It was in the late 1950s, when work crews arrived and cleared a plot on the east side of two- lane Hwy 17 about a mile south of the Doctors Lake Bridge. Even the clearing attracted attention because in those days there was nothing much but pine woods on either side of that road from Orange Park to Green Cove Springs.

Construction began but just stirred up more questions. It was weird with curving walls and a flat roof. It didn’t look like anything locals had ever seen before. When the swimming pool and high diving board went in – traffic increased and slowed to a near crawl.

Then, word got around that the bizarre structure would be home to a new and improved radio station called WAPE and was projected to be bigger and better than anything on the airwaves at the time. The swimming pool was supposed to be part of some new-fangled contraption to cool the transmitter.

Locals laughed and went about their regular business after speculating that they had a good name – WAPE– and that monkey business was probably exactly what those duck-tailed, turned-up collar young disc jockeys were up to.

When they began broadcasting, WAPE suddenly had almost everybody in Clay County’s attention. They cranked that thing up and rock and roll music came screaming out of every telephone and barbed wire fence in Clay County. With the addition of the distinctive ape call, chaos reigned.

Dogs howled, livestock stampeded, and the dairy cows quit giving milk. Teenagers were thrilled to talk to friends while Jerry Lee Lewis and Patsy Cline wailed in the background – parents not so much. The jury was still out on whether rock and roll was the work of the Devil or just good fun.

WAPE dialed back the decibels and everything returned to normal until summertime came and young girls started showing up in bathing suits to flirt with the platter spinners and pose around the pool.

This time cars full of gawkers driving by came to a crawl and tow trucks did a lot of business pulling cars out of the ditches. After all it was the fifties and folks just weren’t accustomed to seeing skin. Bathing suits were expected at the beach or the lake but not on the side of a public highway.

The music was great and reception was perfect.

For the first time, teenagers could listen to music after the sun went down without the marathon adjusting of knobs or holding the radio over their heads.

Clay County residents found instant friends anywhere in the southeast when people found out they were neighbors of “The Big Ape.” Every Clay County boy who trained at the U.S. Marine Corps’ Parris Island remembers feeling a little less homesick when he heard the ape holler out over the radio.