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A Smack From Above

It was a powerful wind that blew through St. Louis the evening of July 19, 2006 . Forecasters did not see it coming, so there was little, if any, chance for broadcasters to get out warnings. But even if they could have foreseen it, it would not have helped KTRS.

After the fact, a National Weather Service spokesman said the St. Louis region experienced a series of north-northeasterly downbursts, which included several microbursts. The storm, he said, is called a “derecho.” Anything in the path of the wind was in danger, including radio towers.

Just a couple miles northeast of downtown St. Louis , the tower site of KTRS was hit hard. The four-tower array was built on the Mississippi River flood plain in Illinois half a century ago. Two of the station’s four Blaw-Knox towers were felled that July evening. A National Weather Service spotter in nearby Bunker Hill , Il., recorded a gust of 92 miles per hour.

Now, KTRS station ownership must cope with an extensive rebuilding process, made more costly and complicated by the possibility that all four towers are covered with lead-based paint.

58-Year-Old Site

The transmitter facility was built by Pulitzer Broadcasting in 1948 for its St. Louis station, KSD. Officially activated November 22 of that year, the towers were constructed during a major expansion of the broadcast facility, which included the establishment of the market’s first television station and a signal upgrade that gave KSD 5,000 watts, both day and night.
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch story heralding the site construction noted each tower was 450 feet tall and weighed 70,000 pounds. The westernmost tower ran a 5,000 watt daytime signal and, with the other three towers, providing the 5 kW nighttime pattern. At that time, there were 16 stations at 550 kHz; KSD had to protect WKRC in Cincinnati , WJIM in Lansing , Mich. , and KFYR in Bismarck , N.D.
Each tower leg sat on a concrete pyramid base. “At the base of each tower is a small building which houses the apparatus used for tuning the antenna to serve its special part in broadcasting KSD programs and preventing interference with other stations,” the article revealed. “The transmitting apparatus is housed in a building about 830 feet from the westernmost tower.”

Development of the site had taken two years, as the F.C.C. construction authorization came December 9, 1946 , a time when materials were scarce due to World War II. The 68-acre plot of land – rural at the time of construction – is still considered remote today, surrounded by cornfields and a huge landfill.

“It’s one of the great old tower sites,” says KTRS chief engineer Mike Breitenstein.

Mother Nature has shown destructive powers throughout history, but recent history in the St. Louis area had been relatively calm. When the wind storms rolled through on that evening in mid-July, the destruction that was left behind was incalculable. Thousands of trees were uprooted or destroyed. A large percentage of them fell on electrical wires.

The local electric utility, Ameren Union Electric, estimated 500,000 homes were without power – it was the largest outage in the history of the utility. The emergency was the logical time for the public to turn on battery-operated radios, and it was the wrong time for a talk-format station to be off the air.

The Benefits of Planning Ahead

Breitenstein says the station was quick to recover from the effects of the loss of two towers that night, in part because of something he did several years ago.

“In the late ‘90s I created a second non-directional tower,” he says. “We needed it for those times when maintenance was necessary. It gave us the ability to continue a non-directional signal during those times when we had to perform maintenance on the primary non-directional tower.”

So when the July storm hit, felling two of the towers, “I was able to get us back up and running within a couple hours,” Breitenstein said. “I took us down to 500 watts until we got the [FCC’s] authorization.” After the station’s signal was restored, KTRS was able to switch into a local mode in which the programming focused on storm damage and making sure listeners got the information they needed for their safety and recovery.

Station manager Craig Unger says their Washington attorneys were in the FCC offices the next morning. They asked for and got permission to go with a nighttime signal at 1250 watts, non-directional, rather than the normal 5,000 watts, directional. The Commission gave the station an initial six-month Special Temporary Authorization (STA) window for repairs.

Assessing the Damage

In the daylight following the storm, KTRS management was able to gather information on what had transpired. “You don’t really understand the magnitude and power of a storm until you see something like this,” said manager Unger.

Breitenstein said it looked like the failure point had not been in the towers’ steel structure but rather in a much smaller part. The steel, he says, was in good shape, even though the towers were 58 years old. But the Lapp insulators appear to have been the weak points.

Those insulators failed,” he said. The National Weather Service spokesman said the highly variable winds at excessive speeds put unnatural stresses on everything. Hardest hit, he said, were trees that were subjected to twisting.

In the case of the KTRS towers, it appeared the winds exerted stresses that shattered the insulators at the base of each tower. One tower simply collapsed. The other, Breitenstein says, looked as though it had been picked up completely from its base and deposited next to it, where the structure collapsed. He said there were distinct prints from the tower’s four legs in the soil next to the base.

A station employee had an apt description: “It looked like it had jumped,” he said.

Looking Ahead and Planning

For KTRS ownership, the storm may have a silver lining. They had recently installed a new transmitter in an effort to improve nighttime coverage. Now the loss and subsequent tower replacement could further that effort by giving KTRS a chance to improve its night pattern. The timeline, says the station manager, is loose right now.
Insurance will help, says Unger, “but as all station managers know, the insurance manual for this sort of thing is usually about 80 pages long. We’re getting bids now and weighing our options.”

Those options could include relocating the nighttime towers to a new site, but that’s not too likely. In any event, nothing can be done until the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency checks out the lead content in the old tower paint. Unger believes there’s no real problem there, but station ownership will have to go through proper channels when it comes to disposal of the scrap metal – and that disposal may not be limited to the two flattened towers.

Unger says consulting engineers will probably be brought in to design a new site plan for four new towers. “There’s great ground conductivity out there in the flood plain,” he says, “and we want to continue to take advantage of that. There are probably a lot of different things we can do with that site.”

In the meantime, thanks to Breitenstein’s planning, KTRS continues to pump out the watts, serving its listeners during fair weather and foul.

(Reprinted with permission of Radio Guide. Originally published 9/2006)

The year was 1948. GIs returning from the European and Pacific theaters were being assimilated into the nation’s booming economy and the nation’s metropolitan areas were spreading rapidly as new housing units sprang up in the suburbs.

It was in this environment that James L. Grove, president of Grove Laboratories at 2630 Pine, began his quest to build a new radio station for St. Louis. He incorporated Radio St. Louis, Inc., and applied for an AM frequency (690) for a new 1,000 watt radio station. Grove’s medicine manufacturing business was well-established in the community. He made himself chairman the station’s board of directors.

Application for the station was announced February 6, 1948. Grove said he would name the station KBGS. He hired Frank E. Pellegrin to be president and general manager of the company. Pellegrin brought significant background to the job, having served as the director of the broadcast advertising department for the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, DC.

When the station’s inaugural broadcast was heard on June 4, 1948, it was under a different set of call letters, KSTL. Studios were located on the mezzanine level of the American Hotel at Seventh and Market Streets downtown. As for format, a spokesman called the sound “mood sequence programming” of music and news, and it was clear the station was avoiding certain images. One news account noted there was a “wide range of recorded music, but [it] includes no hillbilly numbers or hot jazz…the station, which uses no disc jockeys [and] uses the slogan ‘less yakity yak.’”

Pellegrin announced his intention that the music would accent the melody rather than novelty with no “hot jive programs. On the other hand, we will not be too highbrow or longhair…Our announcers will introduce the programs and musical numbers with a minimum of chatter.” KSTL reportedly showed a profit after four months of operation Employees from other stations in the market were hired: Brad Harrison from KMOX became the KSTL news director and Edward Galloway from WEW was appointed musical director. Edward Haverstick from the investment firm of Smith, Moore and Company, was the corporate secretary-treasurer.

An ad in 1949 bragged that the station had “the 4th strongest signal at the lowest cost per thousand of any St. Louis station. By then, less than a year after it signed on, the station had a new general manager, R.L. Stufflebean. William Ware was next in line as GM, but he died in 1953, so Dick Kasten was appointed to the job in February 1954. It was during his regime that KSTL-FM signed on in April of 1960.

But Pellegrin and Ware had been given ownership positions in the company. In 1955, Haverstick, now chairman of the board, filed for a change of ownership so he could buy out those shares. Eleven years later the Haverstick family bought out Kasten’s shares. KSTL was sold by Radio St. Louis, Inc., to Crawford Communications in 1994.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 8/2000)

The first broadcast of the sister FM station of KSTL was April 2, 1960.

It signed on as a Class “B” station at 98.1mHz with 76 kw of power. General manager Dick Kasten had managed to pick up used equipment from a station in Joplin, MO, that had gone dark. The transmitter was in Illinois at the same site as the KSTL transmitter in East St. Louis.

The station was sold 7 years later to Foreground Music, Inc., which changed the call letters to KRCH.

 

When radio stations had individual, rather than corporate, owners, the competition for listeners was evidenced by what was on the air, and what was promised off the air.

KSTL signed on in 1948. The market already had strong radio stations, so instead of emphasizing what it would be, KSTL was promoted by telling the audience what the station wouldn’t be.

The entire radio industry had begun to face the inevitable: television was here to stay and it was taking away all the network stars radio had relied upon. However, in 1948 there were still plenty of network programs for affiliates. NBC and CBS still filled most of the broadcast day and evening, but those stations with no network connection had to come up with their own programming.

There were the special interest shows aimed at women and kids. These were simple and cheap to produce: Hire a host and come up with a script. The more dramatic programs required a staff of actors, sound effects, live musicians and scripts with actual plot lines.

It was easier, and much cheaper, for the stations to hire disc jockeys to play records. And that’s where the station’s image was developed.

KSTL told its audience it would hear “a mood sequence technique with middle-of-the-road musical selections, ranging from old familiar to popular and classical.” Instead of establishing itself by creating a strong, positive identity, KSTL was established as a comparison with other stations, telling people what it was not. “Less talk, less chatter, less yakity-yak.”

In fact, just before KSTL signed on, management told St. Louisans the music would accent “melody, rather than novelty. KSTL will carry no hillbilly or hot jive programs. On the other hand, we will not be too highbrow or longhair, and we do not intend to have disc jockeys as such. Our announcers will introduce the programs and musical numbers with a minimum of talk and chatter.”

KSTL Weatherman Harry Wahlgren In other words, the station’s management was trying hard to not do what the other successful stations in St. Louis were doing.

Within a year, some of the programming boundaries were loosened. Local news was provided through a reciprocal agreement with five community papers. A station profile also boasted of “two noteworthy series of programs: ‘Who’s Who in St. Louis’ is a daily feature presented by tape interviews with outstanding local personalities in all lines of activity, and ‘The St. Louis Forum,’ a weekly discussion of major local issues.

How successful was the station?

A few years later, in 1956, KSTL’s programming included farm reports with Charley Stookey, livestock market reports, the Johnny Rion Western DJ show, Harry Wahlgren’s specialized weather reports and Tony Glenn’s daily mobile transmitter show. So much for no hillbilly programs and less “yakity-yak.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 7/07.)

KSLQ Montage 1976

They called it the “Q” format, and it made a big impression in St. Louis.

And according to those who were on the ground floor, getting there was a lot of fun.

Q hit St. Louis compliments of Bartell Broadcasting, which purchased KRCH in August of 1972. Studios remained in the same place at 111. S. Bemiston in Clayton. The call letters were changed almost immediately to KSLQ, and within a year, the station’s power had been upgraded from 76,000 to 100,000 watts. Al Casey arrived on the scene from Bartell’s Detroit property to engineer the format change from middle-of-the-road music to Q, which would steal away a huge chunk of KXOK’s AM Top 40 listeners.

KXOK had been the station of choice for young people who wanted to hear Top 40 radio. Other rock fans got their kicks with KSHE and KADI on the FM dial. Bartell was breaking through that invisible barrier by bringing high-energy pop to FM radios in St. Louis.

Jonnie King remembers a great work environment, and a trick that created a high-energy sound. “We slightly tweaked up the rpm’s on some of our uptempo hit records. The reasoning was simple: If you were listening to KXOK on AM and switched over to KSLQ-FM and heard the same song, you’d swear we sounded better!”

Peter Skye was working at KADI-FM at the time, and in a conversation with KSLQ’s engineer, learned that program director Al Casey wasn’t happy with the way Q’s sound compared to KADI’s. Skye offered to come over and show them how to adjust the equipment but swore Casey to secrecy, so KADI’s owners wouldn’t know he’d “helped” the competition. But a couple weeks later KADI’s studios burned and KSLQ invited KADI to use Q’s spare studio until replacement space could be found, thus returning the favor.

Skye, who became a Q disc jockey in 1974, remembers, “Jonnie did callout research constantly, asking people he selected randomly from the phone book what they listened to and the names of their favorite artists and songs.”

JoJo Kincaid was part of the Q’s jock staff, and he remembers a high-energy creativity that permeated the on-air side of the building. “GM Ted Smith had mannequins of a mom, dad and two teenaged kids placed just outside the on air studio to remind jocks of our target audience. Considering the fact that most of the air staff at that time were males in our early 20s with ‘creative minds’ to boot, you can imagine the pornographic situations those adjustable, plastic humanoids wound up in.

“Day after day you would come in and find mommy and daddy in different sexual positions…Ted had absolutely no sense of humor. He hit the roof, threatened everyone’s job and ended up removing our demographic inspiration.”

Young Bobby Day says he would occasionally forget the mannequins were outside the studio door and would be startled by them if he came out in a hurry. “I even think I said ‘hi’ to them a few times. Strange thing is, they said ‘hi’ back.”

Young, creative, inspired talent gave KSLQ the early boost it needed. The energy seemed to come pulsing out of the speakers of listeners all over St. Louis. Deejay Gary Bridges has fond memories of one of his assistants. “Frank Accarino was answering phones for me during my show while trying to convince me that he wasn’t hustling the female callers. He just liked to get a rise out of them. Frank was way too smart for the job.

“Mike Jeffries was way too smart to be a deejay, but that’s what he wanted to be. He had a weakness for Mallomar Cookies, which you couldn’t buy in St. Louis back then. Always dated the best-looking women.”

But one of the most creative was Bill Taylor. Bridges remembers his knack for technical work with telephone lines “constructing elaborate party-line calls among nighttime deejays all over the country. He would sit at the grand switcher and ring the hotline numbers of a dozen or more stations, dump us all on a single line to compare notes and, occasionally, all start a song at the same time in cities all across America.”

Terry Fox was 20 when he started at KSLQ, moving over from a disc jockey gig at KWK. “All the guys on the air were single and young and we all loved playing radio and having fun. We even hung out together when we weren’t at the station.”

Fox remembers a station promotion called “The Un-Lottery” based on Jack McCoy’s “Last Contest” on KCBQ in San Diego. “We had 98 different prize packages. They were astounding. Chuck Roberts was our program director at the time. We were just coming up with these prizes off the top of our heads. We blew out the Clayton phone system with listener response. The kid who won wanted the Rolls Royce but he settled for $10,000 cash which is a good thing because we couldn’t afford to give him the car.”

Bartell’s brainchild brought energetic Top 40 radio to the FM dials of St. Louis, and those who were a part of the evolution have nothing but fond memories of the time.

It’s impossible to describe on this page the electricity that permeated the hallways of KSLQ in the 1970s.
Although many on the air staff were part of broadcasting’s proverbial revolving door as management struggled to find the “right” people, those who worked there describe it as the best time of their broadcast careers. In the words of Gary Bridges, “While most other St. Louis stations had long-established air staffs, we swapped out dozens of parts ‘til we found a committed staff of people who worked, and who loved to work…From the day Bartell took over KRCH, the pressure was on to win in St. Louis.”

Terry Fox was “20 or 21 when I got to KLSQ. Here I was in my hometown making radio history. This was FM and the whole market was listening!”

Young Bobby Day, “Working at KSLQ was extremely fun and it was a reflection of the high passion for radio that we had as a staff…The station had a great vibe and we were just radio hippies having the time of our lives together.”

As with most media in those days, there was a business side and a “production” side that developed the public product, in this case, the on-air sound. Corporate program director George Wilson publicly referred to his company’s disc jockeys as “pieces of meat. Instead of causing rebellion, the remarks were largely ignored. After all, the station had soared to the #2 position in the market. The kids must have been doing something right.

Station manager Ted Smith, who always took pains to let you know he’d been a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force, became the perfect foil for his young on-air staff. His tightly buttoned-up demeanor was that of a too-strict father in a houseful of teenagers. This actually worked to his advantage, giving the on-air guys a rallying point that helped create an us-against-him mentality.

Mike Jeffries, who was also known as The Red Baron, was a grad student when he began working at KSLQ. “Studio G-1 was a dump,” he remembers. “While Bartell built new studios on the third floor, we slaved in the basement, really about three steps down off the lobby at 111 S. Bemiston.”

There were plenty of young women, too. The station format had a strong appeal to them, and they were as close as the request line. Announcers never wanted for dates or companionship. Mike Jeffries: “Otis Thomas was a riot. If you heard ‘Stairway to Heaven’ followed by ‘Nights in White Satin’ followed by ‘American Pie’ during his overnight shift, you knew the Boogie Man was in hog heaven.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 9/05.)

                                                                                      (KSHE GM Shelley Grafman)

In 1967, Tom Donahue made waves in California with a radio format unlike anything heard before. A St. Louis disc jockey who was without an on-air gig helped import it to the Gateway City, and a legendary station was created.

Donahue was quoted as asking “How many…times can you play Herman’s Hermits and still feel good about what you do?” He began his first show on KMPX, Los Angeles in April of 1967 saying “This is Tom Donahue, and I’m here to clear up your face and mess up your mind.”

In St. Louis, Howard Grafman knew he had to do something with the FM radio station he had purchased. It had started out, under different ownership, playing classical music. That morphed into a conservative middle-of-road format, including “The Lawrence Welk Show” and a weekly German-language program. Few sponsors were buying ads.

Grafman hired a West Coast man named Harvey Sheldon as station manager, bringing him to St. Louis to turn the station around. Sheldon is portrayed as disliking the idea of changing to a rock format. Nonetheless, that was the job he was given. He was familiar with the work of Tom Donahue at KMPX in San Francisco and Grafman gave Sheldon marching orders to make the format work here.

Enter Ron Elz, who had been running a school for radio announcers in St. Louis. He visited in San Francisco, listened to KMPX, and returned to St. Louis with a blueprint on how to introduce the format here. Grafman wanted a gradual change, saying “We can’t afford to lose our audience that we have now right away.” He also told Elz there was no money to buy any records.

But Elz persuaded local record distributors like Al Chotin, Record Merchandisers and Roberts Records to help him build a station music library.

KSHE also hired new disc jockeys to appeal to its new, younger audience. Richard Palmese, a student of religion at St. Louis University, was given the air name “Brother Love.” Elz’s air name was “Johnny B. Goode.” Lee Coffee was “The Musical Pumpkin,” and Ron Lipe became “Prince Knight.” Don O’Day and Jack Davis rounded out the staff.

There was also a new hire at the top. Grafman brought in his brother Sheldon to manage ad sales. Within a few months, Shelley was essentially managing the station and its playlist. His wife remembers some lean times when the only way the family could eat was on the trade coupons local restaurants had used to pay for advertising on KSHE.

 

(KSHE announcing staff)

Those first announcers recalled phone calls from angry listeners upset with the music change, but it was also obvious young people were discovering KSHE. Word of mouth was spreading among those kids who saw themselves as part of the counterculture movement.

Radio historian Michael Keith wrote about the national movement in “Sounds in the Dark: “Underground radio’s raison d’etre was in step with that of the growing counterculture. It resented the mainstream gestalt of the day regarding countless social issues (war, drugs, race), but most of all it detested formula radio with its 2-minute song cuts and hyper jocks.”

The gradual format change continued at KSHE. Listeners were asked to vote on which artist they preferred – Frank Sinatra or the Rolling Stones. The Stones prevailed.

There is disagreement among station veterans on the exact date of the format switch, but one memory is very clear: The first song played on KSHE to signal the completion of the format change was “White Rabbit” by the Jefferson Airplane.

(Reprinted with permission of The St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 1/10).