Another one of my arcane nostalgia posts.

I know there is lots of discussion about Downtown Airpark as a music venue, but I remember it as an airport. As a kid I was fascinated by aviation( still am ) and I had a small police/aircraft band radio( from Lafayette Radio, if anyone remembers that outfit ). I would listen to Wiley Post Tower as that was one of the best signals I could get. I remember hearing many times aircraft departing Downtown and contacting Wiley Post. Exciting stuff.

I also listened to the OKC police( 159.09 mhz if memory serves me? ). You could really get the pulse of city just sitting there and listening.

As a kid we had a radio with short wave band. It was very cool to listen to broadcast from around the world even if I couldn't understand a single word. Keep in mind that was back in a time when 'Spanish' was still an exotic foreign language. I had a few friends with police scanners and it was always fun to listen. If anyone is interested, there is a scanner Android app that will let you listen to police, fire, and airports all over the world. Just for fun we sometimes listen to DFW air traffic control and Chicago police.

I also listened to the OKC police( 159.09 mhz if memory serves me? ). You could really get the pulse of city just sitting there and listening.The channel at 159.09 was shared by almost all the county sheriffs in the state, as well as many police departments. In that time, the lack of communication between first responders that played such a tragic role on April 19 and on 9/11 simply didn't exist. Even though the OHP used a different channel (VHF rather than UHF) the sheriffs' dispatchers were able to relay traffic both ways.

As the sole city reporter for The Daily Ardmoreite, and a secondary semi-official role as photographer for the Carter County sheriff's office, I had receivers in my car for 159.09 and for the 38.xx frequency used by the OHP, and routinely monitored the traffic on my weekly trips from Ardmore to OKC and back. It was quite interesting, as you noted!

Although it wasn't, officially, a Scanner nor Ham Radio, the night I was left alone, in the local Police Department's Headquarters, in order to construct a service counter and "swinging door" with an electronic lock . . . The "secretary" left the outpost's radio on and I got to listen to the entire Oklahoma County/NE Division's response to that tornado that trashed a few houses on the south side of Edmond.

It was interesting . . . sort of made me question the value of what I was doing in the moment.
(building a Service Counter for the local PD . . . voluntarily . . . in the middle of a tornado . . . =)

That was back around '82 . . . so it doesn't really matter these days.

I had one in the 70s. Listening one time after work and I heard police distach send a car to an apartment complex on a domestic disturbance call. I guess it was a large complex as the officer was having trouble locating the reporting party. Then he turned into one section & radioed back to HQ: "OK Here it is. I see a guy out on the curb w/a suitcase." I LOL'ed...

It was interesting . . . sort of made me question the value of what I was doing in the moment.
(building a Service Counter for the local PD . . . voluntarily . . . in the middle of a tornado . . .I completely forgot to mention in my earlier post that on April 19, a co-worker had a scanner in his pickup truck (not mounted, just lying on the seat) and he rapidly brought it into the office so that we could all monitor what was happening. Quite a few of the departments surrounding the metro area were on a common frequency, and it was absolutely amazing to hear the dispatchers and the responders organizing a high-speed parade down I35 from the north, blending in new additions at each interchange, and of course all vehicles running Code 3 with all other traffic (voluntarily, for the most part) forced off of the interstates...

In some ways it reminded me of the dress rehearsal for that disaster, which happened just before Christmas of 1961 when the huge ammonia tank atop the 9-story Wilson meat packing plant near SW 15 and Agnew slipped off its mounting, crashed through the roof, and plunged all nine stories to the ground, ripping out the heart of the building. As I recall it happened on a Saturday with only a few workers in the place, otherwise the death toll would have been horrendous. At that time, ham radio operators quickly organized a communications relay link so that hospitals could be forewarned of the incoming traffic...

Strangely, I've never managed to locate the details in The Oklahoman's archives; I was back home for Christmas, from California, at the time and clearly remember the event -- including driving out to see the building a few days afterward...