POTTSTOWN PA – Just slightly more than eight months after Pottstown’s only radio station, WPAZ-AM 1370, went silent, leaders of a non-profit community group trying to return it to the airwaves announced the station owner had agreed Thursday (Aug. 12, 2010) to sell it to them for an undisclosed amount.

Outside WPAZ's Broadcast Lodge on Maugers Mill Road in January (2010), after the Pottstown radio station closed. Fans hope it will re-open soon.

“We are now in the process of purchasing WPAZ 1370 from Great Scott Broadcasting, who accepted our offer,” organizers Rick Rodgers and Ross Landy said in a scrolling message on the website of the WPAZ Preservation Association.

On the group’s Facebook page the following day (Friday, Aug. 13), the pair added “Exciting things have been happening behind the scenes! Financial backing has been secured and negotiations are under way with Great Scott Broadcasting. All is looking really promising, and we’re aiming to have some definite plans in place and signatures on dotted lines by the end of August.”

WPAZ-AM abruptly signed off the air Dec. 10 (2009), during mid-morning programming. Great Scott’s president, Mitchell Scott, at the time said his company was shuttering the station for financial reasons. It has been off the air since, and its offices on Maugers Mill Road, Pottstown PA, are vacant.

WPAZ started in 1952 as the first in a chain of the company’s several radio properties.

Since its closing, Rodgers, Landy and other volunteers have been busy with plans to find or raise sufficient funding to buy the station and operate it with a mix of interns, volunteers and a small paid staff. They have consistently contended WPAZ offered an important voice and information services to the community that were not being matched by other media.

Reading PA area radio station WEEU-AM attempted to fill the gap and gain market share earlier this year (March 2010), by promoting itself in The (Pottstown PA) Mercury and elsewhere as “your area’s hometown local radio station,” as WEEU Station Operations Manager Jo Painter put it in an e-mail to The Post. The effort seemed to gain little traction.

The Preservation Association, however, held fund-raising concerts at Sunnybrook Ballroom in Sanatoga PA during the spring and kept enlisting support via Facebook, where it now boasts of almost 300 fans. It drummed up more assistance with appearances at community events like First Saturdays in downtown Pottstown, where WPAZ once occupied studios overlooking High Street until its move to Maugers Mill Road.

The news from Rodgers and Landy was welcomed by several Facebook commenters.

Related:

• Group Envisions WPAZ As Community-Funded Venture
• Five Weeks Later, Thundering Silence at ‘PAZ
• Radio Station WPAZ-AM Goes Off Air

Editor’s note: The Post thanks reader Andy Yusko Jr. of Lower Pottsgrove, a former board operator and on-air personality at WPAZ, for suggesting this story and contact sources. If you’ve got a story idea or tip we should explore, e-mail The Post.

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