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In early April 1998, a man who could be called the father of FM rock radio in St. Louis passed away in Jacksonville, Florida.

Ed Ceries and his wife created a classical radio station in the basement of their home in Crestwood on Feb. 11, 1961. They called their station “the lady of FM” and they gave it the call letters KSHE.

An article by James Kearns, Jr., in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch back then described the infant station at 1035 Westglen Drive as being spread out through the home’s rathskeller and basement, with the Associated Press teletype next to the clothes washer. Ceries had been an engineer for 20 years at KSD radio and television, then owned by the Post. At the age of 40, he decided to build his radio station.

KSHE broadcast fine arts, classical music and drama seven days a week from 7:45 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. The couple had one full-time and two part-time announcers to help them. Their life savings went into building the station, and Ceries is quoted in the article as saying, “The advertisers are staying away in droves. They find it hard to believe that FM is here to stay”.

This lack of advertising support forced the couple to slightly modify KSHE’s format in July of 1962, lightening the music but maintaining 10 percent of its music list in classical selections.

Drama was also a factor on the station. Sundays meant listeners could hear history’s great dramas, including many works by Shakespeare. Lectures from the Washington University Graham Chapel series were also broadcast. The Ceries admitted their operation was run on a shoestring. The news desk at KSHE consisted of several trays atop the chest-type freezer, into which wire copy was sorted. The trays had originally served as Mrs. Ceries’ baking pans.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 5/98)

Anyone who ever worked at the “Old” KSHE has vivid memories of “the window,” that small aperture in the studio wall that served as the connection point between the deejay and the outside world. The cinder block building in Crestwood became a virtual mecca for rock music fans, and “The Window” was their blarney stone.

In the words of former KSHE jocks:

Gary Bennett: “I helped a guy one night find his lost dog. I went on the air and said where this fella lived and described his dog. Sure enough, two days later there’s a knock on the window and it was this guy. Somebody had found his dog. He was so appreciative he gave me a big chunk of hash and a couple of candy bars.”

Sir Ed: “Of course, people would come up and knock on the window. That’s how I met my wife. John Williams was really good friends with my wife’s friend. And she had befriended me. She worked at a couple bars and John would get free drinks from time to time. The two women came out one Sunday to get tickets and that’s how I first met my wife.”

John Williams: “The window had curtains, and if you kept the curtains open, everyone could see you. Your back was to the window and you’d have to turn around to see someone. They’d hold up notes. They’d bring you food. They’d bring you dope. They’d ask you for dope. If you opened that window it was like a floodgate. I had incredible experiences through the window.”

Steve Rosen: “I remember one time I was at KSHE and somebody knocked on the window and it was Chuck Berry and his girlfriend. And he came in and we interviewed him. He just came in, sat down and talked. He knew Shelley [Grafman, one of the station owners].”

Don Corey: “People would come and knock on the window which could be frightening at 3 in the morning. A lot of the time they just wanted to talk. Some would buy tickets. Sometimes there’d be a group of six or seven people just standing around talking.”

For Joy Grdnic, being a woman on the air meant there were plenty of window visitors, but for a different reason than most of the other jocks. “People would come to the window just to see what I looked like.”

Bob Burch: “The window was really fun when the streaking fad hit. The girls would come up and press their breasts against the glass. We always had a bunch of characters coming up there. I had a guy put a gun up to the window once. Then he turned around and ran away laughing. I’d keep the curtain closed.”

Ken Suitter: ““It was nothing to hear a knock at the window and turn around in your chair and a naked woman would be standing at the window. The window, you got to meet all kinds there. People offered you drugs. I remember people coming down to the window with a barbecue pit, and the guy said he didn’t have anything else to do so he decided to come down and cook me a steak.”

Loren Cornelius: “If you were doing 7:00 to midnight or midnight to 6:00 you’d turn around and there’s be people at the window and it’d scare the shit out of you. Most of them were stoned out of their minds when they showed up.”

Joe “Mama” Mason: “You really could talk to the listeners. You could crank the window open. One time a guy came up and knocked on the window and asked if I remembered him. He was about 22 years old. I didn’t remember him. He said ‘I came here four years ago and talked with you and you talked to me all night long. I was just out of high school. I’m here to thank you. You talked me into going to college. I just graduated and I’m here to thank you. You were the only reason I went to college.’

“When I was really in the thick of things, every single night there’d be at least 10 girls who would come up and take their tops off at the window. It was really that crazy.

“There were girls just coming out of the woodwork. They’d show up at the studio or take their clothes off at the window.”

Rich Dalton: “The world famous KSHE window became a rite of passage in St. Louis. Especially on weekends, people would come and party at the KSHE window. And as crazy as it seems now, t-shirts and concert tickets were sold out that window by deejays. One deejay was busted by a St. Louis County cop for selling dope out that window.”

For Brother Love, who had the wake-up shift on KSHE, the window wasn’t sex and drugs. It was rock and roll. “The record guys would come by before the station opened. They’d come to the window and bring me the new records.”

Al Hofer: “I think if you want to build a legendary radio station and you want to reach out and touch the community, you need a window like KSHE had.

“When I would do weekends, people would literally come up there when I was on and hang out all night long. I was on from 7 ‘til midnight Saturdays and Sundays, and they would bring their coolers and other party paraphernalia and hang out, occasionally request songs, but it was a party.

“People would come from miles around. There was this great mystique about the station. And the fact that the tower was right there was extremely cool too.

Mark Klose: “Behind you on the back wall was the window, like a transom window that leaned in. You’d be on the air and they’d stick their head by the window and call out to you. Some of them would reach in while you were on the air and grab some records and take off.”

Ted Habeck: “I remember getting the shit scared out of me a lot from that window. The station wouldn’t spend $5.00 for a mirror so you could see it when you were on the air. Invariably somebody would wait until you opened the microphone before they’d come banging on the window.”

Gary Kolander: “You’d be there doing the overnight shift and all of a sudden at 3:30 in the morning BAM, BAM, BAM on the window. It’d scare the hell out of you.

“There was one New Years’ Eve I’ll never forget where this blond came up with two glasses of champagne. She handed me one through the window and said she’d just come up to wish me a happy new year. We toasted, and I said ‘Just a minute, the song’s ending.’ And she said ‘Happy New Year,’ and she lifted up her shirt and pressed against the glass. I’ve got about five seconds left on the song I was a little flustered, to say the least. I got the next record going. It took maybe 30 seconds. I turned around and she was gone.”

KSHE’s window went the way of all great legends when the station moved from its infamous cinder block studios in Crestwood to their downtown location at Union Station, and with the move a part of rock radio’s fabric was lost.

(Reprinted with permission of The St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 1/2-10).

KSHE was granted a construction permit on September 7, 1960 for a new broadcast station at 94.7 mHz. A license to broadcast was issued June 15, 1961. The license was owned by Rudolph Edward Ceries, who went by the name of Ed. He and his wife broadcast from the basement of their home at 1035 Westglen Drive in Crestwood.

Mr. Ceries had previously worked as an engineer for twenty years at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch broadcast properties in St. Louis, KSD and KSD-TV. He literally built some of the original KSHE equipment himself. He and his wife also helped with announcing duties.

KSHE was dubbed “the lady of FM,” and the station’s format began as all classical, later shifting to emphasize the arts, playing classical, semi-classical and light music. Radio drama was also broadcast, with the typical day running from 7:45 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. They employed one full-time and two part-time announcers.

In 1962, ownership was transferred to Crestwood Broadcasting Corporation (Robert H. Orchard, E.V. Lowall, Keith S. Campbell and Rudolph E. Ceries. They sold the station to Century Broadcasting, effective October 1, 1964.

The new owners changed the station’s format to “progressive rock” in 1967 in an effort to turn a profit. Although there is a St. Louis disc jockey who claims credit for the change to rock music, no documentation has ever been found to back up his claims. By the end of the ‘60s, KSHE was becoming one of the nation’s leading “underground” radio stations. The studios and tower were located at 9434 Watson Rd. (Highway 66) in Crestwood. This site became renowned as a pseudo-shrine among listeners and employees, as listeners had easy access to announcers in the small, cinderblock building, which had a drive-up window from a previous incarnation.

Manager Sheldon “Shelley” Grafman is fondly remembered by his staff as a guy who made the whole thing work. He served as GM, sometime PD, sales cheerleader and collection agency. Realizing the need for a bigger identity, the station applied for and received permission to identify itself as “KSHE, Crestwood-St. Louis” in August of 1973.

In 1984, owner Century Broadcasting sold KSHE to Emmis.

When KRCH signed on in May of 1967, Igor was there, pumping out 24 hours of “adult music” every day. Chief engineer Mike Waldman remembers Igor well: It was an IGM automation system installed in the control room in the Siteman Building at 111 South Bemiston in Clayton.

The nickname can be attributed to those people who had to baby sit the machine, and it’s doubtful the moniker came out of admiration. Anyone who dealt with those early automation systems knows they were finicky and undependable, prone to malfunction on a whim and for no apparent reason. Unlike today’s radio stations’ KRCH always had a live person on duty. The announcers were expected to be personalities, producers of commercials, and babysitters for Igor.

Born near the beginning of the FM boom, KRCH was on a frequency of 98.1 mHz, which was the old KSTL-FM dial spot. Foreground Music, Inc., the corporate name for the company owned by Gerry Mollner and Richard Friedman, was the licensee, but their first priority had been to buy KSHE from then-owner Ed Ceries in 1963. The amount they offered was $5,000 too low, and Century Broadcasting, owned by the Grafmann brothers, was the successful bidder. Foreground was able to purchase KSTL-FM from the Haverstick family in 1967, and they were required to jump through a few hoops with Clayton’s municipal government in order to get a “special permit” to locate their offices there. Initially, company vice president Richard Friedman got a recommendation of conditional approval, providing he put the transmitter and tower somewhere else.

Within three years, a new tower was erected in downtown Clayton. Dick and Nancy Friedman remember it well. “We had a helicopter take the pieces up. The man who owned the hotel, Meyer Loomstein, knew we had to drill through the roof. In fact, for a long time I had a cone of concrete sitting on my shelf. It had been a piece of the roof of the Colony Hotel that they had to drill through to anchor the 72-foot tower. We had to do it on a Sunday. We had cleared everything through the City of Clayton so it wouldn’t mess up traffic.”

The format was described in a Post-Dispatch article as relaxed, good music, “75 percent instrumentals and 25 percent vocals – selections from Broadway shows, updated versions of old favorites, and new, good music numbers.” The station bragged that it had pioneered an approach in St. Louis in which only eight minutes of commercials were played each hour. “We were probably one of four local stations with an easy listening format; Harry Eidelman’s KCFM, I think WIL-FM and WRTH were also doing it,” says Dick Friedman. “It was popular all over the country and was doing very well for the stations that had it then.” In 1970, an hourly gimmick was added in which the newsman would broadcast alternately in stereo through the left and right channel, which supposedly gave listeners an opportunity to appreciate stereo separation.

It was one thing to get a station on the air, but as many others had found, it was another thing to actually sell enough advertising to make money on the deal. “What you would run into was some people saying ‘You guys are going to ruin it with all those commercials. You’re going to make it like AM radio. We like it the way it is now with beautiful music for long periods of time and no commercials.’ We’d overcome that by telling them there’d only be 8 minutes of commercials per hour, which meant there were 52 minutes of music.

“I can’t tell you how many people told us we were going to go broke and we were crazy for going into the radio business. It was terrific. Don’t listen to the naysayers,” says Friedman. By the time KRCH was sold to Bartell Broadcasting 5 years later, the Friedmans felt they had done well on their investment. The purchase of KSTL-FM had cost less than $100,000. The sale price to Bartell was several times that amount. New call letters, KSLQ-FM followed the sale.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 04/02)

KRCH came into being on May 1, 1967 when those call letters were granted to Foreground Music, Inc., which had purchased the old KSTL-FM frequency. The station had been silent for nearly two years. A “good Music format” was broadcast.

In 1969, a construction permit was granted allowing the station to increase its power to 100,000 watts and change its tower location. The new tower was erected atop the Colony Hotel in Clayton, across the street from the studios at 111 S. Bemiston.

A couple years later the license was assigned to national broadcast powerhouse Bartell Broadcasting, which was later acquired by Downe Communications. The call letters were changed to KSLQ on August 3, 1972.

When KMOX ownership announced plans for a new experimental FM station in 1941, international circumstances prevented the project from coming to life. When the station finally did come back to life two decades later, no one seemed to know what to do with it.

While FM broadcasting in 1941 was in an experimental stage, the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 of that year put a halt to technological broadcast development, and although several FM stations signed on in St. Louis following the war, most “went dark” within a couple years.

On Feb. 12, 1962, KMOX-FM signed on. The broadcast day initially ran from 6 a.m. until midnight, and it was a 100 percent simulcast of the KMOX-AM programming. It was this simulcasting practice that had caused the failure of those other FM stations in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. Listeners, it seems, saw no reason to buy a new radio to listen to programs they could hear on the AM radios they already owned.

Then, in 1967, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that 50 percent of FM programming on co-owned stations had to be original rather than simulcast. KMOX-FM began providing its listeners with what was called “The Young Sound,” a format consisting of middle-of-the-road music with selected current hits mixed in. These music tapes were provided by CBS in New York. The fact that the music was in stereo was a big selling point and gave reason to listeners who had considered buying high quality FM receivers.

This evolved into “The Sound of the ‘70s.” A Globe-Democrat article on April 11, 1970, quoted station general manager Robert Hyland, “KMOX-FM stereo…avoids the hard rock to concentrate on adult pop – the tops in popular music for the 20-40 age group.” In the Post-Dispatch in November of that year, Hyland wrote: “To keep KMOX-FM stereo on top of things, we select new music each day. Each week we review the music we are broadcasting and add at least eight new singles and ten new albums to the station’s repertoire.

“Our future plans include specials devoted exclusively to various types and categories of music, as well as programs built entirely around individual artists.” Hyland didn’t mention that his FM station would also serve as a dumping ground for sports broadcasts. In those days, KMOX-AM had play-by-play rights to every major sports team in the city. When there were two teams scheduled to play at the same time due to the overlap of sports seasons, one team would have its broadcast shifted to the FM station.

Most of the musical programming decisions came from Bob Osborne, a KMOX employee who wore many hats. He was also heard as a deejay on KMOX-FM and was the voice on many of the station imaging spots. Many other people were deejays on the station during those two decades, and their paths to the seventh floor studios at 1 Memorial Drive weren’t always pleasant. There were times when GM Hyland would “farm out” talent from KMOX. Some saw it as a punishment – radio’s equivalent of the proverbial trip to Siberia. But there were others who used their announcing jobs there to supplement their free-lance voiceover income.

Live deejay shows were seldom heard on KMOX-FM. Instead, taped voice tracks were inserted into the station’s huge automation system in the hope listeners might think they were hearing someone live. The black monster filled an entire room and contained all sorts of electronic bells and whistles. There was even a large tape cartridge that contained a time signature for every minute of the day (“It’s 12:15 at KMOX-FM.”), with everything designed to make the station sound live. But it cost CBS less to pay people to record voice tracks because each jock could turn out several shows in a short time, and they were only paid for the time spent recording. It didn’t seem to bother station management that there were occasional technical miscues, causing listeners to hear the announcers introducing a song that had been heard ten minutes before.

The end of KMOX-FM began in August of 1981 when CBS began the national experiment known as “Hit Radio.” The station’s playlist began its transformation with more current pop hits being added, and by the end of the year, the KMOX-FM call letters were dropped, replaced by KHTR.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 02/08)