On this spot, before last weekend, a plain brick building stood. It was the home of radio station WWOD AM and FM in Lynchburg, Virginia. The structure was built originally to be a television station but was re-purposed as a radio station, creating a strangely large on-air studio made to hold the bulky cameras needed for live television.
I was once the Advertising Copywriter and Traffic Manager for this station. At that time, the format was alternative rock. It went through a number of programming changes until it reached the point of dead air a few years ago. And now it’s gone.
Visiting a city that you left twenty years earlier is always jarring–so much has changed and yet some things remain undisturbed with the passage of time. I had always expected to see the radio station sitting on Mimosa Drive. Seeing it as a pile of rubble gave me a keen awareness of the passage of time and the inevitability of change.
WWOD: a part of my past, a piece of my heart.–my past, a pile of rubble.
