HOLLYWOOD — When the ground shook hard before dawn in January 1994 and half the city lost power, KHWD stayed on the air. Warren Tibbetts had driven to the transmitter in the dark with a flashlight clamped in his teeth, and he held the signal up on the backup generator until the sun came and the panic eased.
Mr. Tibbetts, the chief engineer who kept the Hollywood radio station KHWD broadcasting for four decades, died June 15 at his home in the Cahuenga Pass. He was 91. His daughter said he died in his sleep.
He belonged to the unglamorous half of radio, the half that never speaks into a microphone. The voices came and went — disc jockeys, newsreaders, a morning host who lasted twenty years — but the signal was Tibbetts’s, and he treated keeping it on the air as a duty that did not pause for weather or disaster.
“Warren used to say the transmitter doesn’t care what’s on fire,” said Lucille Ferrante, 72, who read the news at KHWD in the 1980s. “The hillside could be burning and he’d be up there in a wet bandana making sure we could still tell people which way to run. He thought a station earned its license on exactly those nights, not the easy ones.”
He nursed it through more than one such night. A brush fire in the hills once came close enough to blister the paint on the transmitter shack; he stayed. A quake knocked the antenna out of true; he climbed it himself, well past the age when he had any business climbing anything. He kept a cot at the transmitter site and a bag packed by the door at home, and his family learned that certain kinds of news meant he was already gone.
Warren Tibbetts was born in 1934 in Bakersfield and learned electronics fixing radios in the Navy. He came to Hollywood in the late 1950s, earned his first-class radiotelephone license, and hired on at KHWD in 1961, when it was a small operation with a surprisingly big signal. He stayed until he retired in 2001, having outlasted several owners and formats, and he never fully trusted the digital gear that replaced his tubes, though he allowed that it broke down less often than he’d predicted.
His daughter said he was a quiet man who explained the world through circuits, and that some of her warmest memories were of him at the kitchen table, showing her how a signal leaves an antenna and where it goes. He is survived by his daughter, Nadine Tibbetts of Pasadena; a son, Gordon Tibbetts of Reno; three grandchildren; and the station itself, which still broadcasts, now from automated racks he would have found both impressive and a little sad. His wife, Eileen, died in 2011.
The family plans to scatter his ashes near the old transmitter site in the hills, at his request. He had told Nadine once that if she ever wanted to know he was still around, she should turn on a radio and find the space between two stations, where nothing is playing. That faint, steady hum, he said, was the thing he’d given his whole working life to keeping on the air.