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In 1931, a young radio announcer named Woody Klose was sent on assignment to Lambert Field where his job was to be part of the first three-way conversation between pilots in flight and an observer on the ground. In a way, the broadcast was symbolic of the ups and downs of Woody’s career.

He came to St. Louis at age 16 with his family, and, seeking work to help pay for his education at Washington University, he ended up as an usher at the Missouri Theater. From that position he was promoted to doorman at the new Ambassador Theater, which was also owned by the Skouras Brothers.

His university work was aimed at his professional goal, which was print journalism, but Woody freely admitted that he wanted to be a professional singer. The problem was that no one thought he had enough musical talent. That didn’t stop him from trying, though. He spent most of his $12 weekly income on voice lessons, and the idea of becoming a print journalist never got off the ground. He dropped out of Washington University.

One July morning he went to the KMOX studios, which were located in the Mayfair Hotel, and actually auditioned for a singing job. The station’s director of programming, Katheryne McIntire, was in charge of the auditions, and she wasn’t impressed. Neither was station manager George Junkin, and Woody’s radio singing future crashed. A Globe-Democrat account of that day, published later, quoted Woody: “But just as I was leaving the room, Miss McIntire called me. She told me that, although she couldn’t do much for me as a singer, she thought I had possibilities as a radio announcer…I suppose I should have been deeply gratified. Instead, I was just a bit piqued that my talent as a vocalist had not been recognized.”

He went to work on the air at KMOX at the age of 18. Within a couple days, he was assigned to cover an endurance flight at what was then called Lambert St. Louis Flying Field. Sometimes there was nothing to relate, he told the Globe reporter, “too frequently nothing but the bare recital that the boys were floating around in the heavens.” At the end of the flight, he did a live report on the CBS network. It was a perfect way to celebrate his 19th birthday. Management was pleased with his work and gave him a regular, entry level shift of early morning announcing chores, which included a daily exercise program.

Within a few months he had been promoted to other shifts and was voted the most popular radio announcer in St. Louis in one newspaper’s poll. He was still convinced that he was a singer, though, and he explained to the Globe reporter how he saw a chance to impress the station’s listeners. The story bears a faint resemblance to the work habits of a future station manager, Robert Hyland.

“One night,” said Klose, “we were running late, 1 to 1:30. Local artists were the performers. It was my idea that Mr. Junkin would be in bed at that time, so I decided to slip in a song of my own. I was singing quite nobly when I happened to look out the window of the studio into the auditorium. There sat Mr. Junkin. Apparently he was not yet convinced that he had found a boy wonder. He simply grunted and told me to stick with announcing, which I did.”

Woody Klose left KMOX at the age of 22 to join a local ad agency. He continued to search for the magic career, working briefly at KSD as program director and taking the job of assistant manager of WTMV when he was 25. The latter part of his career was spent in advertising.

And that big broadcast involving the pilots and ground communication – it was a bust. All the listeners heard were repeated efforts to establish radio contact: “Come in, Woody.” “Can you hear me, Phil?”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 5/2003)

As a youngster, Don Corey fantasized about being a disc jockey. He’d set up a mock studio with his record player and do shows in his room, eventually getting a very low power transmitter and broadcasting to “three or four houses” in his neighborhood. Then, while a teenager, he hit the big time doing overnights on KSHE.

“I remember calling up Don Shafer at KXOK when I was about 12 years old. I asked him how I could become a disc jockey. He said, ‘Well, first you’ve got to be a little crazy.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got that down.’ He told me about the FCC license I needed and gave me some more details, and I decided that was the job I wanted.”

Originally Corey had wanted to work for KXOK, which was the top station among teenage listeners, but one day he was checking out the local FM stations and he found KSHE. “Being the naïve 18-year-old that I was, I put together a resume and tape using my bedroom equipment and took the stuff to KSHE. Then I went home and waited for them to call. It was about the dumbest thing I’d ever done because I had no real broadcast experience.

“I waited and waited and nothing happened. So I joined the Columbia School of Broadcasting mail order course. About halfway through the course, on Christmas Eve of 1968, my dad came to my room and told me there was a call for me. It was some guy from KSHE asking if I could come in to work. A bunch of their guys were sick with the flu. I told him I’d be there in five minutes.”

Don Corey had done his pretend broadcasts to his neighborhood over a very weak home transmitter, but he knew he wasn’t prepared for the real thing. Still, that didn’t stop him.

“I came in and the guy showed me the studio and he said ‘You’ve run a [control] board before, haven’t you?’ and I said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ Which I hadn’t, but I didn’t want to lose my chance. When I picked up the tone arm for the turntable my hand was shaking.”

Things got easier as the shift progressed and management invited him back to do weekends. That soon became a regular midnight-to-6:00 slot on St. Louis’ first “underground” radio station, making Corey an electronic companion to the all-night crowd. There was no play list.

“You could play anything you wanted as long as it was in the studio. They weren’t afraid to try something different. We played everything but the title cuts because everyone else was playing them.

“I’d play the long songs so I could talk to the listeners who called in. They were really into the music. We used to play a song called ‘Don’t Bogart That Joint’ by the Fraternity of Man, and in the middle of the song the singer goes ‘Roll another one just like the other one.’ I spliced a tape so the word ‘roll’ went on for over a minute and played it on the air without saying anything. The phones went crazy and people were asking what was going on. I played innocent and said nothing was different. I got 30 or 40 phone calls, and I confessed after the record was over.”

Fellow staff members included Steve Rosen, Dick Merkle, Sir Ed (Rickert), John Williams and Prince Knight (Ron Lipe), and the studios were in the old cinder block building in the shadow of the 66 Park-In in Crestwood. Listeners would constantly come by, sometimes to buy concert tickets, sometimes just to talk.

“Sometimes there’d be groups of six or seven people in the middle of the night all standing around outside the studio window just waiting to get a chance to talk to the guy on the air. They made you feel like you were a celebrity. It was really an ego trip for a kid who grew up in Webster. Back then my dating life was awful. I couldn’t charm an old maid out of a burning building. All of a sudden, I’m on the air, and the girls are calling me.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 07/2003)

Sheila Moseley had a long career in broadcasting, and she can thank the Philomathians for getting her started.

Working under the various names of Shila (pronounced SHY la) Shelp, Sheila Graham, Sheila Moseley, Nancy Willard and Nancy Dixon, her work in St. Louis covered many duties on several radio and television stations and hundreds of broadcast advertisements.

Her first appearance on radio here came after a series of developments that appeared on the surface to be unrelated. She came home in the summer of 1941 after her freshman year at Smith College, where they were building a radio station. Her mother, who had been taking a writing course here at Washington University, had written a 15 minute play that was to be broadcast on KFUO. Sheila’s father decided she wouldn’t be going back to school in the Fall because he believed the United States would soon be involved in war.

So Sheila went to the Concordia campus, which was the home of KFUO. New studios were being built, and the play was being broadcast from the robbing room of the chapel. After hearing her performance, station manager Rev. Elmer Knoernschild asked her to join the Philomathians, his radio drama group. It was a large group of actors and actresses who did dramas on KFUO each Saturday evening. “One time we ran out of material, so the station held a competition for writers,” Mrs. Moseley recalls “The top three submissions would be performed by the group. The winner was a young man named Rod Serling.

“Elmer later asked me to do the ‘Little Red Schoolhouse’ show for him, and I got paid for that. I also did ‘Through the Museum Doors’ which I had to write as well. I remember the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. I made my way to KFUO to see what I could do to help. Elmer was doing the announcing and getting information from wire copy. I answered phones.”

Her first job that really paid was a direct outgrowth of the Philomathians. She worked as an actress on a couple episodes of the “Land We Live In,” the Union Electric weekly drama on KMOX. (In the 1950s, she was a regular actress on the program on KSD.) She also did voice work on WEW and the “Mary Lee Taylor Show,” a national production of Gardner Advertising for their client, Pet Milk.

Behind the scenes, Sheila was making things happen too. At WEW in the early ‘40s, she was paid a starting salary of $15 a week as music director, choosing the selections to be played on the air. Unable to get a pay increase there, she moved to KXOK, where manager Chet Thomas paid her $22.50 to write scripts in the continuity department. She remembers “There were lots of complaints there from advertisers about Harry Caray’s reading of commercials. He was not an easy man to work with.

“In 1943, Harry wanted to get rid of France Laux, another sports voice on KXOK, so he went to Chet Thomas and persuaded him to broadcast Harry’s ticker tape broadcasts of the out-of-town games. Harry would really dress these up and France, whose personality wasn’t that appealing, finally left. I don’t think he ever knew how Harry set that up.”

The KXOK studios were on the mezzanine level of the Star-Times Building, and working conditions in the summer were very uncomfortable. “It was extremely hot. Back then, every word that was uttered on the air had to be written by the continuity department. We worked with the windows open and electric fans blowing, and if we didn’t put something down to anchor the paper, scripts would go flying out the window.”

The chance for upward mobility came in the form of a job offer – news writer and reader – from news director Harry Renfro. She turned it down at the insistence of her father. “He didn’t like the idea of me working with the newsmen.” Later she did combine with Jerry Burns for a daily sports show using the name Shila Shelp. In 1949 she returned to KXOK after an absence of several years and became the music director for popular disc jockey Hal Fredricks. “I worked with him for six months getting his music together and writing all his intros and ad libs.”

Along the way Sheila married Harman Moseley. Between 1951 and 1956 she was the host of “The Nancy Dixon Show,” a national franchise program on KSD sponsored by Cluett-Peabody’s “Sanforized” division. The program, she says, was a 15 minute commercial for the process that prevented clothes from shrinking, and it gave her a chance to spotlight local stores and do features.

Sheila and her husband moved out of the market then to pursue a business venture in Arkansas. When they returned she began a 15 year stint in the local Pulitzer broadcast operation doing vacation fill-in, which gave her a chance to do just about every job in the building, including producing Russ David’s “Playhouse Party” There was also a five-year run at WIL during that same time in which she was “Nancy Willard” doing several women’s programs on the air.

Sheila Moseley capped her broadcast career here with a short appearance on KADY, a station partly owned by her husband, and several years working as free-lance commercial voiceover talent.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 02/2004)

Art Ford really wasn’t sure what he’d do for a living, but he probably didn’t envision union busting. After getting a degree in journalism at the University of Missouri in the 1940s, he ended up working at a newspaper in Evansville.

But when he learned his wife was pregnant, he left that job and they moved back to St. Louis to be near family.

Ford quickly landed a job at the INS wire service, and it wasn’t long before a friend suggested some extra money could be made by doing weekend work at a local radio station, KSTL.
That inauspicious beginning in the broadcast business in 1953 led to a career that spanned four decades.

KSTL wasn’t a particularly glamorous place to work in 1953. The studios were located in a quonset hut on the east side of the Mississippi just under the MacArthur Bridge. The station had been put on the air by Grove Laboratories in 1948, but it was licensed for daytime only broadcasting. After about a year-and-a-half on the air, Art Ford was bored, and one of his managers suggested he move over to the sales side of the radio business.

That also meant a physical move across the river. It seems the station’s sales offices were at co-owned UHF KSTN-TV at the corner of Hampton and Berthold. It wasn’t long before circumstances evolved that catapulted Ford to a position of making radio station management decisions. This was when the real challenges began.

Running a daytime radio station in a major market can be extremely challenging. There were union contracts to fulfill and overhead costs to cover, but the limited power and number of hours of airtime meant there weren’t as many ad availabilities.

Ford says he got around this in two ways: The mornings were filled with religious programming which brought in enough money to cover operating costs. In the afternoon, Carson’s Furniture Store bought a daily time block and put country disc jockey Johnny Rion on the air to represent them. This allowed KSTL to turn a profit, although the Carson’s sponsorship forbade any ads for competitive products like furniture and jewelry. Rion was never actually an employee of the station. He was paid by his sponsor.

In the late 50s rock and roll swept into the market and Ford thought it would be a good idea to counter-program with “good music.” He hired the market’s only black disc jockey, Spider Burks, to do his jazz show from 1:30 – 3 and then brought in TV personality Chuck Norman to deejay until sign-off. “We had the best music programming in the city,” says Ford, “but the fact that we were a daytimer really hurt us.”

In 1965, Art Ford was made the station general manager, and country music soon returned. Jenny Jamison, a singer who had a couple of successful country records, was added to the on-air staff. KSTL became the top country station in the market, and the station’s studios were moved out of the quonset hut and into an office on Laclede’s Landing.

1975 was a rough year in the history of the station. The owners had sold their FM frequency three years earlier, but the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers insisted that the company maintain its full engineering roster.

This meant keeping four full-time engineers on the staff to operate one daytime AM station, a station that was limited to 9 ½ hours of daily broadcasting during the winter months of November, December and January. Ford says he brought this up each year during labor negotiations, even offering to find another job for one of the engineers, but after three years of negotiating, the union threatened to “walk” if the contract was not signed. “I said ‘I’ve worked with those guys for years, but if they walk it’ll be the saddest thing they ever did,’” Ford remembers.

That’s when the going got rough. The engineers walked out and management continued operating without them. There were charges and countercharges. Management hired a consulting engineer and continued operating. In the end, the union lost their battle and KSTL went on without their services. Art Ford, the former newspaperman, eventually moved on to manage WGNU and later retired from the business.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 11/04.)

Del King, a radio announcer here for many years, was not content to sit in one place and make money. He’d go wherever there was a gig. Even in St. Louis that meant moving around from station to station as opportunities arose.

He began his local career in 1930, having spent four years on the radio at KMBC in Kansas City. In radio’s first decade, workers seldom performed single functions, and King followed suit, working as a male vocalist and announcer at the KWK studios in the Chase Hotel here for four years.

But early on it was obvious that he’d have to truncate his given name a bit, so KWK’s owner suggested he shorten Delmar to “Del.” The KWK gig also provided Del King the chance to team up with his wife Dorothy.

The two of them played the parts of “Helen and Henry” on KWK in the early ‘30s. He moved to KMOX in the Mart Building from 1934 to 1936 to perform many of the same vocalist and announcing functions.

He then decided to go the free-lance route, heading to Chicago where several network shows originated.

An opening came at WLW in Cincinnati in 1940, which is where Del King hooked up with a comedian named Red Skelton. His voice was heard as staff announcer for Skelton’s “Avalon Time” and “The Red Skelton Show” which originated from the network’s huge Merchandise Mart studios.

Then it was on to Hollywood with Skelton where King also landed announcing duties on “Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt” and “Sherlock Holmes,” both of which were heard on NBC. King’s experience as a network staff announcer was put to good use upon his return to St. Louis in 1942.

His voice was regularly heard on “The Falstaff Hour of Music” on KMOX, and he also hosted “The Del King Show.” This time the KMOX gig lasted four years, after which Del King entered the local free-lance market, picking up staff announcer duties on Pet Milk’s “Mary Lee Taylor” program which originated here and was broadcast on the NBC network.

KSD radio hired him in 1948 as his 40th birthday approached, and when the Laclede Gas Company moved its award-winning production of “The Land We Live In” from KMOX to KSD, King was given the announcer’s slot. This was a huge weekly production, complete with the full KSD orchestra directed by Russ David and voiced by local actors and KSD staffers in character. It was performed before a live studio audience.

His tenure with the Pulitzer station lasted seven years, the longest of his career. Then it was off to KBBM in Branson, Missouri, but Del King bounced back to KSD in 1962.

Working as a staff announcer at KSD carried an extra benefit in those days. KSD-TV had signed on in 1948, and announcers were expected to perform similar duties for both of the company’s electronic media.

Del King was a newscaster on both stations. King looked the part of a sonorous-voiced announcer, dapper with full moustache. But his health had begun to fail. After a two month illness, Del King died of a heart condition at the age of 56. His last stint at KSD had lasted two years.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 10/04)

What began on KMOX in 1937 became a bastion of radio drama for 25 years in St. Louis, thanks in part to the work of a twenty-something man named Kensinger Jones.

“The Land We Live In” was a presentation of Union Electric, heard at 5:30 Sunday evenings and performed before a studio audience. Each episode was a recreation of an historic event or series of events from the St. Louis area. Ken Jones was hired by KMOX in 1945, ostensibly as a continuity writer, but as he put it more succinctly, “My real work was to make sure there was never again a shortage of scripts for ‘The Land We Live In’ radio show.” He and his young wife Alice worked in conjunction with director Ted Westcott and music director Seth Greiner (Alice was never on the payroll) to produce 52 half-hour shows a year.

Even though that number was later cut to 39, the schedule was brutal. Jones says he did get some help from free-lance writers from time to time, but he still was expected to be the script editor.

An average week, Jones says, went something like this: “From 1946 on, Alice and I lived in a log house just outside of House Springs. That’s where I wrote the shows. We’d do our research at the Central Library, the Missouri Historical Society, and by visiting individuals related to stories. That would take Saturday through Tuesday or Wednesday.

“I’d write frantically on Wednesday and deliver the script to KMOX at the Mart Building where it had to be duplicated. Copies would go to Ted Westcott for casting, Seth Greiner for music, and to Walter Heren at U.E. for client approval. There would be a quick rewrite and then a full cast and orchestra rehearsal.

“Then the show would be timed and recorded. On Thursday morning the rehearsal record would be played for the agency and the client. Their suggestions were cranked into a final rewrite on Friday or maybe Saturday. On Sunday at 2:45, a rehearsal with rewritten ‘final’ scripts commenced. A timed run through occurred from 4 – 4:30. Ted raised his hand and threw the first cue at 5:30. Usually by that time I was back in House Springs working on the next show.”

His wife Alice adds that he was often researching several shows at the same time, and he was picking up free-lance work on the side and writing other shows for KMOX.

Sponsor Union Electric decided in the late 1940s to move the show from KMOX to KSD, and the writers and producers moved too.

In conversation with Kensinger Jones, it’s obvious he and Alice loved what they were doing. They dug deeply into St. Louis history, and while it would be impossible to recreate historically accurate dialog, all facts represented on the show were correct. Suggestions for show topics would come in from listeners, some of whom had material to help the Joneses in their research.

As Ken Jones says, in radio, sound effects, words and music, along with the listeners’ willing imagination, can create anything you want, from a skirmish to a full scale battle. “The theater of the mind is surely the best auditorium ever provided for a writer’s work.”

The scope of their accomplishment is even more admirable when one realizes that this was done before computers, before word processors, before the Internet. The late Bea Adams, who worked at UE’s ad agency, Gardner, wrote of this process in her book Let’s Not Mince any Bones, “In an office only big enough for a small desk, typewriter, chair and raft of reference books, Kensinger Jones wrote “’The Land We Live In.’ He wrote it, lived it, researched it, personally watched over it and shaped it into one of the finest radio shows ever to come out of St. Louis.”

An October 1975 St. Louisan magazine article penned by Nancy Leutwiler told of our town’s local actors who made a good living as regulars on “The Land We Live In.” Hiring was usually done through the St. Louis Players’ Guild, depending on the number of characters needed for the week’s production.

If only a few were needed, they came from the on-air staff of the individual radio stations. Conditions for the actors could be as stressful as they were for the writers. ”

The first run-through came Thursday afternoon when parts were assigned, and the production crew would tell actors which accents, if any were needed. Then followed rehearsals, musical insertions, dress rehearsal, and live production four days later when the staff announcer intoned: “The Land We Live In, where if you listen, you can hear echoes of the glamorous past.

There were also some well-known guest stars. One of Ken Jones’ fondest memories was of the program that featured Maureen O’Hara, a show written as a tribute to the late John Cardinal Glennon. Jones gave Miss O’Hara the narrator’s character, that of Kathy Dunn, a niece of Glennon’s friend Andy Dunn. But as the live presentation was wrapping up, Miss O’Hara began to sob and left the stage. Director Westcott immediately cued the orchestra and Jones was summoned to go onstage and finish the wrap-up speech. Later, Maureen O’Hara told those assembled that the script evoked such vivid memories of her own childhood in Ireland that she was emotionally overwhelmed.

Alice Jones was Ken’s partner throughout the whole “Land We Live In” effort. “It was an exciting time in my life,” she says. “Young, married, no kids, no car, and all these wonderful stories.” The couple truly enjoyed their work here.

“The Land We Live In” was primarily a public relations vehicle for the Union Electric Company. After the final broadcast in April of 1952, Kensinger and Alice Jones moved to Chicago where he accepted an attractive offer from the Leo Burnett ad agency writing for television.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 10/04)