How our phone's navigation apps destroyed SigAlert

We killed Loyd Sigmon twice.

The first time, the universe killed him – in the cosmic way of universal adios, that is, someone who was 95 years old.

But his second death? We are responsible for that. Death by technology. Death by extinction. Death by trusting apps more than our own brains.

There's no denying it – the directions app that orders you around on the road literally squeezes the name Loyd Sigmon and that of his namesake, that fine Southern California creation that preserves life and saves time: the SigAlert.

A SigAlert is Caltrans’s warning to two- and four-wheel drivers in Southern California that there is a unexpected confusion on the highway This will take at least half an hour, so plan your route accordingly.

Many radio stations used to broadcast traffic reports regularly, and some still do. Some local TV stations' news bulletins send you to work, home, or an evening out with up-to-date traffic information. And if you're already on the road, radio stations offer the same – but less than before.

KIIS and KFI are among those still in the traffic mix, and KNX provides its “Traffic on the Fives” reports. However, the most sought-after traffic news can be found on K-APP – phone apps.

But they are mostly without Sig. As people turn away from terrestrial radio, they're also turning away from SigAlerts. The word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1990s, but Caltrans says that to the agency's knowledge, “SigAlerts” simply don't show up in the usual traffic apps.

It would be a damn shame if the word SigAlert became obsolete. With SigAlert's 30,000-foot view, navigating the beautiful chaos of LA's freeways is easier than using the close-range navigation of a phone app.

Loyd Sigmon was a radio executive and co-owner of radio station KMPC with cowboy star mogul Gene Autry. Sig's baby was born 70 years ago this fall, on November 17, when he first demonstrated how it could alert any normal, average person listening to the radio.

His red light system was not as majestic and noble as “What has God done?” – Samuel Morse’s first Morse telegraph message 110 years earlier – but when you are close to it, 42,000 pounds of honey spilled while speeding down Freeway 605You won't tune in for the poetry.

Other cities have adopted the SigAlert service, but Southern California has taken SigAlert to heart and incorporated it into its vocabulary; it was one of the first things I learned in LA when I came here. It has survived a variety of spellings—Sig Alert, SigAlert, Sigalert, Sig-alert, Sig-Alert. In its lonely glory, SigAlert even has its own traffic app, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, Waze.

Now let me tell you the SigAlert storybefore it fades to asphalt.

Loyd Sigmon was born in 1909, the same year that Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun shared the Nobel Prize for “their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.”

At military school in Missouri, the other boys nicknamed Sigmon “Radio Bug.” He adopted “Sig” as his amateur radio name. One Christmas he built his father a detector radio receiver that people at home said was at least as good as anything Atwater Kent or Stromberg-Carlson had on the market.

In his late 20s, he worked as an engineer in Kansas City at a gas station owned by MacMillan Petroleum Co., which managed to local call signs KMPC. The bosses wanted him to work in LA and lured him with a ticket to the west, a rented convertible, a reservation at the Beverly Wilshire and another at the Brown Derby.

But soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor he was sent in uniform to Europe, where he eventually headed the communications for the Supreme Allied Command. His invention, the SigCircus, was a truck-mounted mobile radio unit that carried messages between the United States and Europe – and supposedly between the White House and Downing Street. By the end of the war he was a lieutenant colonel and returned to Los Angeles convinced that America must keep its peacetime listeners at wartime levels.

In November 1954, he demonstrated the new SigAlert system for the first time to an audience of military and civil defense officials. His motto: We should all be forewarned when the enemy's H-bombs are coming our way.

But even with a Cold Warthey gave Sigmon's baby the cold shoulder. He took it to the police next, and it was a hit: a push-button alarm that could radio millions of people in seconds about emergency calls, a low-tech version of the Amber Alerts we know today.

Here's how it worked: Any number of police officers could call a police dispatcher, who would record the information on Sigmon's tape recorder. The dispatcher would then alert radio station technicians with a red light and a special “subcarrier” tone that the message was ready for broadcast, and the radio stations would turn on their programs to broadcast it with the words “THIS IS A SIGALERT BULLETIN.”

The first SigAlert was issued on Labor Day 1955, a Monday, on the six radio stations that had signed on. A train had derailed at Union Station and nurses and doctors were needed. So many came that the crowds themselves posed a small danger.

The first SigAlerts gave the impression of a small-town crier. In the first three months, 86 SigAlerts were issued, of which only 36 were for traffic problems.

The rest were warnings about rabid dogs, warnings to certain people that their pharmacists had inadvertently concocted potentially lethal drugs, warnings about impending Air raid siren testsa warning about a turn signal at a certain street corner and a ship collision in the harbor.

Flooding on Freeway 5? Almost certainly a SigAlert scenario.

(KTLA-TV)

In December 1963, a SigAlert informed the residents of Baldwin Hills that the dam in the hills above them was about to breakand it undoubtedly saved lives. A teenager on a bicycle was hit by a car and since he only had his school ID for identification, a SigAlert was sent out and a woman who heard the boy's description recognized him and put police in touch with the boy's mother.

These early devices cost about $600. They were originally manufactured by Packard-Bell in conjunction with Sigmon's company, Federal Electronics Corp. The Long Beach Independent called it a “nice box” measuring 9 by 8 by 7 inches that plugged conveniently into an electrical outlet. Within a year, four dozen cities in California and others in Arizona and Nevada had adopted the SigAlert system.

Deep down, Sigmon admitted, he thought this was a way to lure listeners to KMPC. But when he took his device to LAPD Chief William Parkerthe boss said he would take it on – but it had to be available to every station. No competitive advantage. As a consolation, it is said, Parker mentioned the SigAlert system.

In 1965, on the 10th anniversary of SigAlert and the 10,000 alarm mark, KTLA dedicated a half-hour television tribute to Sigmon and his baby.

The California Highway Patrol took over operation of the system in 1969 and still uses it for nasty accidents and truck crashes common in late-night comedians: thousands of gallons of hot tar, two tons of cantaloupes, twenty tons of plywood, a load of bras, an entire house still decorated with Christmas lights, an old-fashioned outhouse (unoccupied), $7,000 in quarters, and a body from a hearse.

Sigmon himself drove a white Cadillac with the license plate SIGALRT and retired from LA to Oklahoma in the spring of 2000, where he died in 2004.

He and his SigAlert were the fathers of numerous flying traffic reporters for Los Angeles, blessed with vivacity and excellent eyesight.

KIIS had “Commander Chuck Street,” KTLA had Jennifer York. Future news anchor Kelly Lange was cast as “Dawn O'Day” in the air for the morning helicopter rush hour assignment at radio station KABC. (Her afternoon counterpart was Eve O'Day.) It was radio, but the station dressed Lange in a figure-hugging silver lamé jumpsuit and knee-high silver boots.

KFI had “Bruce Wayne, KF-Eye-in-the-Sky” and the television station KNBC had helicopter pilot Francis Gary Powers.

Wayne was an air traffic reporter for nearly 25 years. He died in 1986. when his Cessna crashed on takeoff.

And Powers and cameraman George Spears died in an accident in the San Fernando Valley in August 1977 while returning from filming bush fires near Santa Barbara. He was The Francis Gary Powersthe Air Force officer who flew a U2 spy plane that the Russians shot down in 1960. Through a prisoner exchange, Powers returned to the West and eventually ended up in Los Angeles.

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