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“We ate a lot of peanut butter.”

That was how Marshall True described his economical diet in the early, lean days of starting a radio station in Belleville, Illinois. True, his World War II army buddy Marvin Mollring, and investors John Lewis, Paul Wnorowsky and John Schultz launched WIBV, 1060 AM, on July 13, 1947, at Fischer’s “Dutch Girl” Restaurant, 2100 West Main Street, Belleville. An hour of music that Sunday morning was followed by a remote broadcast of religious services from Signal Hill Lutheran Church at 8100 West Main, Belleville. No doubt the newcomers to the St. Louis radio market prayed along with the broadcast that the peanut butter would hold out.

True sold advertising, Mollring did the radio engineering work, Wnorowsky was General Manager and Paul Rusky served as Station Manager. True’s challenge would be to get WIBV a piece of the Belleville advertising dollar in a town where small businessmen had the habit of spending their money with two daily newspapers. Wnorowsky and Rusky would have to develop programming that would offer something unique for Belleville area listeners.

 

 

Mollring would keep the transmitter humming and maintain the broadcast equipment. The original broadcast day ran from 6 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. The restaurant/radio combination seemed to work well for both parties: Dutch Girl patrons could watch the announcers as part of their dining experience and the station had an accessible presence in the community.

The Belleville News-Democrat radio listings for October 4, 1948 presented the daily programming for seven AM radio stations: KSD at 550, KXOK at 630, WIBV at 1060, KMOX at 1120, KWK at 1380, WIL at 1430 and WTMV at 1490. Variety seemed to be the strategy at WIBV since the schedule had 15 minute segments of news, sports, farm features, Man on the Street, Good Neighbor, Pumpernickle, Roy Shaffer Show, Tumbleweed Tunes, Polka Time, Myrt and Marg, Victory Quartet, It’s Dancetime, 1060 Supper Club and Golden Bantam.

Country music was popular in the post World War II years and in 1950 country singer Johnny Rion joined the WIBV staff for two years as a live performer and record spinner. WIBV programming in the early 50’s featured Cactus Joe, Buy in Belleville, Dr. Crane, Country Preacher, plenty of local news and sports and Bill Bailey, who had compiled an impressive resume. Bailey advanced into the Program Manager and Station Manager positions and represented the radio station in the business and civic communities during that period. He later hosted the Downtown Club show from Schlosser’s Restaurant on East Main Street.

By the mid 1950’s peanut butter was still on the menu at the True household. The Federal Communications Commission allowed WIBV to move to 1260 AM at 1,000 watts of power. The increased power meant the broadcast tower would have to be lengthened. To save the expense of contracting the work, Marshall True fashioned a chair on a hoist and extended the tower himself, according to Terry True, Marshall’s son.

In the mid 1950’s Lee Pennock was cuing up the records and Reverend Ed Oxendine was a regular feature. Other programs included Hillbilly Hoedown, Wagner’s Wagon, Just Call Joe, Joe and Paul, and a new announcer who would prove to be very popular with Belleville’s sizable German audience. He spoke with a stereotypical German accent, told jokes, played records and touted himself as Otto Schultz, “the man with the sauerkraut head.”

Eddie George, also known as Otto Schultz, held a daily fifteen minute late afternoon slot and a half hour Saturday afternoon time period for the next twenty five years, introducing polka tunes and getting chuckles from his audience while relating the imaginary lives of “Fritz, Lena and the whole schmier.”

 

Bob Hardy, who later became synonymous with KMOX, St. Louis, started at WIBV in 1955 and performed the usual chores of running the control board, playing records and reading news stories and commercials. Norm Greenberg began a 22 year career with WIBV in 1958. Greenberg debuted as a newsman-announcer, moved to advertising sales and eventually Program Manager, Assistant Manager and General Manager.

 

Lloyd “Moe” Harvey and Ron “Uncle Buck” Lipe joined the Belleville radio team in the 50’s. Moe spent about 30 years at WIBV. Part of his on-air shift included the “Stop the Housework” program and the annual “Let’s Talk Turkey” phone contests. Lipe became a “rocker” in the 60’s on KSHE-FM, St. Louis, assuming the moniker “Prince Knight.” Lee Coffee, WIBV Program Director in the late 50’s and early 60’s , left WIBV and enjoyed a long career at several St. Louis radio stations.

Bob Armstrong worked vacation relief in 1957 and recalls running the control board on Sunday mornings “for the live religious programs in the big studio. There was a gospel group from East St. Louis that had the place totally rocking!” Armstrong also remembers running the board for Otto Schultz with his trademark intro to polka songs, “You watch me Fritz, and I count ‘em off…ein…zwei…drei…schpiel’” Armstrong was promoted to the Program Director’s position and worked with News Director Al Schmidt, a retired Belleville newspaper reporter. In 1960, WIBV moved its broadcast operations from Fischer’s Restaurant to a new building at 3199 South Illinois Street, a mile and a half south of Belleville on Route 159.

 

Roger Gafke was hired full time in the news department in 1965. He wrote editorials for GM Glen “Skip” Deffendall, who had succeeded John Lewis. WIBV began identifying itself as “The Voice of Metro East.” Gafke remembered fellow announcers Tom Ryther, Charles Napier, and Jeff Hendricks, who WIBV sent to Viet Nam to interview area soldiers. Hendricks finished out his radio career with Chicago radio giant WLS. Roger Downey worked at WIBV in 1969 and 1970. Terry Ganey worked in the 1260 newsroom from 1968-1972, when Frank Walters held down the morning shift.

 

Joe May estimates he has called between 3,000 and 4,000 high school, college and minor league games since he began at WIBV in 1970. Other staffers on the air included Pete Basch, Ron Jacober, Harry Swift, Joel Myers, Bob Agne, Frank Joachimsthaler, Tom Calhoun, Wil Jackson, Les Weatherford, Bill Cook, J.C. Hall, Ray Brammer, Mark Langston, Mary Ann Faulbaum, Mac Chamblin [and long time news director Jack LeChien].

Marshall True and Marvin Mollring retired and sold their interests in WIBV in the late 1980’s. The station was sold several more times before the year 2000 and each of those owners attempted to create a “regional” radio station that would attract more listeners and more advertising income. The WIBV call letters were quietly, unceremoniously retired when Disney Radio adopted WSDZ in late 2002.

(Excerpted and reprinted with permission of the St. Clair County Historical Society. Originally published in the Journal of St. Clair County, 2003.)

Sheldon Davis and his partners paid too much for his radio station in St. Louis. It had a lousy signal and half the market couldn’t pick it up. But for his employees, it was a helluva ride.

Davis bought a station in 1985 from Robert Skibbe and Janet Gorecki that was licensed to Jerseyville, Ill., so that’s where the broadcast tower was located. Even with licensed power of 50,000 watts WJBM-FM’s broadcasts couldn’t be heard in South St. Louis or Jefferson County.

Davis’ plan was to produce a station, marketed to St. Louis, that played country music. He wanted to give local powerhouse WIL-FM a run for its money, which would be no small feat, given the limits of the broadcast signal.

Thus was born WKKX-FM, “KIX 104.”

But there was a lot about the business that was beyond Davis, so he hired consultant Rusty Walker to put together a staff and guide the operation. Walker’s hire as the local program director was John King.

“John and I ‘imagineered’ KIX at the trivia machine in the bar at Tony Roma’s next to the hotel where we were staying,” Walker says of the station’s beginnings. “Neither of us took any notes – we were just ‘jamming’ and kept it all in our heads.

“The next day at the unfinished studio facility (concrete floors and card tables), we had to recreate everything we’d done the night before. I’m not sure how much we actually retained.”

Buddy Van Arsdale, “Bud Man” on the air, has similar memories.

“When I got there in September of 1985, the office and studio space on the tenth floor of West Port Plaza were pretty empty. John King had us tracking down music from the old Jerseyville station library or buying what we needed from record stores.”

King’s goal was to give country listeners something different. “The point was to be a pop sounding station that happened to be playing country music,” he remembers.

To that end, Van Arsdale recalls increasing the speed of the records slightly to brighten the station’s sound.

The first on-air line-up featured Mark Elliot and Diana Rivers in morning drive with Jack Warnick handling news; Bud Man from 9 – noon; John King 12 – 3; Scott St. John 3 – 7 (whose shift was taken over by King fairly quickly); Michelle Kent 7 – midnight; and Al Richardson overnights.

Staff turnover among sales personnel was so frequent that newsman Warnick said there was no use trying to remember their names until they’d lasted on the job for a minimum of six months.

Even the erection of a new broadcast tower in Godfrey during the station’s first year of operation failed to overcome signal problems. Mike Anderson, a former announcer, remembers a remote broadcast from Arnold in which the station’s broadcast team at the shopping center couldn’t even pick up the station.

After a year of operation, company president Shelly Davis admitted to an Alton Telegraph reporter, “We’re prepared to lose several million dollars and right now we’re doing a good job of it.”

There may not have been a lot of money, but the staff was young and competitive. Michelle Kent has fond memories of a concert sponsored by rival WIL. KIX jocks stood outside the Arena handing out their bumper stickers to ticket holders. When a WIL guy told them to leave, they did, but not before they “papered” the WIL remote van with their stickers.

“We all were working for a common goal,” she says, “the success of this start-up.”

Anderson remembers KIX as “kind of like a thrill ride at an amusement park. It was the station that always seemed to be climbing the hill but never got to the top. Every achievement was made against seemingly impossible odds.”

Commercial success never came. Consultant Walker says the staff experienced late payrolls, and jocks were shorted on talent fees. He himself worked for two years as a consultant without being paid.

Within six years the station was sold to Zimmer Broadcasting for slightly more than the original purchase price. There had been a lot of red ink, and a lot of fun.

Walker looks back on WKKX as “the most successful unsuccessful station in the history of country radio.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 10/08.)

It was really the ultimate in portable radio, and it came to East St. Louis in January 1927. Instead of the radio receivers being portable, the radio station was.

The East St. Louis Daily Journal carried a front page story on Dec. 26, 1926, heralding the imminent arrival of WHBM, stating, “Radio station WHBM is going to put East St. Louis on the aerial map.” This claim could probably be chalked up to the bandwagon effect. Across the Mississippi River, St. Louis had several stations operating by 1926, but the Illinois side had none. That’s when Charles Carrell came on the scene.

National radio historian Thomas White traced Carrell to Chicago, which was initially the base of his portable broadcast operations. WHBM was licensed to Chicago at first. Another researcher, Donna Halper, found that it was a popular entrepreneurial move in the 1920s to take a radio station “on the road” to communities like East St. Louis. In her words, “They brought radio to towns that otherwise could not have supported a station.”

WHBM was brought to East St. Louis by the city’s chamber of commerce. A group spokesman told the newspaper, “This company [Carrell] offered us the services of their trained staff of technicians and consultants…we were to be the judges of whether or not such a station would be acceptable to us…”

Carrell’s group did everything right. “Tests” were conducted in late December, broadcasting two programs from the Lyric Theater, with Paul Godt playing the Lyric organ “broadcasting sweet melody.” The newspaper accounts in late December had already begun leading the public to believe that the station may put down permanent roots: “The Chamber of Commerce will gather to discuss the practicability of installing the station here for all time.”

The next day’s issue made the official-sounding announcement on its front page: “WHBM…is to be permanent, following decision of the Chamber today.” It would take to the airwaves five days later from studios in the Chamber of Commerce offices. Chamber manager Les Foreman was named “official announcer” for the station.

Following the official inaugural broadcast, which featured a speech by Mayor M.M. Stephens, the station settled into a daily schedule of variety programs. News bulletins were broadcast by the radio editor of the Daily Journal at 5:30 p.m. each day. After initially carrying articles about the various radio programs for a week, the Journal cut back its daily coverage to a Page 2 box listing the day’s shows and times. By Jan. 19, sponsorships of several programs had been sold and were listed in the box.

Major feature articles ran in Sunday editions, extolling the value of the “advertising” the city was receiving via its radio station. Two months into its operation, WHBM received a letter from a listener in Utah, which was no small feat, considering that the station was broadcasting with 100 watts at 1390 Kc.

By March 20, it was all over. Newspaper articles were now more specific on the initial agreement, stating that “…it [the station] was to be installed here and operated on a trial basis, to ascertain whether the city of East St. Louis would respond to a station of its own…it was agreed that the station would operate during an experimental period up to and including March 20th.” The final broadcast in East St. Louis was March 19, 1927. None of the newspaper accounts of the station, save those at the very beginning, mentioned C.L. Carrell.

Researcher Halper learned that Carrell had been a theatrical impresario in Chicago, overseeing several traveling companies. It was, therefore, no coincidence that many of the WHBM broadcasts originated from the Lyric Theater. It was Carrell’s way of getting publicity for his people, which got more people to go to the theater.

By 1928, the Federal Radio Commission outlawed portables under General Order 30.

As a footnote, only one article about WHBM could be found in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and it listed the wrong call letters (WBHM).

(Reprinted with permission of the St.Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 10/98.)

When Bettye Robinson started working at WESL July 31, 1972, as a receptionist, she had no way of knowing how many changes she’d see in her 35 year career there.

You may not recognize her name, because most of her work was behind the scenes, although she was called on to work in the control room occasionally when a jock was late for a shift. She readily admits to becoming the mother figure for many of the station’s announcers over the years.

The station had just recently returned to the airwaves when she was hired, having gone dark because of financial problems. WESL signed on July 10 of that year under the ownership of E. St. Louis Broadcasting. The company was overseen by majority owner Dr. Wendell Hansen. “He was a jewel. I loved him,” says Bettye Robinson. “He would come in once a month. We’d have a sales meeting and he’d give us a pep talk. We made a lot of money with him.”

Hansen was a real character, even by radio standards. He had a group of trained birds which he’d occasionally bring to the station, where he would put on a bird show. “He was just good for the station,” Robinson recalls. “I think we made more money under Dr. Hansen than we did under any other owners. He’d worked with radio and with black people before and he knew the kind of music blacks liked. He knew how to deal with people.”

Reverend Robert Wolf, the station manager, had hired Bettye Robinson, a process she recalls fondly. “He was the best manager I had. He taught me so much about radio. There was an article in the paper and he said he was looking for a receptionist. So I came down. He said ‘Are you sure you want to work in radio?’ I told him I’d give it a try. And Reverend Wolf asked if I could type. I told him I could, so he sent me to the E. St. Louis employment office to take a typing test. That was on a Thursday. He called me at home the next day and asked if I wanted to go to work. I asked when I could start and he told me to come in Monday.”

At that point, WESL featured block programming. Don O’Day had an oldies show. Ken Brantley hosted a program of gospel music. Program director Decatur Agnew even asked the station’s receptionist to host a daily five-minute household hints show. Bettye Robinson remembers writing the scripts using a big book full of information. She also took calls from listeners who had specific questions. Her 2:00 p.m. show, Bettye’s Household Tips, ran for about a year.

Everything at the station changed in January, 1984, when Bishop L.E. Willis of Norfolk, Va., bought WESL. The format was switched to gospel and all the announcers quit. Bettye Robinson has been the administrative assistant to Dr. Hansen, and she performed many of the same duties as the station liaison to the bishop.

Ten years later there was another owner, nightclub impresario Robert Riggins. His hope was that he could use the station to promote his club, and for awhile it worked well. Blues musicians appearing at the club would drop by the station, which was a thrill for Bettye Robinson. “With Mr. Riggins I met all the blues people and they’re very nice. Johnny Taylor, Bobby Bland, Bobby Rush. I met so many entertainers I’d heard about.”

But Riggins’ lack of knowledge of the radio business proved to be his downfall. He spent money to add on to the studio building, envisioning an increase in the sales staff. “He was going to hire all these people to come in and turn things around,” says Robinson, but it never happened. “Mr. Riggins never really moved into the new building because he got sick. That was his dream – to move into the new building.”

In the late ‘90s, Bettye Robinson decided to retire to pursue another dream, but those plans took a detour. ““I retired from WESL in 1999 on a Saturday evening. I had a big retirement celebration. Mr. Riggins asked ‘What are we going to do without you? I don’t know radio.’ And Mozella, his wife, said, ‘You can’t leave us.’ So I told them I’d come back and help until they could find someone. I went back the next Monday morning and ended up staying.”

Another ownership change came in November of 2004. Simmons Media bought WESL and later moved out of the E. St. Louis studios, consolidating operations with another radio property in a building on Laclede’s Landing on the Missouri side of the river. The format was also changed, bringing back Bettye Robinson’s thoughts of retirement. WESL, she says, would never be the same. “Home is that little building that sits at 149 S. Eighth Street, and when I think of WESL, that’s what I see in my mind.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 3/2007.)

What set Joy Lepp apart as a teenager was the fact that there was a radio station in the basement of her house.
When she was 16, Joy’s father, Joseph Lepp, realized his lifelong dream by building a commercial station, WCBW-FM, in the basement of his Columbia, Illinois home. This meant Joy and her two brothers experienced a home life unlike those of her peers. For one thing, there seemed to always be music in the background. And there was a constant stream of people coming to work and going down the basement stairs. And, as a sort of added bonus, Joy got to be on the air.
“Everyone in the family voiced commercials,” says Joy, who is now Joy Kocher. “I did a daily spoof of the local weather girls and put on a sexy, disguised voice. All the guys at school wanted to know who our weather girl was.”

Joy wasn’t the only Monroe County teenager involved with WCBW. Steve Schmidt from Sts. Peter & Paul High School in Waterloo had a regular air shift using the air name “Steve Williams.” “My parents had been friends with the Lepps for years. When my dad told me that Joe had applied for the radio station license, I said I’d love to work there. Like any other 17-year-old guy growing up in the Johnny Rabbitt era, I thought being a deejay would be really cool.”

Steve was on the air the first day of operation, February 15, 1964. He was told to play some music and read the news. “Dad had about fifteen record albums to start,” says Joy Kocher. Schmidt says the music consisted mainly of “easy listening” material from artists like Percy Faith and Mantovani. “In the initial years all the deejays decided on which music we would play. I was the closest thing to a program director or music director that WCBW had. I worked the record companies and distributors for new product and ordered the deejay promo copies of albums that we needed,” Schmidt said.

Dorothy Lepp, Joe’s wife, was “the rock who kept things going,” says Joy Kocher. “She loved the excitement and disruption of having WCBW in the house.”

Dorothy did all the office work, even writing commercial copy and occasionally reading news on the air. Joe kept his day job at the Missouri Pacific Railroad, and he also found time to sell ads for the station and sometimes pulled an air shift. “Dad loved radio,” Kocher says. “Grandma said he used to pretend he was working at a radio station when he was little.” The realization of that dream came when he was 52.

WCBW-FM was typical of most small town radio stations in the mid-60s, according to Steve Schmidt. Even though it was on the fringe of the St. Louis market, the station’s programming was aimed at the Monroe County audience. “I hosted the German Music Parade for awhile, and Polka Time was on every day at 5:30. There were also plenty of remote broadcasts from local churches.” Joy and Steve were teamed to host the station’s teen show for about four years. Steve also remembers anchoring a local news show which consisted of reading tidbits out of the Monroe County newspapers. “I think the papers sponsored the show. I was supposed to read the first couple lines of each story and then tell the listeners to buy the papers for more information.”

Joy was one of the staffers who read the obituaries provided by the local funeral homes each day. “It was during the Vietnam War. I had to read the obituary of a friend of mine who was killed in action. It was one of the hardest things I ever did.”

Other announcers in the early days of WCBW-FM included Eric Stiegerman and Tony Mayer, who hosted a German-language program, and regulars Jim Gray, Bill Ray and Dick Ross. As one might expect, the station’s equipment was bare bones in the beginning. “There was no tape cartridge machine for about the first six months on the air,” according to Schmidt. “You either read the commercial live or played it back on the Roberts reel-to-reel machine. (Commercial copy, often hand-written, was kept in a three-ring binder.) We broadcast in monaural sound at 104.9, and the tower was out on Cemetery Hill.” Joy Kocher remembers staffers having to go to Cemetery Hill several times a day to take transmitter readings.

Eventually the station was moved out of the basement and into the Lepp’s garage. Steve Schmidt says the move was made in the early ‘70s and became necessary because the Lepp’s basement, like many others, was susceptible to flooding.
(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 11/2003)

The date was April 10, 2005. Smooth jazz listeners who turned on their radio station in St. Louis that day found something completely different from what they expected. There was no more smooth jazz on WSSM.

Overnight the music had been replaced. The music they heard was a mixture unlike anything else in the market. WSSM was history, replaced by a format that had been tried and proven in Phoenix. It would take St. Louis by storm, vaulting the station’s ratings to No. 2 (18-34), No. 1 (25-54) and No. 1 (35-64) in the most recent Arbitron survey period.
To hear John Kijowski tell the story, the idea for the station was hatched and developed shortly after Radio One bought St. Louis’ WRDA from Emmis and changed the format to Urban.
Kijowski, who is Vice president/market manager – Bonneville St. Louis, says the market is about 18 percent African American.
“To really do great with smooth jazz, you need to capture a majority of the African American audience and you have to make huge inroads into the KEZK audience. We only got a small portion of KEZK’s audience, and on the African American side we ended up competing with Majic. When Radio One got Tom Joyner and St. Louis picked up a second adult African American signal, there was no way I could be the third choice for African Americans.
“We began creating a game plan for “The Arch,” and I wrote up a summary of what we wanted to do. I called our Phoenix station and told them [at the Phoenix office] that I’d followed their success, and they told me they weren’t going to do the “Jack” format. They told me what they’d done and I thought we could do it in St. Louis. Phoenix is more of an A/C market, and St. Louis is more of a rock market. I knew I’d have to adjust the playlist.”

“Once I got the go-ahead for a format change, a team was assembled: Joel Grey (P.D. from The Peak in Phoenix), Greg Solk (head of programming for Bonneville), Matt Bisbee (Director of Creative Services for Bonneville Chicago), Drew Horowitz (Senior Regional Vice President Bonneville, Inc., from St. Louis), WVRV Imaging Director Jude Corbett, former WVRV P.D. Marty Linck, our Marketing Director Abigail Pollay and myself.
Greg Solk would later tell Radio Monitor magazine the actual format change took about 45 hours, “It was quite a launch,” he said.

Grey agrees: “Greg Solk and I showed up in the middle of the night, took the Peak basic format from Phoenix and put it on the air in St. Louis and then modified it to make it a St. Louis radio station.”
Kijowski says, “When other broadcasters ask us how we did it, I tell them it was totally a group that did that over a weekend, turning it around in 48 hours. The first month we did not have an on-air personality. Then we brought in locally known players.”

Jules Riley arrived from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in June and took the job of program director at The Arch. She says initially, the target audience was 25-54 women, but the current Arbitron shows listenership is evenly divided between men and women. “Our station came out of the gate strong, and we already had guidelines in place on spots and clutter – things that people had said they didn’t like about other radio stations. Recently a caller told her, ‘We listen to the station because my wife and I can agree on it.’”
Riley and music director Al Hofer pick the daily playlist from 1,100 titles (at least double the size of most station lists) and constantly tweak it.

The success of The Arch in St. Louis isn’t surprising to a longtime radio observer. Bob Kochan, owner of Kochan and Company advertising, is quick to praise the large playlist. “A music mix that is not so narrow allows for variety without the frequent repetition of songs to work to their benefit. The decades of music they cover gives them the ability to capture the listening of more audience in more demos. It also reinforces the theory that the market will embrace a station that is promoted as different and fresh.”

That promotion has an attitude. Using the highly recognizable voice of John O’Hurley for imaging, the station assigned the actor an identity: Simon Archer. He records scripted material provided by station personnel to help give The Arch local flavor. Riley says humor is an integral part of the atmosphere at WARH. “You can’t take yourselves too seriously. I mean, it’s radio. We’re not saving lives here.”

The image is also enhanced by the pledge to never play the same song twice in the same day. This philosophy came from studies that showed heavy music repetition to be a tune-out factor among listeners.
There’s no doubt the station is a huge success, not just locally either. It’s getting national trade press attention for its huge Arbitron ratings.

John Kijowski tells SJR he’s running The Arch with an eye toward the future. “Technology has allowed people to get the music that they want to hear when they want to hear it, completely customized for them, whether it’s their I-Pod, satellite – whatever they want to hear they can get now. Tightly fitted formats have less and less appeal. We keep our ratings up by keeping the music fresh, and we live up to what we say we’re going to do. We have to do it differently to keep them listening to local radio. Local jocks are vitally important. We intentionally try to make the music flow crazy.”

And the result of that crazy music flow? “This means we’re going to have [formatic] trainwrecks all over the place,” Kijowski laughs, “because that’s what the adults want to hear.”

But Kijowski says music mix isn’t everything. “Personality is really important in how we built this radio station, because if it were nothing more than a juke box I don’t believe we would be as successful as we’ve been. The jocks have a lot to do with the success.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 09/2006)