There are five communities in the US named Portland that have radio stations. Jeff Lehmann does a good job of keeping Toppy well-fed on the Maine one, and my “Big Trip” a few years back loaded us up with a nice run of IDs from the Oregon one. I’ve never been to the towns by that name in Texas (a suburb of Corpus Christi) or Tennessee (off I-65 north of Nashville and south of Bowling Green, KY)…so that leaves just Portland, Indiana, a small city near the Ohio state line about an hour south of Fort Wayne.
Blaine and I went down there a couple of years ago, and one of the pictures I took there is in the brand-new Tower Site Calendar 2011 and is this week’s Tower Site of the Week. On the audio side this week, we present some IDs from Portland and vicinity, which for lack of a better place to put it ends up in our Muncie-Marion, IN market, to which I’m adding a few more IDs this week as well. And there’s some (sort of) newness to be had in the neighboring Kokomo and Fort Wayne markets, too.
Two more bits o’ geographical oddity: look carefully in that Muncie-Marion listing to find stations in both Union City, IN and Union City, OH. Same town, just different sides of the main street, which straddles the state line. (And yes, the Indiana and Ohio stations share a common tower, yet each provides that oh-so-valuable “first local service” to its own community.)
And since someone’s bound to point it out (hi, Garrett!), yes, there’s also a Portland, Iowa, a dot in the road just east of Mason City where Clear Channel applied for a translator on 99.5 back in 2003. But it was never granted, and probably never will be, and so they don’t count in this week’s Portland-fest.
What’s more interesting about Union City, Indiana and Union City, Ohio is that before 2006 (when Indiana started changing time with most of the rest of the country), the two Union Cities (I suppose that’s the proper plural?) would spend half the year in different time zones. Union City, Indiana would be in the Central Time Zone, and Union City, Ohio would be far into the future (well, one hour) in the Eastern Time Zone.
The local Fort Wayne TV stations would do their yearly schlep to the two towns, and ask the locals “Whatcha think?”
Boring TV.