Tampico tower: Spreading the word for more than 70 years

TAMPICO – Ronald Reagan isn’t the only president with ties to Tampico: Harry Truman made some waves there, too.

Microwaves, that is.

The sight and sounds of Truman giving the opening speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference on Sept. 4, 1951, was beamed across the U.S. – and through the airwaves around Tampico – in the nation’s first coast-to-coast television broadcast, using what was then state-of-the-art microwave technology.

It was a feat made possible in part by a tower just outside the village.

Today, in a time when satellite signals bouncing across the globe is routine, a coast-to-coast broadcast may not seem like that big a deal, but it was a pretty tall order back then. Those interested in seeing how it was done need only head toward Tampico, where a large concrete tower stands tall above the flat fields between the village and Prophetstown, in clear view about 8 miles in any direction.

It’s on a man-made hill near the southeast corner of Blue Goose and Jersey roads, 3 miles west and 1 mile south of downtown Tampico.

This 190-foot reinforced concrete tower has quite the story in its role bridging the communication gap between America’s coasts, and bridging the gap between the high-tech worlds of yesterday and today.

Today, the 71-year-old tower is a relay point for high speed wireless internet from providers Citizen’s Telecommunications Co. and Frontier Communications. It’s owned by Tower Sites, Inc. of New Berlin, Wisconsin, which owns and constructs communication towers throughout the Midwest.

The internet is important to today’s communication; television played just as important a role when the tower was first built.

The events of World War II helped feed Americans’ appetite for more news and entertainment, more than newspapers and radio could provide. TV’s reach was expanding and people wanted to see the world through flickering pictures on the small screen.

At the same time, advancements in TV technology sped up, and with that came the boom of more regionally based television stations. In the Quad Cities, stations from the “big three” networks – NBC’s WOC (now KWQC), CBS’s WHBF, and ABC’s WQAD – were established, but in order to stay in touch with each channel’s headquarters, certain spots between the affiliate and each of the two coasts had to be constructed.

Not only that, those watching the small screen on either coast could see footage of events happening on the other coast, thanks to the spot-by-spot relay that the Tampico tower was a part of.

“The original purpose of these towers was to carry television signals from coast to coast,” Tower Sites President Terry Michaels said. “Before these towers were built, there was no practical way to transmit television pictures for long distances.

“The transcontinental microwave route that the Tampico tower was on made cross country network television possible for the first time.”

But TV wasn’t the only task the tower took on. According to an early 1950s industry publication touting the “Telephone Skyway,” the primary job of the relay network was the help handle the increasing volume of long-distance telephone calls – a role that the publication said was becoming increasingly important as the telephone was becoming more and more important to a nation mobilizing its resources for defense.

AT&T Long Lines took on the task of building the tower. Construction began in 1950 and was completed the following year. McDonald Engineering Co., of Chicago built a string of seven concrete towers, spaced 40 miles apart, including the one near Tampico and a similar one near Woodhaven Lakes in Sublette.

The tower was a somewhat unique design, Michaels said. Of the several thousand microwave towers that AT&T eventually built for the route, only 49 were square concrete structures. The towers were constructed from east to west; those built between New York and Des Moines were made of concrete, and those west of Des Moines were made of steel.

Inside the tower are seven floors of 25-by-18-foot equipment rooms that are accessible by an elevator shaft and stairwell. Until 1982, those rooms housed plenty of wires, bulbs and amps upon amps of electricity to make possible its television – by then nearly all in color.

Then the relentless march of progress made the towers obsolete for a while.

The phone antennas remained for 10 more years after the TV signals powered down, then it was abandoned for a decade until Tower Sites bought it in 2002, when high-speed wireless internet was in its infancy, turning the tower back into a part of a communications network, this time for wireless internet.

Television has played an important cultural role in people’s lives, and people in Whiteside County who sat in their homes watching the news or their favorite shows, beamed from across the nation more than 70 years ago, couldn’t have done so without the Tampico tower.

To learn more

Wanna geek out on tower tech and more? Go to http://www.long-lines.net/ to find vintage articles and publications.

Tower Sites’ entry on the Tampico Tower is at https://tower-sites.com/Tampico%20Profile.htm