Radio Articles

When Joan Colgrove took a job at KACO in the late 1960s, she didn’t mind the fact that she was the station’s only employee. She changed her mind the day the building caught fire and she was trapped inside.

KACO was a blip on the FM dial at the time. It was owned by Apollo Radio Corporation, which was based in Houston. As she remembers it, the company hired her to manage the offices, which were located along with the studios on the second floor of a three-story building in Gaslight Square. The area had suffered its big decline, and about the only business left on that block of Boyle was O’Connell’s Restaurant across the street.

There are a lot of questions surrounding Apollo’s operation here. The company had begun seeking an FM frequency in 1963 with plans to put studios in the Continental Building. By 1967 the company was seeking a studio site in a trailer in Crestwood adjacent to the KSHE studios, but that town’s board of aldermen turned down the request. Apollo had told the F.C.C. that it would be programming classical music, but when it finally got on the air, the music was MOR, which is the industry term for middle-of-the-road.

There was also the problem of KACO’s broadcast day. Because it had only one employee, Joan Colgrove, the station was on the air for only a small portion of the day. She’d been hired to answer the phones “if they ever rang” and pick up the mail. The company told her it was trying to sell the station so it had gotten a special ruling from the F.C.C. allowing it to broadcast only 36 hours a week.

“The people from Houston would make periodic trips to St. Louis,” Colgrove says, “And on one trip they told me ‘We’ve decided it’s silly to hire a deejay. Anyone, even a chimpanzee, can operate a radio station. Joan, here’s the book. Study it and get your license.’ So I did.

“Then came the day when they came in from Houston and sat me down at the board. We had an Ampex tape machine in the studio, and a tape would play for 45 minutes. There were three turntables for records, and I’d use the tape when I had to use the restroom or go across to O’Connell’s to get something to eat.”

What she wasn’t aware of was the fact that the F.C.C. was putting pressure on Apollo. The Commission threatened the company with a $1,000 fine because it had not adhered to its promise to play classical music. In addition the Commission questioned the short broadcast day.

Colgrove only knew what she was told to do and she did it.

“I used to come in at 10 in the morning, unlock the door and flip the transmitter switch. I’d check the meters and start playing music. The transmitter was on deBalliviere at the KCFM tower.

I seldom had a problem, except that I was so totally tied to this, and there was no one there to relieve me. The people in Houston told me I was doing very well. ‘Why don’t you get creative? Start running public service announcements. If you want to talk and introduce a record, do whatever you want to do.’ Up until then I’d only opened the microphone to give the station ID.”

It was, for all intents and purposes, a station that went on the air only to play music. There were no advertisements. It appears, in retrospect, that Apollo simply wanted to keep the signal active until it could find a buyer for the FM slot at 107.7.

“Occasionally a couple of the guys who worked as disc jockeys at KSHE would come up to the studios because we had such good equipment compared to theirs. Gary Bennett and Steve Rosen even backed me up once in awhile when I needed a break from my airshift.”

Then came the fire. Colgrove says: “Our engineer, the man who was supposed to monitor our signal, was never at the station. One day he called me and said there was nothing on the air. I knew something was wrong because my meters weren’t working. When he didn’t call back, I picked up the phone to call him and the phone was dead. I went to the reception area and smelled smoke. The door to the main second floor corridor was hot. So I went to the window and opened it. It was about 10:30 in the morning in February and no one was out of the street.

“I was in a panic. I figured I was going to have to jump or find another way out. I went to the front door and got down on my knees because there was so much smoke. I knew there was a large room on my floor that had a window in the back that opened onto a first floor roof. But when I got to the door it had been nailed shout. I pounded and pulled and finally got the door open, but when I got to the roof it was covered with ice, but there was a fire escape about five feet from the roof’s edge.
“I started yelling for help and finally a man walking through the alley saw me. He called the fire department and came back, climbed the fire escape and helped me across the gap.”

This was the first fire at the radio station. After damages were repaired Colgrove went back to work, but a second fire destroyed everything.

“Apollo kept paying me, even though we weren’t on the air.” But the company had finally found a buyer. In July of 1970, Intermedia, Inc., of Kansas City announced plans to purchase the frequency, which had been renamed KGRV, with studios at 1215 Cole. The MOR signal gave way to “music for groovy adults.” As for Joan Colgrove, she made the switch to KGRV for awhile, taking to the airwaves as “Kay Groove.”

She later designed restaurant interiors. Among her credits: the old KSHE Café.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 4/1999).

WGNU has been Chuck Norman’s baby since the day it was born. And he considers the station’s staff members are still his family. That’s what makes WGNU unique.

There used to be a belief in the radio business that the best general managers came up through the ranks as successful sales people. That’s the way Norman got his start. He was a disc jockey at WTMV in East St. Louis in the 1940s. In those days the announcer bought the time from the station and then sold his own advertising. To say he was a success at this time brokerage agreement would be an understatement. He recalls having to collect money from the likes of Buster Workman, who was later convicted of racketeering.

After a few years, Chuck Norman stepped up to a disc jockey/broker position at WIL, but after five years, he says he realized he wasn’t cut out to work for someone else. In 1960, he and two other men laid the groundwork for a new AM station in Granite City.

Getting the license for WGNU wasn’t easy because there were two other applicants for the frequency. Chuck Norman had to go to Washington, DC., for hearings at the F.C.C. and testify before a committee. “It was almost like a criminal trial,” he said, “We got cross-examined by lawyers. We had to undergo a rigid question-and-answer session.” The application also contained the names of John Karoly and George Moran, and the commission noted that those two principles of Tri-Cities Broadcasting had been heavily involved in community service and Norman, in the position of general manager, brought significant broadcast experience to the table.

A tentative permit was issued to the group on December 17, 1960, but challenges held up the actual issuance of the license until May of 1961. WGNU went on the air December 1, 1961, playing different versions of the song “What’s New?” It would become the signature song of Norman and his station.

All of Norman’s years of experience in time brokering in the past had provided a good sales foundation, and that sales experience paid off. He had begun selling WGNU over a year before it went on the air, and as a result, he says, “I sold an awful lot of time, and as soon as we hit the airwaves, we had a lot of sponsors.”

The station’s original staffers included Bob Baker and Russ Benson. Baker spent the rest of his life at WGNU, passing away in 1989. Benson left in 1964 but returned three years later and stayed until 1983. Things were primitive. Studios and transmitter were next to the tower on Old Alton Road in a 10×50 foot trailer. On warm days, listeners could sometimes hear the honking of towboats on the nearby Mississippi River. The original format was Top 40, mainly because the hottest station in the St. Louis market was KXOK, also playing Top 40. That soon gave way to country & western music and an affiliation with the Chicago White Sox radio network, giving St. Louisans a source for the play-by-play of the exiled Harry Caray. And the listeners responded, proving that WGNU’s audience was not limited to Granite City.

But the station also had a handicap. WGNU was licensed for daytime broadcast only, meaning they had to sign off at sunset, a time determined by the F.C.C. The acquisition of an FM frequency allowed nighttime service. The FM frequency was sold in 1979 and 24-hour operational status was granted to WGNU-AM in 1980.

John Karoly says there was an excellent relationship among the three owners. “Granite City had close to 40,000 population in those days and there was no radio station to serve the community. No one else could have kept WGNU going the way Chuck Norman did.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 02/2003)

They were pretty heady days for radio. The mid-1920s were a time when the stronger stations were gaining a foothold in popularity. Lesser stations – those whose owners had jumped on the 1922 bandwagon when everybody tried to get a station -were beginning to fall by the wayside. In St. Louis there were nine different stations, although six of them were paired off in shared frequency agreements, which meant that the two sharing stations had to coordinate broadcast hours on their single frequency.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had its own station, KSD. A competitive newspaper, the St. Louis Star, didn’t own a station, but they entered into an operating agreement with Benson Broadcasting which allowed the paper to build studios in its building and promote the station as “The St. Louis Star Radio Station.”

And the broadcasts originating in those local studios were something. Looking at the evening of February 2, 1925, the Star described the “typical” scenes in the eighth floor studios. The portrait painted in the paper is one of a local radio station trying hard to impress, visually as well as aurally.

“While the radio fan is glancing at his clock, as the hands near 10 p.m., all is activity at the studio in The Star Building, a pretty gray room with softened walls and muting draperies. Within it voices sound echoless. There are stenciled decorations on the walls, a new grand piano in the center, overstuffed lounges, and on the wall, over the microphone, a gilded horseshoe. “Billy Knight, the Little Ole Professor, flits from studio to reception room, where the evening’s entertainers leave their coats and clear their throats. One of the earlier arrivals asks that the horseshoe, sent by a fair admirer and which hangs on the wall for luck, be turned prongs up according to tradition, and Billy fixes that, with many other things.

“It is ten, lacking a minute. The Professor has finished a telephone conversation [with the engineer two stories up]. [Pianist] Bud Fox has smoothed out his long black hair, and Miss Toots Thurman, a good looking girl with auburn hair and a dress the color of burnt ochre, is standing before the microphone, the bronze ear of all those listeners out in the cold, distant world.

“‘Now, everybody quiet,’ says the Professor. The piano starts, followed a few seconds later by the words of ‘Roses of Picardy.’ Up in the operator’s room, the needles on the dials are swinging, measuring the voice modulations and sending them on their far flung circuit.

“In the studio, the most striking thing is the interest of the performers in their appearance. No shirt sleeves here, but pearl necklaces, satin slippers, careful marcels. Each singer has his or her pet habit. One digs the heel of her shoe into the thick carpet, another fingers his watch fob, while Bonita Frede, a child blues singer, is assured by her mother that it will be quite all right for her to bend a knee in time to the music and roll her eyes, too, if she wants to.”

These were the days before radio networks took hold, so the programming originated locally. Broadcasts were not continuous. In fact, many local stations would go silent one night a week to allow listeners to tune in distant signals on the same frequency. The “stars,” if that is what one would call the performers, ranged from Lieutenant Felix Fernando and his Havana Orchestra, Jack Ford and his Peacock Orchestra, and Bud Fox (the studio pianist) to Miss Ruth Mitchell (contralto), Miss Edna Deal (blues singer), and Mr. Fred Otte (Swiss yodeler). While these may not seem to be a big draw by today’s standards, one must realize that every station in town was filling time using talent like this, and a two hour broadcast would usually consist of eight to ten different acts. A lot of listeners obviously thought this stuff was worth staying up for.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 11/1999)

It was the night of the Harding-Cox presidential election, November 6, 1920. At the very same moment KDKA “made history” by broadcasting the results, a couple of 20ish year-old kids were doing the same thing over 500 miles away on a transmitter they built in the basement of a home in St. Louis. They’d been playing with radio gear since 1914, and had also operated an amateur spark station.

Lester Arthur “Eddie” Benson and his partner William Wood did not have the public relations machine that Westinghouse did, and there are factual holes in published accounts, but if press reports are to be believed, they may well be considered the fathers of St. Louis radio. For example, an article in the June 15, 1934, issue of Broadcasting magazine credits Benson with the building of the first transmitters for KSD and KFVE.

On the other hand, there was only one article referring to his supposed technical achievements. That article also says he attended Washington University in St. Louis, but a school spokeswoman said no records could be found listing Benson as a student there. His obituary, published in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat December 18, 1972 says “He made the first police radio broadcast on WIL in 1921 from a moving car, with the police chief along supervising the broadcast.” Yet neither WIL nor its predecessor WEB existed in 1921.

Building KSD
KSD was owned by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the paper vigorously promoted that station’s experimental broadcasts. Through supposition, one can assume these were the broadcasts made on Benson’s transmitter, and they led up to KSD’s obtaining the first Class B license issued in the United States in March of 1922. Benson’s name never appears in any of these articles, but there are brief descriptions of the “transmitting device:” “Technically, the small transmitter…makes use of six five-watt power tubes, or 30 watts in all…The small transmitter panel and its apparatus could be picked up by a boy and carried away under one arm.”

The Broadcasting article says Eddie Benson had been commissioned in 1920 to build an experimental transmitter at the Post-Dispatch plant in downtown St. Louis and indicates this transmitter was used when KSD went on the air experimentally in 1922.

The experimental broadcasts were described in the paper on February 14, 1922: “Amateur radio stations in and around St. Louis are notified that a ‘QST’ signal will be sounded at 7:45 this evening for the purpose of a test demonstration of the wireless station installed in the Post-Dispatch building. Shortly afterward, the entire first act of the musical play now appearing at the American Theater, ‘Two Little Girls in Blue,’ will be sent broadcast by wireless – overture, songs, dialogue, everything presented on the stage during the first act will go out instantaneously through the Post-Dispatch radio apparatus. Wave length, 360 meters.”

It appears Benson’s device also was put into operation when KSD officially signed on March 11, 1922, but arrangements had already been made to replace it with a new Western Electric transmitter in June of that year.

Benwood Radio, KSD and WEB
One reference in a KSD article tells how they had to run down the street to an electronics shop after transmitter failure during an experimental broadcast. Less than half a block away from the KSD studios in downtown St. Louis was Benwood Radio Company, the parts and service store founded by Eddie Benson and William Wood.

By now things had been humming at Benwood for some time. Land station 9ZB was established there in 1920, and the talented young men were building a transmitter and filling out the necessary papers to put WEB on the air. Experimental broadcasts for WEB had begun February 9, 1922, at 375 meters. In what appears to have been a status race of sorts, the St. Louis Star had hitched its wagon to Benson’s station and wrote in its February 8, 1922, issue, “The first program to be given by wireless under the auspices of a St. Louis newspaper will be presented tomorrow night, commencing at 7:45 o’clock from the offices of the Benwood Company, Inc., 1110 Olive Street, pioneers in the development of wireless apparatus in St. Louis.”

The Star had no ownership position with WEB, but that didn’t stop the paper from milking their “cooperating relationship” with Benson, although his profile in all the hoopla was fairly low. There is one mention on February 10: “…a young man with a set of telephone receivers strapped on his head was talking into a transmitter. Every now and then he would adjust some numbered discs on a strange wood box and listen to what was being said on the other end of a wire that wasn’t there. In addition there were a few peculiarly fashioned boxes and coils and a few electric lights on a black board. That was all, but it seemed an unexplainable mess until the young man took the apparatus off his head and gave a three-minute lecture that took all the mystery away. He was L.A. Benson, vice president of the Benwood Company, who was in charge of the sending.”

Although the St. Louis Post-Dispatch got their own transmitter and severed their relationship with him, Benson had the last laugh. After a couple years of the relationship with the Star, his company took full control of WEB and changed the call letters to WIL. In later years it was said WIL was the market’s first station to sell commercial time.

The Benson Broadcasting Company also reportedly figured in the history of KFVE, licensed to University City in suburban St. Louis. The original license holder was the Film Corporation of America and a published report indicates Benson built the transmitter for the station’s sign-on in 1924, and he later bought the station.

Rocky Road in Life
That same year, Eddie took the big step down the aisle, marrying on July 24. He and wife Doris would weather marital storms, but the marriage itself would eventually dissolve in acrimony. Things went better at the station: In the 1930s, at a time when the country was in the throes of the Depression, Eddie Benson threw annual picnics for his radio staff, bringing in substitute engineers and announcers for the day. One newspaper account stated, “There is never a dull moment…he is acknowledged a genial host.”

In 1933 he completely remodeled the WIL studios and added a roof garden for the staff. Eddie Benson also was also a ham radio operator and served as Midwest manager of the American Radio Relay League. He claimed to have been the first person in St. Louis to do baseball play-by-play in 1926, and he was actively involved in the operation of WIL until it was sold to Balaban in 1957.

The marriage situation, however, worsened. After repeated attempts at reconciliation, Doris and Eddie separated in 1939; eventually she claimed he deserted her and their daughter Leslyanne on December 28, 1941. Two months later he informed his wife he would not be returning to their home in South St. Louis, having taken up residence in the tony suburb of University City. He filed for divorce, alleging “general indignities, mental cruelty, nagging, violent temper and habitual suspicion” but the filing was later dropped. Doris Benson counter-filed for divorce in 1951, testifying she had made repeated attempted to persuade him to return. The judge awarded her a substantial settlement.

His active involvement in the family-owned radio station was not without controversy. Eddie’s own brother Clarence sued him in 1934 in an effort to prevent what Clarence called a usurping of rights in the company. Clarence also showed his distrust for his brother’s management style by requesting an audit, alleging Eddie had overdrawn his banking account in what was then known as Missouri Broadcasting Company. A later judicial decree ended the family battle, and Eddie bought out his brother’s interest in the station in 1948.

Lester Arthur “Eddie” Benson died December 16, 1972 at the age of 72. Although mentioned by name in relatively few newspaper accounts, he clearly built transmitters, owned stations, and was a local “figure.” Hence, we can remember Eddie Benson as one of the two men who got broadcasting started in St. Louis.

(Reprinted with permission of the Radio Guide. Originally published 3/04)

By Harold P. Brown

As the uses of Radio grow and expand, our interests grow and expand with them. We no longer are satisfied with the passing song and the chatter of the hour. There is a powerful fascination in bringing in the distant stations. They stir our thoughts. We like to imagine ourselves in the places where the voices originate. We dream of the city and wonder about it and the environment of the peoples who live there. This is a healthy curiosity. We are learning something. Our ears are open to the voices of these citizens. We enjoy the pride they feel in their communities and of the fine things their cities have done. It seems like unrealities becoming real. We always knew they were there, even if we had not traveled, and now we are almost like being there ourselves, right in the presence of the people who are broadcasting in the studio – and it isn’t so far away after all.Many people who have never seen the Mississippi river have heard the Voice of St. Louis, which is radio station KMOX. To the people of the South, it is a voice from the North, and from the North it is the voice of the South. This is equally true from the East and the West. But especially it is the voice of that vast area described by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat as the “Forty-ninth State.” The Globe-Democrat is affiliated with the KMOX station. The territory defined as the “Forty-ninth State” is embraced in a circular boundary drawn at a radius of about 150 miles from St. Louis.

In making a trip through Missouri not long ago I called on Mr. Joseph McAuliff, managing editor of the Globe-Democrat and he pointed me to the wonderful future of this “Forty-ninth State,” served by the Voice of St. Louis. Uncle Sam has, within the past few years, completed many miles of levees that have reclaimed hundreds of thousands of acres from the Mississippi overflow. I stopped at Cape Girardeau and Caruthersville, and saw prodigious crops from cotton and peanuts to corn and potatoes, all producing great wealth that finds its way to the metropolis.

Some of these are thoughts that come to mind when the DX listener tunes in KMOX, the Voice of St. Louis.

The station is still young although it is rather an old story now how Tom Convey, the managing director, brought it into being.
He had a conviction that there should be a truly representative Radio broadcasting station with the sinews and blood of the thriving city in its composite. To speak with the Voice of St. Louis it must have the authority of those who do speak with the Voice of St. Louis. He went about visiting the large business concerns and hammered this truth home to the big manufacturers and bankers.

He convinced them that he was right and welded sixteen of these firms into a unit to finance the institution in a way that they would not be ashamed to hear its voice on the air, speaking as the voice of the city. The enthusiasm, once the ball started rolling, was unbounded. It was hoped to have the station on the air in time to say “Merry Christmas” this last season.

Then came the old brick, that pernicious stumbling block over which many a hopeful young Radio station has stubbed its baby toe. There was no wave length. But Tom Convey had put in too many heart-breaking hours surmounting other difficulties to be overwhelmed at this obstacle. He found a powerful ally in Colin P. Kennedy, head of Colin P. Kennedy Radio Corporation of St. Louis. Together they journeyed down to Washington and stormed the ramparts of the secretary of commerce. Just what was said or done I do not know, only this, that they came marching home again victorious with a sure ‘nuff wave length buckled up in their luggage and St. Louis got its voice.

The intended Christmas present to the people of St. Louis of a voice on the air was a trifle belated but none the less welcome when it did sing forth with a clarion call from the studio in the Hotel Mayfair.

Recently “Smiling” George Junkin, announcer of the WSWS Radio station in Chicago, has been signed up to the KMOX staff. George has been around some and knows all the announcers in the United States by their first names, so it is said (but not by George). If you want to know what “Smiling” George thinks about his new job we submit a quote from an interview in the Globe-Democrat.

“I consider KMOX one of the five leading broadcasters in America,” he said. “Its financial condition, 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 on the air. The chief idea of a broadcast station should be to work up a continuity in its presentations, and KMOX has the proper facilities to do this. The orchestra, carefully selected so that every individual is an artist on the instrument he plays, is the essential background which can not only play symphonies, but light music as well.”

And that is what “Smiling” George Junkin says…

There have been many celebrities including Rosita Forbes, famous explorer; John Philip Sousa, Arturo Mondragon and others. Even talented children are heard, as the Kimmel Kiddie Frolichsters.

The Voice of St. Louis is heartily recommended to Radio audiences, America over, as a voice well worth listening to.

(Originally published in Radio Digest 4/24/26)

Sportscaster France Laux liked to tell people he began in the business at the top. When he died, 51 years after his incongruous start in broadcasting, it was mainly the old timers who mourned.

His first appearance behind a radio microphone was as the broadcaster of the opening game of the 1927 World Series. He wasn’t at the ball park. Rather, like many of his radio contemporaries, he got all of his information from the Western Union ticker and described the game to his listeners from the studios of station KVOO in Tulsa.

Laux had been hired for the job 50 minutes before the game began, to replace KVOO’s regular announcer who was sick, but his hiring was even more unorthodox than it may seem at first glance. The KVOO manager tried to contact him at his home in Bristow, Ok. He was told Laux was somewhere in the town’s business district. The manager drove to Bristow, found him and raced back to the KVOO studios, 45 minutes away. The two men arrived at the radio station 90 seconds before airtime. For his new full-time job Laux was paid $30 per week.

Two years later he was called to come to KMOX in St. Louis for a tryout, based on a letter he’d written. Laux once told a reporter, “I was listening to a wrestling match at about 2 o’clock one morning and I decided to write to KMOX to see if they had any openings.” In moving to KMOX, Laux paved the way to become on of the nation’s best-known baseball broadcasters.

In those days, St. Louis radio stations only aired home games, but since both the Cardinals and Browns played at Sportsman’s Park, there was usually a broadcast every day. Once, in 1934, the Cards were in the pennant race, so the station sent Laux on the road to air a double header from Wrigley Field, and he supplemented the broadcast with two more games – a double header featuring the Browns – using Western Union’s ticker.

Not all of Laux’s work was with KMOX. As is the case today, he had to follow the clubs to whichever stations were carrying the games, so his voice was also heard on WEW, WTMV and KXOK. In addition, he was called upon to handle play-by-play duties in nine World Series and nine All-Star Games and was given the first Radio Announcer of the Year award by The Sporting News in 1937. And not all of his work involved baseball. He did play-by-play of basketball, wrestling, boxing, St. Louis Flyers’ hockey and Missouri, Illinois and Notre Dame football.

In 1938, The Sporting News noted that Laux had begun broadcasting an early morning sports review for the smaller communities surrounding St. Louis, which was recorded the night before and aired in the early morning farm program block. The show included information on minor league, semi-professional and local teams.

Combine a heavy broadcast schedule with the many calls that came into the station for personal appearances and it’s easy to see why France Laux was considered the voice of sports in St. Louis. The reasoning behind his removal from baseball broadcasts is lost in time, but he was replaced in 1946.

There were new voices to be heard, like a youngster named Harry Caray, along with Dizzy Dean, Gabby Street and Johnny O’Hara. It was a difficult transition for Laux. Baseball had been his love and the path to his national success. He stayed on radio awhile, doing other sports programs, but his air time dwindled and he was seldom heard after 1953. At that point, Laux embraced his second love: bowling. He bought a bowling alley and attacked things with the same passion he had shown years before as a young broadcaster, rising to the appointed position of secretary of the National Bowling Congress.

The late Bob Broeg once said Laux’s early background ended up working against him. As a low-key, quiet person, Laux concentrated on unbiased reporting of the game. But when the new guys showed up, Broeg remembered to author Curt Smith, “…when he had to entertain – to be flashy like his competitors, the Deans and Harry Carays – he couldn’t do it. People said that he was too old-timey.”

The late Jack Buck told Smith that most people simply forgot about Laux since there were flashy guys who took his place. In Buck’s words, “He went out pretty shabbily.”

In the end Laux was philosophical about his professional demise: “I just lived too long,” he lamented.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 8/2009)