Super Bowl Update

Owensboro, as most of us in the Tri-State know, is a city well-known and respected worldwide for its long and delicious history of great barbecue. [My mouth's watering just writing this, so you know. -Ed. ]  And, on Sunday night's edition of BBQ Pitmasters on Destination America, you'll get to know two of the greats in Owensboro BBQ.

The show, which is scheduled to air at 8 p.m. CT / 9 ET, will feature John Foreman of Old Hickory Bar-B-Q and Roy Henry of Henry's Boogalou BBQ.  Foreman's family has been serving up great hickory-smoked meats for nearly a century, while Henry has been serving up meats made with his own special sauce for 35 years - including to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush when he visited Owensboro in 1988.

BBQ Pitmasters follows barbecue cooks as they compete for cash and prizes in barbecue cooking competitions.  The show premiered in 2009 on TLC and moved to Destination America last year.  Past episodes have featured the famous American Royal Invitational in Kansas City, the Murphysboro Barbecue Cook-Off in Southern Illinois, and Georgia's oldest BBQ contest, The Big Pig Jig, just to name a select few.

We've heard that Melissa "Spiff" Goodall and Mike Chaney (Micah Cox) have been let go at Cromwell Radio's Owensboro operation.*   There's been no official word on why the two were terminated, but there has been something of a movement gathering steam among loyal fans on Facebook to boycott Cromwell's local stations because of their termination.

14 News reports that a popular Owensboro BBQ joint will be featured on the Travel Channel.  Old Hickory, which is located on Washington Avenue just west of Frederica Street, is to be seen on an upcoming episode of Bizarre Foods.  No word yet on when the show will air.

To some, they’re eyesores on the landscape. But to one man, radio and television towers are landscapes, and beautiful ones, too. For a dozen years now, journalist/photographer/broadcaster Scott Fybush has created an annual wall calendar featuring artistic photos of important and historic broadcast tower sites from coast to coast, and he’s just released the 2013 edition, which includes the now-demolished towers of WVJS in Owensboro.

“Some people may think all radio towers look alike, but the Tower Site Calendar shows every year that that’s not the case,” says Fybush, who has worked in radio and television news for more than two decades. The calendar began in 2002 as an outgrowth of his weekly industry news column, NorthEast Radio Watch, and its offshoot, “Tower Site of the Week,” a weekly feature at his fybush.com website.

“It has developed a passionate following in the broadcast engineering community,” Fybush says. “Engineers are notoriously underappreciated for the hard work they do, and the calendar is one little way I can help show some recognition for the infrastructure that engineers design and maintain to make sure all of us have easy access to radio, TV and our cellphones, too.”

The 2013 edition, now shipping from the Fybush Media store (store.fybush.com/store) features a fresh new page design, a spiral binding, and 13 new pictures taken from Fybush’s travels all over North America and beyond. Some of the highlights this year:

In addition to tower photos, the calendar’s monthly pages include significant dates in radio and television history, as well as civil and religious holidays.

“Engineers email me all the time to ask if their towers can be a featured site or a calendar page,” says Fybush, who also anchors newscasts for NPR member station WXXI in Rochester, N.Y.