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It was the early days of FM radio. March 27, 1955, owner Harry Eidelman signed on his new FM station in St. Louis, KCFM. Studios and tower were in the Boatmen’s Bank Building on Olive downtown. Later, Eidelman moved to a new location to save money.

With the help of broadcast engineer Ed Bench, Eidelman moved the entire operation, including the broadcast tower, to an old warehouse at 532 DeBaliviere. The new 300-foot steel tower was self-supporting and didn’t need guy wires, but the legs literally came down through the building’s roof and were anchored in the floor.

At the time of the move, KCFM was one of six FM stations serving the market. Theirs was a “beautiful music” format, but advertisers were reluctant to put their money into the relatively new medium and the station operated on a shoestring budget. Two of the FM stations here were non-commercial.

Things went smoothly, until the night of May 12, 1960. That’s when Eidelman got a phone call at home around midnight from Walter Vernon, the announcer on duty, who said he saw smoke in the studio coming out of an air conditioner. Writing about the incident later in the Post-Dispatch, Eidelman recalled he “gave him the only advice I could come up with at the moment! Call the fire department and get the heck out of there.”

Vernon, the announcer, did as he was told, and the janitor on duty was quick to follow. The first alarm was struck at 12:12 a.m. At about the same time, someone passing by the building saw smoke and ran to Engine Company 30 at 541 DeBaliviere, across the street from the studios, to alert firemen there. The radio station quickly filled with thick, black smoke and flames burst through the roof, causing another major problem.

The excessive heat had begun to melt the steel tower legs.

Within moments, the huge tower came crashing down. It fell to the north, into the National Food Store at 546 DeBaliviere, setting off that building’s sprinkler system. Multiple fire alarms were called with a total of 25 pieces of fire equipment and 100 firemen dispatched to the scene. It took firemen several hours to get the situation under control, and Harry Eidelman’s radio station was set at over $50,000 – a total loss.

The supermarket suffered smoke and water damage and there was also smoke damage in the nearby Winter Garden Skating Rink, The Toddle House and Hampton Cleaners. Two firemen suffered minor injuries on the scene.

In his Post-Dispatch article, Eidelman wrote, “…there was nothing left of the building that had been KCFM. DeBaliviere looked like the Fourth of July. Within an hour, every member of the staff was standing in the street looking at the ruins.

“The next morning we gathered at the ashes and tried to decide where we could go with KCFM now. We could take the insurance money, which would not pay off one-third of our bills, and fold up. Or, we could try to rebuild something. The consensus of the entire staff was, let’s go forward. They even offered to go without their paychecks until we were back in business, but that didn’t become necessary.”

Ed Bench remembered, “I salvaged a transmitter cabinet and all the parts I thought I could use. We rented a storefront across the street and I cleaned up the stuff I had salvaged and built a one kilowatt transmitter.”

Within five days KCFM was back on the air, operating with reduced power and using space on its old tower atop Boatmen’s Bank, which was, by then, the primary tower for KETC-TV (Channel 9). Within a few more days, KCFM was operating at full power. Ed Bench recalled in a later interview that only one of the market’s radio managers offered help: Robert Hyland of KMOX.

Eidelman reminisced about those trying transitional days several years later. He told a Globe-Democrat reporter he was listening one night a few weeks after the fire when the music suddenly stopped. He rushed downtown, took the elevator to the 19th floor, ran up the last two flights of stairs and rushed into the studio, where he found his announcer fast asleep, the classical record still spinning with the turntable needle at the record’s center.

A year later, KCFM’s DeBaliviere location had been completely rebuilt, along with a 500-foot tower at the site. In 1978, Harry Eidelman sold KCFM to a national corporation, Combined Communications.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 5/08.)

The call letters KBMJ were originally assigned to the radio station at the University of Missouri – St. Louis.

Official assignment came on December 27, 1968, however the station did not go on the air until 1972. By that time the call letters had been changed. The FCC granted the calls KWMU on April 11, 1969.

The station, at 600 kHz, is the carrier current student operation at St. Louis University.

In the the mid-twentieth century, the radio business was a lot different behind the scenes than it is today. One of radio’s unseen workers from those days has some pleasant memories.

Tom Lyons grew up in rural Southern Illinois, and he has vivid memories of listening to KWK on the farm radio. “I always liked it. ‘Recall It and Win’ with Tom Dailey and Gil Newsome’s record shows. Somehow as a ten-year-old kid I was really fascinated by it all…Later when I was a high school student, it was Spider Burks, Bob Osborne, Ron Lundy, Anthony Oren on KWIX-FM and some guys on the old Star-Times’ KXOK like Art Rice and Ed Bonner. These guys played great music.” As he got older, Lyons set his sites on a radio career: “Radio represented a quality of life I wanted. It was a romanticism, the fact that I would like what I was doing.”

He joined Local 4 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and got on their engineering “extra board” in 1968. “At that time you had engineers on duty at the studios and usually controlling the transmitter by remote control. They had to be on duty twenty four hours a day, so I’d get a shift to work here and there. I’d work at KXOK, KSD, WIL. It was fun. When vacation openings came up in 1968 at KATZ, Lyons got the assignment. He showed up at the studios, which were in the Arcade Building downtown. “Gabriel was their all-night disc jockey, and I remember he’d put the microphone on a long cord and run it over by the window and do his show there. The regular studio was pretty well insulated, but he wanted the sounds from outside.”

At that time, KATZ’s announcers were all using “drop-ins,” which were pre-recorded sound effects and quick voice quips, and this kept the engineers busy. As the “extra board” man, Lyons mainly did studio work. “I could do production work there, even though you had to do it while you were on the air.” So he’d be editing audio tracks for commercials and mixing music beds while records were playing on the air.

“Doug Eason and Donnie Brooks were both announcers there during those days and their on-air styles were very different. Doug was laid-back. He was about the easiest person I’ve worked for. Donnie was flamboyant, aggressive, had a lot of ego. This wasn’t necessarily bad. He was flashy.”

The disc jockeys of the ‘60s and ‘70s were true celebrities in the eyes and ears of their listeners, and they worked hard to earn that status. Because of that, the announcers each established a certain persona and then developed it. Lyons says his fellow engineers helped him when it came to dealing with the personalities. “By the time I actually got to the point where I was working with these disc jockeys, I had been told who had the egos and who were the ones who were okay…Dr. Jockenstein (Rod King) really developed a niche. He wasn’t the ego type. He understood what life was like. All the people who worked with him loved him…Back then they had engineers and they had talent, and the end product was electrifying. You could feel the energy coming through the radio.”

The on-air staff at KATZ were all male, and all African-American, or “Negro” as was the popular term of the day. It gave a man like Lyons, who had been raised on an Illinois farm, a much different perspective on things. “You became aware of injustices, improper treatment by police and malicious prosecution.”

And although they had earned the aforementioned celebrity status, most black announcers in the ‘60s and ‘70s were not paid as well as their white counterparts, which meant, Lyons says, that they were always hustling, doing personal appearances or concert promotion to earn extra money.

It was a different time in the radio business and it was an era that will never be repeated, but for Tom Lyons, the memories are good.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 06/04)

In 1955, downtown St. Louis was teeming with activity, and the Arcade Building was filled with business tenants, including a new one that began operating on January 3 of that year. St. Louis Broadcasting signed on with KATZ on that date, and its studios and offices were on the southwest corner of the second floor. At least one first-hand account notes that the frequency, 1600 kHz, was obtained after it was relinquished by the St. Louis Police Department.

Station manager William Garrett moved to St. Louis from Cape Girardeau, where he had worked in the radio business for the previous 11 years. He reported to Bernice Schwartz, the owner of St. Louis Broadcasting Co. She lived in Chicago.

There was little fanfare in the mainstream press when KATZ went on the air. Daily newspapers printed versions of the official press release: “Aimed at Negro listeners, KATZ will employ Negroes as announcers and as entertainers.” Sales manager Robert Hetherington, who came over from WIL , was quoted as saying the station would specialize in “spirituals, rhythm and the blues.”

By all accounts, Mrs. Schwartz’s operation was a minor success. She sold KATZ two years later for $110,000. The buyer was a national chain, Rollins Broadcasting, based in Wilmington, Delaware. Wayne Rollins’ company specialized in broadcast properties aimed at the Black community. It was at this time that the KATZ Educational Assistance Fund was established. Made up of educators and social workers from the Black community, the fund raised money and allocated grants to grade and high school students. Subsequent owner Laclede Radio, Inc., continued the effort.

That ownership transfer came in 1960. Just three years after it had bought KATZ, Rollins sold the station for $600,000. During its short ownership, Rollins had increased the station’s power from 1,000 watts to 5,000 watts.

Laclede held the station until 1986, and the years were rocky. The Arcade Building fell into severe disrepair, forcing the owners to relocate to the Missouri State Bank Building. Lawsuits were traded with other Black-formatted stations in St. Louis over charges of misleading listeners. The local Black Nationalist Movement set up pickets charging all the stations with “directly exploiting black people.” The group demanded three hours of airtime a week devoted to black nationalism programs free from white censorship.

In 1986, Inter Urban Broadcasting of St. Louis purchased KATZ and its sister FM station, finally bringing them under the ownership umbrella of a local minority-owned company. The stations were purchased by San Diego-based Noble Broadcasting in 1992 and then by Jacor Communications, Inc. in October of 1998. Clear Channel Communications bought out Jacor in 1999.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 05/99)

The two stations were called the Kaydee Twins, and they were heard in the St. Louis area until 1965 when financial problems and a strong labor union shut them down.

Station KADY went on the air April 3, 1958, licensed to St. Charles at 1460 Kc. The corporation’s president and general manager, Harlan Moseley, Jr., who was a former advertising executive with Young & Rubicam, announced in a press release that the station had received permission from the F.C.C. to start program tests on that date, and it was decided to air programming from 5:30 a.m. until sundown. The transmitter and studios were about three miles north of St. Charles on Highway 94 at Route B in Boschertown.

Within a couple months of sign-on, KADY’s ownership changed hands and the corporation’s treasurer, William Cady, took control by purchasing Moseley’s shares. He started planning the expansion of the company to include an FM operation, and KADI-FM signed on December 11, 1959, at 96.5 Mhz. Cady was also a former ad man, and he hit the streets in October with an advertising rate card for both stations two months before the FM station was even on the air. His creativity shown in the card’s editorial content:

“With the many conflicting claims made today by competing radio stations, one thing stands out – it’s not the numbers in an audience, but rather the purchasing power those numbers represent, that counts.

“More than 50 percent of the mail received at KADY-KADI carries postmarks from St. Louis County postal zones or municipalities, where the average income is over $7,000; where almost 20 percent of the families own two or more cars, where almost 72 percent own one car; where almost 75 percent have had some high school education or more; and where the population has increased by 40.5 percent since 1950.”

KADI-FM had its transmitter in the city of St. Louis’ entertainment district at Grand and Olive atop the Continental Building. Unlike its AM counterpart, KADI was not required to sign off at sundown, and its program day ran from 5:30 a.m. to midnight.

The AM signal was simulcast during the hours it was on the air. At 5:30 a.m., listeners of both stations heard the news and duck report. Another duck report was aired at 4:15 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Most of the rest of the FM programming consisted of the sort of musical shows normally associated with early FM radio: “Stereo Album Time,” “KADI Matinee,” “Melody Lingers On,” Candlelight and Silver,” “Lamplighter’s Serenade,” “Starlight Symphony,” and “For Dreamers Only.” News was broadcast hourly on both stations.

In late 1962, the stations were sold again to another broadcaster, Rodney Erickson, who owned interest in a station in Syracuse, N.Y. He resigned his job as president of a television distribution company to devote all of his time to his radio stations.

Aubrey Williams took the job as manager of the local stations, but it appears, in retrospect, that Williams and Erickson were in over their heads. Employees of both stations sent a telegram to the F.C.C. on February 14, 1964, saying they would shut down the stations unless management paid all past-due and current wages in full. They made good on their threat the next day, and it was several days before management could get back on the air using temporary employees.

Williams told newspaper reporters the stations were two weeks in arrears on wages but negotiations were taking place to bring workers back.

KADI-FM remained off the air though, due to “technical difficulties.” There are conflicting reports in area newspapers and F.C.C. files regarding the life of KADI-FM after the shutdown, but according to F.C.C. files, authorization was granted to the owners to keep the station off the air through January 1966.

But on January 21, 1965, members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers who worked at KADY walked out because they had not been paid in over a month. Owner Rodney Erickson ordered interim manager Homer Griffith to shut down the station so “financial reorganization” could take place.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 10/03)