WAPL 40 For 40

WAPL 40 For 40 is a history of WAPL, a rock station in northeast Wisconsin, and it is told from inside the building. The voices belong to people tied to the station, and what they bring is memory: concerts, contests, stunts that worked and at least one that very much did not. The talk is quick and overlapping, full of interjections and running jokes. Take the Keith Richards story. Someone recalls a brisk meet and greet with the Stones in '94, and the lasting souvenir is that Richards stepped on their foot. The follow-up gag, that the foot had already gone unwashed for years before that, sets the register. From there the conversation drifts to Brown County Arena, where the echo let fans hear every concert twice, a two-for-one deal as one voice puts it. Promotions produce some of the most vivid scenes. A Packers giveaway run with Chevy sent winners onto the field at Lambeau at halftime to throw Nerf footballs at the back window of a green and gold truck, with an Aaron's lawnmower among the lesser prizes. The misfires are remembered just as candidly. A float in the Appleton Christmas Parade ended the station's parade days after its second year, when an employee named Eileen was run over and hospitalized, and the telling dwells on the insurance hit and the part-timers who covered her shifts. Staff memories stretch across several installments, and one title reads '#38 - Staff Stories [Part Four]'. That episode also recalls a limo trip with listeners down to a show at the Rave in Milwaukee, with a stop at Festival Foods first since nobody was driving. Two titles, '#36 - More Rick + Len' and '#37 - Even More Rick + Len', put a pair of names up front, and the material under them runs from the Lambeau contest to a San Francisco detour: a giant ball of bras towed behind a pink Cadillac, fought over in court and now reportedly 1,600 pounds. Sports history gets its own title, '#35 - WAPL Sports!', along with the reminder that before its rock years the station did much more in sports, including carrying the Bart Starr Show. A Packers sideline story about Mike Sherman sending Ty Detmer in for a final series gets called one of the best football stories the speaker has ever heard. The present gets a look too: under '#40 - The Future of WAPL', talk turns to website awards from the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association, a new WAPL.com and a frank admission of being dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age. The same conversation mentions an archive project started in 2016, with microfilm, deep library basements, old newspapers and photo archives, which earns the digger a comparison to Indiana Jones. Ross Maxwell's name is heard in a sign-off, and the series is part of the Woodward Podcast Network. For promotions and oddities, the Rick + Len titles are a natural entry point; for the Packers angle, '#35 - WAPL Sports!' is. One conversation even ends by hoping for another 40 years.