural north Alabama expressed "overwhelming gratitude" on behalf of his ailing and deeply religious 72-year-old mother, who had been confined to her bed for four years. Unable to attend church, she listened avidly to WSY every Sunday to hear "both morning and evening services of a great city church and her happiness in confinement knows no bounds." In February 1923, a massive ice storm struck the region, cutting off telephone communications and pulling down lines that supplied area newspapers with reports from the wire services, and vice versa. Filling the gap, WSY broadcasters stayed on the air to share reports from Associated Press and United Press International correspondents in ice-locked Birmingham back to their respective wire service offices. The station broadcast pleas from the public for help, and messages from Birmingham-area families trying to contact distant relatives to let them know they were OK. Among the programs that generated the most correspondence to the station was a performance on Feb. 26, 1923, of a quartet from Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University. Bands and musicians from throughout Alabama traveled to play for the WSY audience as their music was transmitted over equipment designed and built by Alabama Power engineers.

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