The Absurdest Radio Contest of All Time
James McAdams / CC BY-SA
In 1982, in the sleepy, small city of Allentown, PA, there was an AM Radio Station called WSAN. Listened to by a few hundred faithful people, WSAN was known for its country music.
That is until this unknown station in the middle of nowhere pulled off one of the most outrageous marketing stunts of all-time.
That spring, WSAN had decided to make the move from country music to what they thought the people of Lehigh Valley really wanted — big-band, nostalgic music that reminded the factory workers of a different time in American life.
In order to help promote the change of genre, they wanted to create some buzz and attention to the station. Someone on the inside recommended what was called an endurance challenge. Little did they know what they had just unleashed.
WSAN set out to find a big enough prize to attract interest from nearby residents. After a few weeks of searching, they found their jackpot through a partnership with Love Homes — a single-wide modular home worth $18,000.
That was a lot of money back in 1982.
Here were the rules of the contest.
Anyone could submit as many entries as they’d like.
Three people would be chosen to climb up 30 feet to the platform of a billboard sponsored by WSAN.
The person who stayed the longest on the billboard platform won the home.
WSAN thought it was clever to name the contest, “you’ll love to live with us.” They were unthinkably correct.
The Contestants
WSAN received thousands of entries from people all over the greater Pennsylvania area and beyond. Word started to spread like wildfire that there was a contest happening in Allentown, PA with the prize of winning a free home.
That would be big news for any time period, but especially for 1982, which just so happened to be right in the middle of a hard and long recession, the worst the U.S. had seen since the Great Depression of the ‘30s.
In 1982, interest rates were soaring, companies were cutting costs and closing factories right and left, and people like the fine folk of Allentown were down on their luck and hard-pressed to be able to afford a home with their small paychecks.
That’s the climate for the WSAN Radio Contest.
Of the thousands of men and women who sent in entries, three men were chosen largely in part due to the volume of the entries they submitted.
Dalton Young thought he was clever in submitting over 1,000 entries. He had nothing to do that summer so he was all set to spend his sunny days up on a billboard trying to win a free home.
Ron Kistler was the second contestant who submitted over 4,000 entries. Which sounds like a lot until you hear that the third contestant, Mike MacKay, submitted over 47,000 entries to WSAN.
99% Invisible host Roman Mars said that Mike MacKay submitted so many entries that the first 10 entries that were pulled when the winners were chosen all belonged to him.
With the winners chosen and the rules of the contest defined, the only thing left to do was to send the men up the ladder to start living on the billboard platform.
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The platform was very narrow and crowded, especially split between 3 people. Each man got a tent, a chemical toilet, a telephone, and a radio.
Since there was very little room for anything else, this inevitably meant that there had to be an assigned crew of people to help support each of the three contestants — people whose job was to deliver food and help with cleanup and removal of wastes. Each contestant had a wooden bucket on a pulley system that they used to bring items, including meals, up and down to their perch.
As the days continued to roll into one another and weeks stretched into a month and then into a second month, it was starting to become clear to WSAN that what they hoped would be their short-lived contest was shaping up to be much, much more intense.
The summer turned to fall, and with no sign of stopping, the contestants continued to live on top of the billboard as the winter months started to roll in.
By this time, Young, Kistler, and MacKay, or the Billboard Boys as they began to be called, started to attract some bigger audiences than just the local Allentown faithful.
On December 9, 1982, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the Billboard Boys, and from there, the response was mountainous.
Young, Kistler, and MacKay soon found themselves talking with representatives from Rolling Stone, People Magazine, and even news outlets from other countries.
As winter settled in, the men hunkered down, enduring temperatures as low as zero degrees while living atop the metal-framed billboard. That December, a huge snowstorm shut down the town and surrounding cities, but the contest kept moving along as normal.
The men outlasted the storms and made it to spring. These men had missed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years, and they had no plans of stopping.
It looked like the contest would be a stalemate until March of 1983, when one of the contestants, Dalton Young, was duped by an undercover police officer and was charged with drug charges. That left only Kistler and MacKay atop the billboard.
Still fighting, these men stayed up on the billboard for another three months. By this point, the town was so annoyed at the contest. It was a nuisance and everyone just wanted it to end, but Kistler and MacKay were convinced that they were going to outlast the other.
Eventually, WSAN caved and called off the contest, changing the rules so that there could be two winners. On June 7, 1983, Ron Kistler and Mike MacKay both came down from their ladders at the same time, having lived up on top of the billboard for a total of 261 days.
They both walked away with a modular home, a Chevy Chevette, and a free vacation.
Was it worth it? For Kistler and MacKay, maybe. For WSAN, definitely. For the people of Allentown, heck no.
The story sounds insane, but it's a fun reminder that every piece of marketing comes with a price, and that price could just be two men living on a billboard for 261 days.