Radio

by Catherine Snodgrass

Radio listeners are familiar with WIL’s 2 o’clock Police Releases, a feature that has been heard for several years and has never lost its interest appeal. The broadcasts are from Headquarters, bringing news which Police Chief Gerk feels is of value to the public. This includes information about “missing persons” and “stolen machines.”

Nightly, Mr. Fixit answers the hundred and one questions about taxes, laws and public affairs. But still Mr. L.A. Benson, president and general manager of Radio Station WIL was not satisfied. He felt that WIL could be of further service to the people of St. Louis. He noted the increasing accident and casualty list and decided that WIL could be of assistance in helping to curb this growing menace. He knew that as the radio reached into the homes it was the best means of educating the entire family, and the quickest and most impressive lesson would be to present the actual happenings of the Traffic Court over the air.

Immediately, Mr. Benson began to formulate plans and make arrangements. Mayor Bernard Dickmann was in full accord with this new Safety Campaign. Police Chief Gerk lent his assistance and judge James P. Finnigan obligingly agreed top allow the broadcasts to be made from his court.

Several microphones were placed at vantage points in Police Court No. 1, one before Judge Finnigan, another on the witness stand and still another for the Prosecuting Attorney.

Elmer Miller, the remote operator, arranged his amplifiers, power packs, faders and mixer control, etc. A test was made. It was satisfactory, and so one of the most interesting, yet one of the most difficult broadcasts ever attempted in St. Louis was put on the air by WIL last Wednesday at ten o’clock. Judge Joseph Dickmann made the keynote speech on the opening day.

(Originally published in Radio and Entertainment 9/24/1933)

Robert Hyland, the late general manager of KMOX, was famous for his on-air auditions of talent, bringing people into St. Louis for a one-time shot at membership on his elite staff. History shows he was simply following in the tradition of the station’s founders, known as the “Voice of St. Louis, Incorporated.”

After putting the station on the air in late 1925, the group of investors held a competition to find their chief announcer. They were riding on a huge wave of public interest in the fledgling station, generated, in part, by vast amounts of coverage given its development by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. This was no coincidence, since the newspaper was one of the “Voice of St. Louis” members. The paper even provided the station with Associated Press news dispatches so a regular, nightly news broadcast could be aired.

The 17 local businessmen who formed the Voice of St. Louis, Inc., made up one of the panels that sat in judgement of the candidates for the chief announcer’s position. There was also a special committee of monitors listed in one news article, although no details was given regarding their identity or function. Candidates for the job were given several opportunities to appear on the station to be heard by the judges and the public.

The winner was George Junkin, an announcer for the S.W. Strauss Company’s radio station in Chicago, WSWS. Junkin had been in St. Charles visiting his in-laws during the tests and was invited back to KMOX to be heard again shortly after the judges heard his first effort. His quoted reaction, published in the Globe-Democrat, has all the qualities of a PR man’s best efforts: “‘I consider KMOX one of the five leading broadcasters in America,’ he said following his appointment yesterday. ‘Its financial condition, its management, personnel, equipment, facilities and program material place it easily within this group. It has all that is necessary to build into a popular presentation of programs of the air.’” It’s notable that his assessment of the station as “one of the five leading broadcasters in America” came after the station had been on the air a mere three months.

His previous employer is quoted in the same article as saying Junkin was “a reader of unusual ability, a former motion picture actor, and a professional director of theaters.” Rounding out a flawless resume, Mr. Junkin was a veteran of the war (World War I) in which he served as a flying instructor, had served on the faculties of three institutions of higher learning, and had been a farmer in Colorado.

He and his wife, Martha, moved to St. Louis 13 years after they were married here. Their son, George, Jr., was four years old at the time. The move was a good one professionally for Junkin. Within a year of his appointment as chief announcer, he was elevated to the position of managing director of KMOX and later became secretary of the Voice of St. Louis, Inc.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 2/1999)

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)

If anyone ever compiled a list of troubled radio frequencies, 1380 kHz in St. Louis would probably be in the nation’s top 10.

The first broadcast license for what was to become 1380 was issued April 3, 1925, for the call letters KFVE. Lester Arthur “Eddie” Benson, who was also responsible for building the transmitters at KSD and WIL, built this station’s original experimental transmitter. Benson and his brother C.A. Benson operated KFVE for two years before selling the station to Thomas Patrick Convey, who had been the general manager of KMOX. He changed the call letters to KWK and moved the studios from University City to the Chase Hotel.

There were technical problems for all stations in radio’s early days. They were forced to share frequencies, which meant fights among KFVE, KFQA and WMAY over who would be on the air on their shared frequency at what time. The Federal Radio Commission then assigned KWK to 1350 kHz in 1928, which meant it would share the frequency with WIL. WIL was soon moved to 1200 kHz, but WIL’s owners sued the commission seeking a reversal. The legal action dragged out six years before the radio commission ruled in favor of KWK.

An article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in November 1928, reported that the frequency change resulted in poorer reception of all stations moved down the dial.

Owner Convey didn’t live to savor the victory. He died in 1934, a week after his appendix burst, and his son Robert took over operations of KWK. In 1941 there was another national frequency switch and KWK ended up at 1380. Management wanted a different frequency (680) and more power, but their request died when a freeze was placed on all such actions during World War II.

The station saw a couple of subsequent quiet decades, with an ownership change in 1958. The new owner, Andrew Spheeris’ Milwaukee Broadcasting Company, paid Robert Convey more than $1 million, with Convey maintaining a 26% ownership share. It was under Spheeris’ ownership that KWK lost its license in 1966. The problems began in 1960 when some of the station’s listeners complained to the Federal Communications Commission that KWK had conducted bogus treasure hunt promotions.

KWK’s general manager, William L. Jones, Jr., was spotlighted in the ensuing hearings. An employee testified that Jones ordered him to hide the contest prizes only a few hours before the prizes were found by listeners. He also said Jones told him to lie in the hearings. Jones testified that he had talked with Spheeris about problems if the prize were found early in the contest and “I know we decided to hide it later in the hunt.”

The hearing examiner decided not to revoke KWK’s license, but that decision was overruled by the full F.C.C. KWK appealed, but the Supreme Court upheld the commission and the station’s frequency was awarded on an interim basis to Radio 1380, Inc. The license was issued to Vic-Way Broadcasting in 1969 and the station went dark early in 1973. Efforts to get the station back on the air ended when the owner was placed in receivership.

It took a broadcasting conglomerate the size of Doubleday Broadcasting to get KWK back on the air several years later. In November 1978, KWK was reborn, but many AM stations in the market were having problems with survival by then. It was assumed Doubleday would go after an FM frequency to help support their AM at the right-hand side of the dial. That happened when the company acquired WGNU-FM. In the next 25 years the ownership of KWK went to Robinson Broadcasting, Chase Broadcasting, Zimco, Inc., Emmis Broadcasting and the Northside Seventh Day Adventist Church. Call letters evolved from KWK-AM to KGLD, KASP, WKBQ-AM, KRAM, WKBQ-AM (again), WKKX-AM, KKWK, KZJZ and KSLG.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 9/1998)

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.)

When Edwin Armstrong provided a demonstration of FM broadcasting to RCA’s David Sarnoff in 1933, he was successful in showing off “staticless” radio, but RCA and CBS were both eyeing a technology with even more commercial promise – one that sent live, moving pictures through the air.

Realizing that his project was not a corporate priority, Armstrong continued to develop FM on his own, and in 1941 the federal government authorized commercial FM broadcasting. It would be several years before St. Louisans heard regular broadcasts.

Part of that delay is due to the fact that the country was involved in World War II, but many other cities, some of which were significantly smaller than St. Louis, were active in FM development. It wasn’t due to any lack of support from Washington.

As early as 1939, several existing AM stations in the U.S. had been designated as Apex station operators, and two of them were in St. Louis: W9XPD (KSD owned by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) and W9XOK (KXOK owned by the St. Louis Star-Times). Many of these Apex stations around the country evolved into FMs.

The FM band, like its predecessor AM, also underwent technical changes on the way to its current incarnation. Early frequencies ranged from 41.02 – 43.98 mHz for the Apex stations with 40 kHz separation, and by May of 1940, 15 FM stations were on the air in the U.S. A year later the number had risen to 24. In 1945 the Federal Communications Commission reallocated FM stations to higher frequencies, 84 – 108 mHz, with the lower end, 84 – 88 mHz set aside for non-commercial stations.

There were several false starts here. WIL-FM was authorized at 92.1 and later moved to 97.3; KMOX-FM was allocated 45.9 mHz but later dropped its application; KWK-FM was assigned to 95.3; KXOK-FM was at 93.7; KXLW-FM was at 101.1; KSD-FM went on the air in September of 1948 at 96.1; and KWGD-FM became a reality in December of 1948 at 98.1 in studios now occupied by Sinclair Broadcasting.

WEW applied for an FM station in 1942, received a frequency of 45.1mHz, and was later given 95.1. WIL-FM was also on the air in 1948, as was KFUO-FM at 104.1.

The early days of FM in St. Louis were not as exciting as the early days of AM. Government control precluded a lot of unauthorized experiments that had been the rule in the early 1920s.

The first programs on AM consisted of whatever station managers could find to put on the air. Most FM stations here provided simulcasts of what their co-owned AM stations were broadcasting.

By 1950, several stations had already pulled their literal and figurative plugs here, but some new ones had been added. The dial included KSLH (91.5), KXOK-FM (93.7), WEW-FM (95.1), KWK-FM (98.1), KFUO-FM (99.1), and WTMV-FM (102.5). F.C.C. records in 1958 list only three FMs here, KFUO-FM, KCFM (93.7) and KSLH. It appeared the fad of FM radio would not take hold in St. Louis.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 11/1997)