and became known regionally as "Your Neighbor Lady". Speece was still continuing to do her Marconi Award-winning broadcast more than sixty years later when WNAX celebrated its eightieth anniversary in 2002. In October 2005 Speece announced her retirement after almost 66 years of continuous broadcasting. She died on October 22, 2007, at 90 years of age. Other well-known regional radio personalities from WNAX have included Norm Hilson, Whitney Larson, "Happy" Jack O'Malley, Bob Hill, Ed Nelson, Jerry Oster, Carl Thoreson, Steve (Mike) Wallick, George B. German, Roland "Pete" Peterson and the hillbilly performers on the WNAX Missouri Valley Barn Dance show. Gurney's sold WNAX for $200,000 to Gardner Cowles Jr.'s South Dakota Broadcasting Corp. in 1938. The station joined Cowles media holdings that also included The Des Moines Register & Tribune, KSO and KRNT in Des Moines, Iowa, and WMT in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In 1942 the station built a tower at Yankton at , which was the tallest radio broadcasting tower at the time. The current tower is tall. In December 1944, the Blue Network announced that WNAX, along with Cowles sister stations KRNT in Des Moines and WCOP in Boston, would be among six new affiliates of the network effective June 15, 1945; the affiliation change would ultimately coincide with the network's rebranding as the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Prior to this affiliation, WNAX had been a CBS affiliate. Concurrently with the termination of WCOP's ABC affiliation on June 15, 1951, WNAX and KRNT would also leave ABC and rejoin CBS. In 1957, Cowles Broadcasting Corporation sold the station, along with co-owned television station KVTV (now KCAU-TV) in Sioux City, Iowa, for $3 million to Peoples Broadcasting Corporation, a subsidiary of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., which, in turn, was an affiliate of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation. Peoples sold WNAX to Red Owl Stores for $1.5 million in 1965. Control of Red Owl was acquired by Gamble-Skogmo in 1967; the transfer occurred before seeking FCC approval, and in 1968 the commission ordered Red Owl to sell its stations. WNAX, along with WEBC in Duluth, Minnesota, and KRSI AM-FM in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, was then acquired by Park Broadcasting in a $2.9 million deal announced that July. In December 1983, a fire destroyed the main WNAX building. All of the station's historic live recordings as well as thousands of records were destroyed. The staff of WNAX went to