Calling with COWs: What it took to use a cell phone in downtown OKC in the weeks after April 19th, 1995
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — Kurt Beecher walks Harvey Avenue in downtown Oklahoma City as aimlessly as someone might while looking at their cell phone, but he is different in that he's probably more connected than most.
Beecher is a longtime cell technician and engineer.
He's been with the phone company for more than 30 years, building the bandwidth from analog to 5G, and he remembers the challenge of a young system unable to handle the volume of a terrorist attack.
'It's a different perspective,' he offers. 'Analog technology. One call per channel.'
The city has changed a lot in that time, but Beecher can still point to where Southwestern Bell teams brought in a cellular truck on wheels.
'Right here in this parking lot,' he points, standing behind the current OCU Law School parking lot.
They still call them COWs today.
'Cell on Wheels,' he said. 'The network was so busy on that day, we'd never experienced it before.'
The first truck came in from Dallas in response to April 19th, filled with columns of radio transmitters.
Beecher points to an old photograph of the inside of that COW.
'These were radios. These were amplifiers,' he said.
Each light on the panel represented one call.
'We stayed and we watched it. If there was a problem, we fixed it immediately,' said Beecher.
He doesn't know why, but he kept a trove of snapshots from that time tucked away and buried in a box.
What Kurt recalls is what was in the air during that time, cell phone signals, yes, but thousands of thoughts and feelings too. Each one responding to something tragic with whatever they could muster.
'The interesting thing,' he argues, 'is not what any one person did. It's what everyone did.'
If you got a call out from downtown OKC in the weeks after April 19, 1995, to deliver news, good or bad, or to tell someone you were okay, it probably came from a COW or a maxed-out cell tower hastily erected to meet demand.
Beecher is still on the job 30 years later, long after the COWs went home.
He works for AT&T these days.
Kurt recently donated his collection of photos and mementos from that time to the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum.
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