From the July 29 and 30, 1992 - NAUTICAL FESTIVAL SPECIAL

Local marine radio station serves all the Great Lakes

Rogers City is indeed the Nautical City!  Proof of this is the fact that the main 
communications link on the Great Lakes has for years operated out of the port of 
Calcite.

Marine radio station WLC of Rogers City, the main communications between ships 
sailing the lakes and the shore, has a unique part in the history of Great Lakes 
shipping, and in the Nautical City.  When First becoming licensed for operations in 
May, 1922, the operations of the station were limited to communi-cating with 
vessels of the Bradley Transportation Company, the WyandotteTransportation Company 
and ships from Boland and Cornelius.  When first started in Rogers City as WCAF, 
the station became the first ship-to-shore radio-telephone station in the Great 
Lakes.

In the years following the station's name changed from WCAF to WHT in 1923 to WLC 
in 1924.  Between 1930 and 1941 the station was moved several times before settling 
in at the current site just on the edge of Calcite Harbor.

WLC, Central Radio and Telegraph Company of Rogers City, is operating this year 
with new owners.  Since March 15, Randy Martens of Rogers City and Susan Rutledge 
of Hessel have run the communications station this shipping season after purchasing 
the station from former owners Transtar, Inc.

Martens had been operations manager at the station since October, 1987 when he 
replaced the retired Harvey Peltz, and Rutledge was serving as business manager for 
the former owners before the purchase. The station continues to provide 
communications, engineering and design services, marine weather via voice, data and 
facsimile, land mobile telephone service as well as a paging and answering service.

Presently the station provides weather information seven days a week, 24 hours a 
day during the peak season, passes communications traffic to freighters throughout 
the Great Lakes, makes phone-call patches for sailboaters and acts as a central 
message center for ships on the lakes.