[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
The experiences I had at KOBS remain pivotal in my formative years of growing up in Orange. Long after leaving the business I would occasionally drive by the place to just look and remember those days with nostalgia, and in doing so noted with a tinge of sadness the inevitability of change and the end of all things as we know them. Just a year into college I saw that the Kobs' had built a new house on their property just outside the fenced-in acreage on which the station sat. It was right around the time that he sold the station to a company that changed the call letters to KZOM and turned it into a professional outfit. Suppose that was inevitable, and I'll bet Kobs got a pretty penny for the rights to the frequency. I even was so bold one day as to knock on the door of the old station; the KZOM DJ greeted me and generously showed me around. The basic layout and furnishings were the same but of course the homemade transmitter and board engineered by their genius inventor were long gone.
Even until recently I've occasionally had dreams of being back in that spare studio working the board and crafting my own show...maybe subconsciously wondering if I still have what it takes to duplicate the energy of my youthful endeavors.
But something that happened very recently took me by surprise. I was with my brother Mike just a couple of years ago, in 2018, and we were on our way from a visit to Mom's grave in Orange driving back to Beaumont. On the way we decided to stop by the old station site to have a look. We arrived at the end of the paved section of Kobs Korner and saw someone on a small front-loader clearing some brush and maintaining the property immediately surrounding the small building that housed the station, which was still there.
Turns out the guy doing the work owned the property now, as KZOM had moved to new and more accessible digs. This fellow knew the history of the place going back to the '70's since he'd grown up in one of the houses nearby. He filled us in on what happened in the intervening years. He described how the tower had finally been knocked down and dismantled. The old studio building now served as a junk shed, but the same old steps were there on which Mrs. Kobs placed the key for my return so many years ago. These things were interesting to us, but when I asked about the Kobs family and what became of them he revealed that Mrs. Kobs had passed away a dozen years before, but Mr. Kobs, now in his 90's, was STILL ALIVE, active, living in the same house he'd built in the late '70's, and puttering about town in an old Cadillac! His daughter, the music director, was living there taking care of him.
As we were leaving I saw Kobs' house and fleetingly wondered if I should stop and say hi. But the thought was quickly quelled. I'd worked for him when I was 16, and now I was 60 years old. Does this guy really want to be haunted by one of his old DJ's from the past...why give the old man a heart attack? So we drove on, secure that the place had served its purpose in its time for all of us, and it's best to just move on...
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