The radio tower peeking out over dense woods and poultry farms had an AM signal just strong enough to serve WJLX’s intended audience: the people in and around Jasper, Ala., who wanted to hear the Jasper Vikings’ Friday night high school football broadcasts and news of the burger specials at Alabama Stackers on 19th Street.
Then, “The Sound of Walker County,” as the station has long billed itself, went silent.
The tower, all 190 feet of it, had vanished — its 3,500 pounds of spindly steel beams possibly sliced into pieces and dragged away earlier this month by thieves, the police said.
“Who in the world steals a radio tower?” said Brett Elmore, the station manager, recalling his bewildered reaction when a maintenance worker explained to him why the station he often calls “my life” had been knocked off the air.
The disappearance has made for one of the more puzzling cases taken on by the Jasper Police Department, which has had few leads so far.
Many in Jasper, a city of about 14,000 that lies 40 miles northwest of Birmingham, fear the culprits have taken more than a heap of steel.
Listeners describe WJLX as a trusted source for local news and warnings of extreme weather, breaking through the noise of a cluttered landscape on radio, television and the internet with something that felt distinctly theirs.
That lifeline, broadcasting over the AM airwaves since 1957, has been severed. For Sherrie Pike, 54, that means morning commutes without WJLX’s shows and music, including a daily sermon from the Church of Christ on 6th Avenue.
“Everyone loves the radio station because it’s all we have,” Ms. Pike said last Saturday, sitting in her pop-up jewelry shop near the cream-colored courthouse downtown. “I think everyone’s first reaction to the news was, ‘Oh no, we’re going to lose our station.’”
Radio stations have long served as accessible sources of information for residents across the rural South, where many areas lack reliable cell service and broadband internet.
Alabama’s healthy listenership has survived the rise of the internet and streaming partly because of its residents’ love of high school football, said Sharon Tinsley, the president of the Alabama Broadcasters Association. The booming voices of broadcasters can often be heard crackling on county roads and in backyards, as touchdowns elicit guttural cheers.
But people in the radio business say it is their role during severe weather that brings them the most pride. The medium has often been credited with helping save lives after cell towers go down or TV broadcasts shut off.
“These rural communities across the country, I think it’s safe to say, live and die by their local radio stations,” Ms. Tinsley said.
More than 82 million Americans listen to AM radio monthly, according to the 2022 Nielsen Fall survey. Still, radio stations have recently faced an existential threat as carmakers have considered, and in some cases gone ahead with, dropping AM radios from their newer models. Broadcasters say such decisions will deprive drivers of a crucial source of news in emergencies.
Jasper has abruptly found itself so deprived. Mr. Elmore said the tower was not insured. Getting a new one would cost between $60,000 and $100,000, he said, an exorbitant price for a station the size of WJLX (it has three full-time employees).
Mr. Elmore said he asked the Federal Communications Commission last week if he could use a nearby FM translator station to stay on the air. But the F.C.C. said stations need an AM tower to be allowed to use an FM translator.
The F.C.C. said in a statement that it was “sorry to learn of the theft of the radio tower that brought this station off air,” and that it was “happy to help out in any way possible within the law.”
For Mr. Elmore, 40, who followed his father’s broadcasting footsteps at WJLX, the theft has forced him to project optimism to anyone who asks about the case. They’ll be fine, he promises.
But when he drives the three miles from his duplex to WJLX’s headquarters, he sighs thinking about the sound residents will hear when they twist the dial to his station: static.
It is a sound many have heard in recent weeks as they rolled through Jasper’s revitalized downtown, where small businesses use colorfully painted statues of mules to advertise their stores. .
“We are off the air totally now,” Mr. Elmore said at The Pie Factory pizza restaurant and bar in Jasper, smoking a cigarette as a country singer crooned about lost love.
“Want me to bring your tower back?” a man jokingly asked Mr. Elmore.
“I got your tower!” another man said seconds later. A third teased that he had seen a spaceship behind the chicken poultry plant where the tower had stood for nearly seven decades.
“I’ll be back on the air,” Mr. Elmore assured them. But underlying the jokes was the reality that his business, an inheritance of sorts from his father, Johnny Elmore, who died in 2022, was in peril.
He tossed the cigarette butt and asked the men around him: Who would steal his livelihood just to make a few thousand bucks?
The theft two weeks ago has quickly become the main subject of curiosity across the city. At The Cigar Box Lounge, Travis Hill, who works at a local barbershop, wondered what would return to Jasper first: an AM tower, or the first movie theater in years.
“Whoever stole it, I hope they can afford better chicken than this,” Mr. Hill said, pointing at his crispy brown honey-barbecue nuggets from Walmart.
Bill and Mary Cain, who have lived in Jasper for decades, said they had not seen such an outlandish crime in the city since two inmates used peanut butter to escape from a jail in 2017.
“The nerve of some people,” Ms. Cain said, furrowing her brows.
Some posts online have theorized that Mr. Elmore himself was responsible for the theft, in a quest for attention and money. But Mr. Elmore said such accusations were ridiculous, noting the lack of insurance on the tower.
One of the more promising theories is that the tower was taken for its metal, though workers at scrap yard companies in the area said in interviews that they had not seen anything suspicious come in.
There are, however, some precedents in Alabama. In 2021, the police in Dothan arrested a man who had stolen a 30-foot aluminum trailer with a collapsible radio tower that reached up to 100 feet. And in the summer of 2013, the police in Talladega said that a 75-foot steel radio tower and other equipment had been stolen from a broadcasting group.
WJLX continues to broadcast online, but it is reaching a smaller audience because many people, especially older residents, prefer to listen in their cars. Remarkably, its advertisers, nearly all of which are local businesses, have still bought ads, said Terrell Manasco, 61, who helps run sales at the station.
“They just have faith that we’re going to get back on and be stronger,” Mr. Manasco said.
Rusty Richardson, the owner of Bernard’s Store For Men, a 75-year-old local clothing store, said that he never considered backing out as an advertiser.
“Small town means something,” Mr. Richardson, 66, said. “We know each other, we care about each other. And that’s what matters in life, is caring about each other and loving your neighbor as yourself.”
Mr. Elmore said he was determined not to let the station die this way. Still, he finds himself thinking about how the culprit managed the heist.
Whoever did it might have noticed that the tower was in a perfect spot for such a crime, the authorities said, tucked behind the Mar-Jac Poultry Alabama facility, which is undergoing construction and is filled with trucks carrying equipment that could have served as cover.
There is only one way in and out of the fenced-off area, officials said. The culprit likely drove down a muddy back road into the woods to reach it.
Mr. Elmore recently visited the scene, where frogs croaked and ticks inched in the dry, tall grass. He wondered if the thief had seen the “no trespassing” sign.
“Danger,” it read.
On Monday night, Mr. Elmore sat in the broadcaster’s booth alongside the Bevill State Community College basketball court, his microphone on, his throat cleared and ready to call the game. His eyes were sore from reading all the emails he had received about the crime. But there on WJLX’s website, he could see that more than 100 people had tuned in to the livestream, propping up his station for a little longer.
“Thank you so very much for listening,” he said after the final whistle. “And we bid you a most pleasant good night.”
Susan Campbell Beachy contributed research.
