This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The year was 1982 and on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania in the small city of Allentown sat an AM radio station called W-S-A-N.

For years it had broadcast country music to the surrounding Lehigh Valley,

an area known for malls, manufacturing, and Mack trucks,

but the station was about to undergo a complete identity change.

Well, W-S-A-N was coming off being a country station and becoming a nostalgia station.

This is Ned Teeter.

He was a DJ at WSCAN at the time.

And he says that as the station transitioned to nostalgia,

meaning big band and soft hits from the 50s,

they wanted a gimmick to hook new listeners, something to lure people to the sweet

sounds of the Andrews sisters in Perry Como.

So you had FM radio stations playing music with really nice fidelity and then you had us playing music so you

had to be a little bit different so you know they're shutting up and playing the hits we're injecting something different into our air sound in this contest well

That was a little different a contest

W-S-A-N decided it it would launch a good-old-fashioned endurance contest, reminiscent of the pole-sitting stunts and dance

marathons popular in the 1920s.

The station secured a local sponsor called Love Homes to donate a prize, a single wide modular

home worth $18,000.

In 1982, even a modular home of $18,000 is a significant price.

And then they devised the scheme.

W-S-AN had a billboard in Lehigh Valley advertising the new nostalgia music format.

They would get three contestants to ascend a 30-foot ladder to the billboard platform and

...