And, you could call Merlyn through the Nevada telephone exchange- just tell the operator to connect you to, “Number 22, please”.
Leo had a store, The Farm and Home Store, in Nevada on the east side of Main Street (1225 6 th ) just a half block north of Lincolnway. He kept on display, among all the other farm supplies and gadgets, an all metal taildragger plane which the youngsters of the community would dream up all kinds of reasons to get their folks to go into Leo's store so they could look at the “keen” airplane.
The Neasham family moved to Milford Twp in about 1941 and left in the winter of 1953-'54. They moved to Arizona but Fred, the eldest son, stayed in Nevada with his Mother's Mother and graduated from Milford Twp in 1954. More on the Neashams on page 41.
Leo also was one of the first merchants in the area to stock that new wonder, TV sets. He sold a number of sets to folks before there were any local stations. The closest stations were in Omaha so it was necessary to install a large antenna high above the house and then install a signal booster in the line to the TV set.
WOI-TV, the one-hundredth TV station in the nation, came on the air (on channel 4) on 21 Feb. 1950, and had, for a time four networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and Dumont Networks) feeding them material from the coaxial cable that had been installed diagonally across Milford Twp from the south to the north in a slightly eastward direction. It ran through the Paul Comfort farm where a “boosting station” had been constructed about a half mile north of the Comfort farmstead on Avenue 190. (The "boosting station was a mile and three quarters north of Milford Twp School) This “boosting station” has been removed and a new facility constructed along 180th about a mile north and 3/8 west of Milford Twp school. WOI screen pattern on page 248.
WOI radio was one of the earliest radio stations around. It was on the air, as a amateur station, with the call letters 9YI prior to 1914 with 240 cycle and a signal that was known throughout the midwest. This was before the beginning of voice transmission.
On 21 Nov 1921, 9YI came on the air, apparently with voice transmissions, with a “super power” 100 watts and a wave length of 375 meters. In April of 1922 this station was assigned the call letters of WOI.
WOI was assigned a frequency of 1110 kc in Jan 1925, reassigned to 1130 kc in June 1927, 560 kc in Nov 1928, and finally, in Nov 1929 to 640 kc with 5000 watts of power.
Incidents happen and ironies can come from these events. One of the incidents that happened and the irony that came from it is that a Milford Twp man who survived both WWII and the Korean War died in an airplane accident while engaged in the mundane tasks of farming.
On the 25th of July in 1952, in the early evening, Marvin L. “Ole” Sorensen, a 27 year old man died a couple hours after his light plane had crashed and burned in a corn field just two miles east of Ames. He was a graduating member of the class of 1944 at Milford Twp. He was the son of Harry Sorensen.
Sorensen had flown the plane to the Jay farm where his brothers, Kermit (Milford Twp 1940) and Richard (Milford Twp 1937) were making hay for Mr Jay. The mishap occurred as Sorensen took off heading southwest in the plane. He gained about 150 feet of altitude and