After a year of frenzied construction, northeast Florida’s WAPE-AM passed its FCC inspection and was ready to rock ’n’ roll. WAPE blogger David Israel reported that in the early afternoon of Thursday, October 23, 1958, “a bespectacled Ted Jones stepped up to the microphone and read the sign-on announcement for the first time. The massive 16-inch platter on one of the turntables spun as Ted slip-cued a 45-rpm record of Floyd Cramer’s ‘Flip, Flop, and Bop.’ Ted’s first patter included the declaration that ‘he was there to make the day for all the ‘Sugga-Boogas’ in the world and especially to ‘my girl Shirl,'” said Israel, adding that nobody ever talked faster or more enthusiastically than Jones.
The Big APE claimed to cover, without much exaggeration, “From the capitol to the coast, from Washington, D.C., to Key West, Florida!” When the Big APE Call was first broadcast from the 25-foot long “Mighty Brennen” transmitter, it was received not just on radios but virtually everywhere in Clay County, according to a local woman. “Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis could be heard on every telephone and barbed-wire fence in Clay County. Cattle stampeded through vegetable gardens, and dairy cows quit giving milk.” Bill Brennan made some adjustments, “and milk production and everything else settled back to normal for a while,” she noted. John Ferree, who went by the name of “Honest John” when he was a WAPE disc jockey from 1967–1972, recalls that “one thing I most remember vividly about the transmitter was that you could stand in front of it holding a four-foot fluorescent tube in your hands and the thing would light up, and the light would dance with the music! Made a wonderful impression on visiting family and friends.”
The stated reason for the swimming pool was to cool the transmitter, but in truth, that was accomplished by a cooling tower and pond. The swimming pool had other value. “[When] the weekends came, a bevy of girls in two-piece bathing suits began cavorting in the pool and prancing around for the benefit of those disc jockeys and anyone driving past. For a while, there—real or imagined—Clay County was really hopping, and WAPE was the main attraction for young people. An outsider would have thought that Hugh Hefner had built a Playboy mansion annex on US 17,” said a neighbor.
So imposing was The Big APE that Time magazine published a feature story.”The day begins at 5:30 a.m. with the recorded mating call of a bull ape. After that, for 14 hours, Florida radio listeners within range of Jacksonville’s WAPE are assaulted by the monotonous beat of rock ‘n’ roll. A three-minute trickle of news every two hours is the only relief; every station break is loud with the lovesick ape. The continuous uproar is so hypnotic that few who hear it seem anxious—or able—to turn it off. Last week one-year-old WAPE finished its fourth month as the top-rated station in a highly competitive nine-station town . . . Station Boss Bill Brennan, 38, a hillbilly-talking Harvard-trained electrical engineer, directs operations in his bathing suit, but he prefers to escape to his plush apartment [separated from the office by a sliding panel operated by a hidden push-button]. There he can toy with his bar and his ‘Play Pretty,’ a frosted-glass wall behind which colored lights flare and flicker in time with the transmitted music. ‘On low notes,’ Brennan explains, ‘the low part of the panel lights up, and so on. When there are chords, the whole wall goes crazy.’”
WAPE was the undisputed number-one radio station in the Jacksonville market for six years, until WPDQ-AM, under the direction of Tom Kennington, knocked it out of the top spot.
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