Forest of Towers Draws a Special Kind of Lumberjack

Train your telescope on the top of Mt. Wilson and pick out a radio tower--say, the tallest one up there, the 975-foot spike owned by KCBS-TV Channel 2.

That man you see climbing the upper rungs, with a dizzying view from San Clemente Island to Los Angeles Harbor, just might be the same ornery, rawboned, ice-in-his-veins character who began climbing these towers half a century ago.

John Hignite is 75 now, and he has slowed a bit. His knees are bad. He drinks light beer instead of Black Velvet.

But when lightning strikes, or winter ice ravages an FM antenna, Hignite is one of the repairmen clambering like Jack up the beanstalk, into the wispy air more than a mile above the metropolis.

“He’s nerveless,” said a colleague in 1956, in a newspaper clipping from an era when there were no limits on exposure to electromagnetic radiation. The old headline--”Defies Death Painting 500-Foot Tower Radiating 50,000 Watts”--suggests hazards far beyond anything Hignite faces today. The fact is, he’d do the job regardless.

Danger? He shrugs; he’s never been scared of heights, never been injured, even when he was scaling towers in the middle of FM broadcasts--towers so hot with radiation the sweat ran off him. Hignite was in Germany the final months of World War II, and you sure can’t rattle him now.

“I just don’t think they make people like him anymore,” says his wife, Jackie, who is 39 and says it takes a younger woman to keep up with him. “He reminds me of John Wayne, a ‘True Grit’ kind of guy.”

The forest of towers atop Mt. Wilson invites no other type. It is a forbidding, otherworldly landscape of warning signs and steel lattices, silent but for the roar of cooling fans and an ominous electrical hum.

Twenty-nine towers now occupy the narrow, rounded peak, a little more than a mile above sea level northeast of Glendale. The towers support 55 antennas beaming signals for 34 television and FM radio stations. They jut above a low crest of pine and scrub trees like Simon Rodia sculptures, bizarre spikes of assorted sizes and shapes. Most are skinny three-sided pyramids, gray and dotted with radar dishes. Some are stubbier, broader, darker in color. One of the largest has a spiral staircase through the guts of it, up to a platform that supports a needlelike antenna above.

A few are painted red and white. The KCBS tower has that scheme and is thin and straight as a ladder. Getting to the top is simple, Hignite says in his laconic, hard-edged way: “The ladder steps are a foot apart. You take 900-and-something steps and you’re up there.”

The view is spectacular--the city stretched out below, as if seen from a jet, the ocean beyond. “Depends on how clear the weather is,” he sniffs. “Sometimes you can’t see the ground from 20 feet up. I probably don’t pay attention to the view anymore.”

The first towers began to go up in the 1940s, and more came in the 1950s, when TV began to take hold. Unlike AM radio signals, which can be transmitted from lower elevations, FM and television signals must be sent on a direct line of sight to their targets, the millions of radios and TVs now scattered across the region.

Mt. Wilson’s vantage point above Los Angeles made it Southern California’s salient broadcasting point almost from the beginning.

Orman Day, a poet and short story writer born in Glendale, remembers afternoons when his father would pack Mom and his three sisters into the family Studebaker and motor up the long mountain switchbacks to this “isolated, wind-swept place, with these towers pointing up into space.”

TV was the new miracle, and they gazed in wonder at the sky, the city below and the strange transmitting structure that connected it all.

“You felt, somehow, that these towers had magical powers,” says Day, now 55. “They could carry sounds and images. A picture would go through this thing and end up back on your TV in Glendale. . . . It seemed, literally, like you were on top of the world.”

Edwin Hubble dramatically changed our view of the universe during the 1920s with a string of discoveries from a telescope on Mt. Wilson. Except for a solar observatory, and all the transmission towers, not much else was ever built atop the mountain. There is a tiny post office and a loop road that carries tour vans, hikers and, every so often, a daredevil hang-glider or two. .

So much electromagnetic radiation surrounds the mountaintop that some areas are fenced off. Cell phones usually won’t work here, and neither will remote door locks. The Federal Communications Commission now requires that broadcasters closely monitor exposure levels and shut down transmissions when workers reach certain points on the towers.

Radio engineer Steve Blodgett says the towers face constant bombardment. “Transmitters get hit by lightning,” he says. “It will damage the lines that connect the antennas. It will burn antenna elements off. . . . During the winter we have ice storms up there. There was a lot of ice damage from this past winter.”

Hignite and his crew, including his son Russ, spent most of a month trying to catch up on work from those storms. Hignite isn’t sure how long he’ll go on, but he mutters about his young wife, his 26-foot fishing boat--lots of excuses to keep himself working--and you have to figure he likes the job.

“Apparently, I do,” he allows. “It’s a challenge once in a while.”

His friend Ray Mascho, the systems manager for KCBS-TV, leans across a console of television monitors and says, “You know the real secret? It keeps him young.”

Hignite’s hard blue eyes flash something that must be agreement. “Work is good for you. All of my bar friends, they died about 10 years ago.”