Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Crossing Woman / Old Man Kobs

We were using Taipei as our base, leaving for the occasional jaunt to Chiayi, Zhuqi or some other place.  On our last return to the city we were treated royally by a businessman we know from there who knew all the interesting spots.  This was the time I captured lots of street scenes, and have saved the most interesting (to me) for posting in this blog.
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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
KOBS was owned and operated by a man named Charles H. Kobs.  Yes, his name was actually Kobs...it was formerly Cobbs, but when he built and obtained a license from the FCC to operate the station had the spelling of his name changed so that it would match the call letters.  He owned two cars, and the license plates read "KOBS-1" and KOBS-2".  The land he bought was extensive enough that he could name the road leading onto the station property "Kobs Korner", which is searchable on Google Maps to this day.  The exact location of the building that housed the station is 30.132422N -93.845997W.

His on-air name was "Chuck Hubert".  In the national registry of radio stations he was listed as the owner, his wife was listed as the program director, and his 8-year-old daughter was listed as the music director.  It was truly a family operation - in fact it was rumored that he married into money for the sole purpose of being able to launch the venture.  Before doing that he was chief engineer of Channel 4, KJAC television in Port Arthur.

He was a genius as an engineer, and made full use of those skills to literally build the transmitter and studio board from scratch.  I'll swear it's true that the transmitter had vacuum cleaner parts and ping pong balls that served important functions...the phase 1 modulator of said transmitter was tethered by wire into the studio because the studio had air conditioning and the adjacent transmitter room did not.  And to turn on that thing in the mornings was a chore - it took 25 minutes to ramp up the transmitter to full operational status, a process that required several steps to be done at specific time intervals.  He knew if a DJ did everything on time because he had his clock radio at home in Port Arthur set to go off as soon as we were supposed to go on the air at 5:25 a.m.  Similarly, at the end of the broadcast day (10:00p), several buttons and switches had to be toggled and turned in a timed sequence. 


The board as we saw it before sitting down to a shift:

The first-stage oscillator, wired into the studio because it needed to be air conditioned.  The window at the top of this and the previous picture looked into the transmitter room, which was not air conditioned.  We had to take readings from it once in a while as part of our duties, and it got mighty hot in there during the summer.

 

One fateful night lightning struck and knocked this guy out on me...air time was done for the weekend.

Kobs Korner Street.  Mr. Kobs lived into his 90's in a house built on the land to the right of this clearing.