Radio Articles

The question came in a phone call in October, 2004. David Ohlemeyer’s company, The Lawrence Group, was in the process of rehabbing St. Louis’ Marquette Building. Atop the building, an extra room had been built, and there was also a huge radio tower on the roof.

Ohlemeyer had found some papers and wanted to know, just out of curiosity, whether a radio station had operated there. Since the place was filled with construction workers and the elevators were out of order, a 20-story climb was in order.

Sure enough, the room he had talked about looked like it had been used as a studio. There were even a few perforated acoustical tiles still on the wall. But no documentation could be found to link a station to a studio here.

Those papers he’d found were a gold mine. They were bills of sale for the tower and its antenna, made out to Thomas Patrick, Inc. at the Chase Hotel, which was the parent company of KWK. The tower, purchased in December of 1946, was 270 feet tall. When erected, the tower’s top light was 574 feet above street level, making it the highest broadcast tower in the area. But the antenna to be installed on the tower was for an FM station. KWK was an AM station.

All of the equipment was delivered to 314 North Broadway, then known as the Boatmen’s Bank Building. Thomas Patrick, Inc., had been given permission in 1945 to erect an FM station on a frequency of 95.3 megacycles. The station came on the air in September of 1946, so this tower would not have been in use initially.
The Federal Communications Commission changed KWK-FM’s frequency to 99.1 the following year. The change appears to have come in August, 1947, thus bringing the new tower into use. But the mystery of the studio remains unclear.

In October 1946, an article in the Globe-Democrat told of KWK’s purchase of a two-story former bank building at the corner of Fourth and Pine streets downtown, a block away from the then Boatmen’s Bank Building. The article stated “One of the most modern broadcasting studios in the Midwest has been planned” for the building.

But the best-laid plans failed to become reality. For unknown reasons, the building was never refurbished. Three years later, May 9, 1949, KWK-AM and FM moved their studios to the building at Twelfth and Cole where the Globe-Democrat’s FM station KWGD was being shut down. At the same time, the company that owned KWK and KWK-FM changed its name to KWK, Inc.

The new building had its own broadcast tower on site, rendering the tower atop the Boatmen’s Building redundant. By the end of the year, the St. Louis Star-Times entered into an agreement to buy and use the tower on The Boatmen’s Building for its station, KXOK-FM.

There was never a mention of permanent studios at the Broadway address but an interview many years later provided an explanation. KCFM was broadcasting from the tower after a disastrous fire destroyed their facilities, and owner Harry Eidelman made reference to the fact that his announcers were using the “temporary studio on the 22nd floor of the Boatmen’s Bank building.”

The temporary studio had been put in place after construction of the tower so the radio station would have a place to originate broadcasts in such an emergency.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 1/2009).

In 1947, KXOK was owned by the St. Louis Star-Times, and the station was making a strong effort to reach out to the community. Part of that outreach involved the publication of a monthly newsletter for listeners. While the only purpose of the newsletter was the promotion of the station, it provides insight into the way radio operated in St. Louis in the middle of the last century.

There’s an announcement that KXOK sports announcer Harry Caray has become a father again. This time the son is named Christopher, and he joins a family of two other kids, “Skippy” (also identified as Harry Junior) and Patricia. A publicity photo shows Harry in a boxing stance with the great Joe Louis. Caray is also shown in a photo of a party for a young Cardinals’ catcher by the name of Joe Garagiola, who sports a full head of hair.

The program “Junior Fone Quiz” is described as “the only telephone quiz for young folks…exclusively for boys and girls between 6 and 16 years…offers valuable awards for submission of questions used and correct answers.” Those awards included dolls, bicycles, baseball equipment, games and ice skates.

There’s a large photo of a dozen college students receiving a tour of the station’s transmitter site and another photo of news director Bruce Barrington in front of the “new KXOK Field Car, a station wagon that is being equipped with Radio Telephone, transcription equipment for recording programs and events, and a ‘mobile’ transmitter, making the car a veritable radio station in itself. Its use will facilitate the station’s ‘on-the-spot’ reporting of news and sports events, agricultural features and special events.”

Farm director Charley Stookey is shown between two Ferguson tractors parked on Grand Boulevard in front of the Fox Theater. He’s receiving gifts from two local farm girls in honor of the showing of the movie The Farmer’s Daughter. Sports director France Laux is shown interviewing Lloyd Mangrum, the 1946 National Open Golf Champion.

KXOK disc jockey Rush Hughes was asked to be a guest lecturer at the annual Educational Radio Conference at the university in Norman, Okla. Hughes, who is described in the KXOK newsletter as “one of the leading ‘Disc Jockies’ in the country, will give demonstrations and lead the discussion on his type of program.” While he was out of town, his daily programs would still be heard on KXOK, via transcription.

One of the longest newsletter articles begins: “Have you ever thought about becoming a radio announcer? If you have, you are similar to many people who frequently inquire of radio stations whether their voices are well suited to the microphone.”

In this way, the anonymous writer leads readers into an article promoting the KXOK announcers of the day. Fourteen announcers are mentioned. There’s Don Phillips, who hosts the Manhattan Coffee and Dixcel License Quiz shows. Bob Hille is “the dean of the KXOK announcers, with the station since it went on the air in 1938, [he] is recognized by many listeners as the quizmaster on the Forbes Food Store Quiz.” Bruce Barrington and Bertram Hughes are cited for their newscasting efforts, and the station’s only woman with on-air duties is Kay Morton, who is featured on the daily Musical Party Line.

(Reprinted with permission of the St.Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 06/03.)

Bob Hille has fond memories of his work at KXOK and the day the station signed on.

“KXOK went on the air with a really impressive staff. We had a full studio orchestra. We had a classical quartet which included a man who played first cello with the Symphony. We had Skeets Yaney and the hillbillies in the morning. Eddie Arnold was a young kid who played with them. I went on as a studio announcer, which meant I was literally working for nothing. When I finally got a job that paid, which was in April of 1939, I made $40 a week, which was pretty good money in those days.

“The biggest name talent,” according to Hille, “was a young man named Paul Aurandt. He now goes by ‘Paul Harvey.’ Paul was kind of a second fiddle on special events. Allen Franklin did most of the really special events, as well as being program director.

“We had a very big studio set-up, including one studio with a full organ. The night before we went on the air, the union came up with the idea that we couldn’t do it because the organ had not been made by a union shop. Ray Hamilton, the manager, had to hire a guy to come in and sit down and put a hot soldering iron on every connection in the organ.”

The KXOK studios were on the fourth floor of the Star-Times building at 12th and Delmar, occupying the part of the building that faced 12th. The other side of the building housed the paper’s linotype operation, which caused a lot of noise and vibration. Hille says, “All three studios were mounted on springs, which was fairly innovative at the time. We had a disc recording set-up that was designed to escape the vibration from the linotypes. They mounted a Presto recorder on legs that ran down about three feet to a huge concrete block. The block was set on top of a large, inflated truck inner tube that kept the vibrations out.

“We did a lot of remotes. We were at dance halls practically every night. I remember we carried a live broadcast from the big circus that was playing at Kiel. Allen Franklin bribed the charioteers who were racing to stage a huge crash right in front of his broadcast position. Allen was really good.”

One might assume today that the Star-Times owners would realize the radio station would cannibalize some ad dollars from the paper, but in those days, more than money was at stake. “They were watching that combination down the street, the Post and KSD (at 12th and Olive). And there was a different group of advertisers, those who couldn’t afford ads in the newspaper.”

As a night announcer, Hille was required to do station breaks, news cut-ins and commercials. “If a half-hour program was on the air, you sat and, theoretically, studied your script, which is a laugh. Almost all our commercials were done live, since there were few recordings. Those would have to be done on disc, which was expensive. We did 15 minutes of news at 6 and again at 10, and a sign-off news at midnight.”
Later, after he was hired as a full-time announcer, Bob Hille was made host of a daily remote broadcast from various grocery stores where he would conduct a live quiz with shoppers. The program was sponsored by Forbes Coffee Company. After awhile he hosted a daily half-hour luncheon show at the Forest Park Hotel, which would feature celebrity guests.

There were seven or eight radio stations serving the St. Louis audience in the late 1930s, and Hille says the big difference in the stations was determined by whether the station had a network affiliation. “NBC was split into the Red and Blue networks at that time. We had the Blue. KSD had the Red, which was the premier. KMOX had CBS. KWK, with Mutual, was not as big. So that made KSD an even bigger competitor for KXOK, and in this case, the competition was accelerated because of the personal competition between the newspapers’ publishers.

That competition even spread to talent raids. In 1951, Bob Hille was hired away from KXOK to work as an announcer at KSD and KSD-TV.

(Reprinted with permission of the St.Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 09/03.)

Listen to a KXOK newscast from 1963.

In the decade of the 1960s, one radio station stood out in St. Louis, and an assessment some 40 years later finds that it still stands out in the memories of many people. Anyone who lived through those years understood the later premise behind George Lucas’ film “American Graffiti.” The radio – or more importantly one specific radio station – played a big role in the lives of teenagers in just about every market. Everyone listened to that station, and the disc jockeys were real people who became friends to the listeners. In St. Louis, that station was KXOK.

KXOK was owned by Todd Storz as part of his chain of AM stations known for their rock and roll formats. A stroll down memory lane, compliments of station vet Dick Ulett, who now owns Clayton Studios: Mort Crowley, Danny Dark, Ron Riley, Peter Martin, Robert R. Lynn, Bob Shea, David D. Rogers, Dan Allison, Johnny Rabbitt, Don “Stinkey” Shafer, Richard Ward Fatherly, Nick Charles, Bruno J. Grunion, William A. Hopkins, Big Ears Bernard, Steven B. Stevens, Bobby Shannon, Delcia Corlew, Chickenman, News at 55, Radio Park, “The station with the happy difference.”

Ray Otis was the station’s program director, coming to St. Louis in 1962 at the age of 24. Manager Bud Connell had “opened” the station, and it was Otis’ job to move it through the next stages of evolution. “There was magic at KXOK like no other place I’ve seen,” he says.

“Everything just fell together. The synergy was incredible.” The station was located in a small grove of trees at 1600 North Kingshighway, which it dubbed “Radio Park.”

Across the street was the old Parkmoor. There was an old house on the property and the studios were built as an addition, with the a room in the house serving as the reception area and the rest being used for storage. Out in front, facing Kingshighway, were the 3’ high green letters “KXOK” which had graced the side of the building it had previously inhabited, the old Star-Times Building downtown.

Jim Bafaro, a former radio journalist here and now working at Boeing in public relations, remembers being confused as a five-year-old: “As a kid, I heard the term ‘Radio Park’ and assumed there was some little park somewhere with a big microphone in it.”

Richard Ward Fatherley was KXOK’s production director, and he often did substitute work by doing dj shifts on the air. Like Ray Otis, Fatherley joined KXOK at the age of 24, coming to St. Louis in 1964. “In 1966,” he says, “The Pulse radio ratings research group completed its ranking of the nation’s top five most-listened-to radio stations. Two of them were in St. Louis; KMOX, the CBS-owned “At Your Service Station,” and KXOK, the Storz-owned Top 40 station.

“This ratings battle between two differently programmed radio stations signaled the beginning of the end for the reign of the AM “Rockers” and a green light for the AM “Talkers.”

Both Fatherley and Otis remember how KXOK capitalized on the construction of the Gateway Arch, tying in its dial position with the monument’s dimensions (630 Kc, 630’ high, 630’ wide). Fatherley notes the station “took advantage of every opportunity to embrace the structure in its sales brochures, business cards, promotional pieces and listener contests.”

Otis remembers the day an audition tape was played featuring the work of a young entertainer named Don Pietromonaco. “I’d never heard anything like it. We had a fairly rigid framework for our jocks, but when we brought in Don and made him ‘Johnny Rabbitt,’ things loosened up. Todd Storz used to say some guys need the framework of a format. Others don’t. The proof is in the ratings. We turned ‘Johnny’ loose, and he owned nighttime radio in St. Louis.”

And then there was the time a guy drove up to Radio Park towing a speedboat behind his car. Lou Cooley told the station’s manager he’d like to make a deal. If KXOK would allow him to paint the station’s call letters on the side of his boat, he’d win a high profile boat race. He kept his word, and an interesting relationship was born. “Lou ran a laboratory shuttle service,” Otis says, “and he had a telephone in his car. He’d phone the station with traffic reports and we’d put him on the air.” Otis also put the station’s janitor on the air. “Eddie Simpson, the janitor, lived in the house behind the studios. Sometimes when he’d be cleaning in the studios I’d sit him down at the mic and we’d talk.”

Robert R. Lynn, who was news director in those years, has fond memories of his experience there. “We were actually gatherers, writers, editors, not just news readers like many other stations. The newscasts were full of gizmos, echoes and beeps so they’d fit the format. It was a bunch of people having a good time.”

And those good times sometimes took the form of pranks. Lynn remembers a psychology student at Washington University who sent the station a press release. The student had constructed a body-length black bag (cutting out two holes so he could see out) and he wore it all over campus, recording reactions of other students. The young man scheduled a press conference in which he would detail his findings. “Steven B. Stevens’ mom sewed up five more bags and five of our guys went to the campus wearing them. Each of our guys held a press conference claiming to be the student, blowing away any chance he had of getting attention.”

Then there was the time Fatherley came back from vacation and had to do an air shift. He conducted the station’s “Bingo” game without reading all the instructions, giving out six numbers at once instead of the usual single number. As Lynn tells it, hundreds of “winners” blew out the phone circuits and other multitudes drove to Radio Park, gridlocking North Kingshighway. For the rest of his St. Louis stint, Fatherley became the target of Ray Otis’ ribbing, enduring shouts of “Bingo” at unexpected moments.

A young lady who began her on-air stint as a sponsor’s spokesperson has fond memories of KXOK. Delcia Devon (later Corlew) was the voice of Famous- Barr beginning in 1964. She remembers the brilliance of Don Pietromonaco, who was known to his listeners as Johnny Rabbitt. “I would be recording my commercials in the production studio and Don would come in to record his Bruno drop-ins. He’d just sit down and start talking in his Bruno voice, doing wild tracks. Later, when he was on the air, he’d carry on a conversation with those recordings. I was amazed how he could remember what he’d said on the tapes.”

Everyone interviewed for this article gives the credit for KXOK’s success to one man, Bud Connell, the operations manager. “He pulled the right strings and brought in the right people,” says Robert R. Lynn. Ray Otis says “Bud was the best market opener I’ve ever seen.”

Connell came to St. Louis from Miami. “Storz gave me carte blanche,” he says. Arriving in July of 1961, he monitored the market for a month. “KXOK had 4% of the market while WIL had over 20%. KXOK’s jocks were Ken Reed, Peter Martin, Jack Elliott and Don Shafer. Bob Shea and Robert R. Lynn were the newsmen. My first job was to brighten the sound and beef up the news. I brought in Shad O’Shea and Danny Dark as jocks and David D. Rogers and Steven B. Stevens for news. Our news department had four of the biggest voices in radio.”

“It was a bunch of people having a good time,” says newsman Lynn, “and the jocks made as much on the side from personal appearances as they did on the air.”

Connell says he brought in outstanding people, but his main criterion boiled down to a simple requirement: “I looked for a capacity to entertain and the intelligence to entertain without using bad taste. The big stars in radio today wouldn’t even have been considered for jobs on KXOK. Don Pietromonaco, for example was the ultimate Johnny Rabbitt; the defining Johnny Rabbitt. He was an absolute entertainer.”

The veterans of KXOK all say it was the finest job in their careers. “In a word,” says Robert R. Lynn, “it was fun!” Delcia Corlew says “It was unique, exciting. There was a lot of discovery in it, a chance for all of us to learn about ourselves and our listeners.” Connell says “My nickname around the station was ‘Mr. Kx-OK. Those were heady days for a young man who loved playing radio. I am convinced the old KXOK would blow away all of today’s broadcast wunderkind, including those in the smut-filled control rooms of the present day audio-porn purveyors. And wouldn’t it be fun to do it all over again?” The comment by Ray Otis says it all: “In retrospect it was almost euphoric. I’d go back in a heartbeat.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St.Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 5/01.)

Baby boomers have fond memories of a rock “n” roll station that grabbed the market in the 1960s and dominated listenership among teens and young adults. But KXOK had a long and admirable history even before it hit the top spot with good old rock ‘n’ roll. It also faced a long history of challenges.

On Sept. 22, 1936, the Star-Times Publishing Company was granted a construction permit for a 1,000 watt radio station at 1250 kHz. The station’s transmitter was across the Mississippi River in Venice, Illinois. A couple weeks later, on Oct. 10, the station was given the call letters KXOK. But a challenge to these actions by the owners of WIL kept KXOK off the air.

Aside from fears of competition in the marketplace, there were a couple of other motivating factors behind WIL’s action. The publisher of the St. Louis Star-Times was Elzey Roberts, and there is evidence that he may have been involved in the ownership of WIL as late as 1928. But in the 1930s, Roberts was one of many newspaper executives who were quite vocal in their opposition to news broadcasts on radio. Many of these executives had embraced the development of radio in its early days 10 years earlier, but as the stations realized they could read news and disseminate the information quickly, scooping the papers, they began scheduling regular news broadcasts.

Also, WIL’s owners, Missouri Broadcasting, wanted to move their station to the 1250 dial spot so they could increase WIL’s power. In the end, Roberts won the battle and KXOK’s license was issued in November 1938. The fourth floor of the Star-Times Building in downtown St. Louis was transformed into radio studios. A thesis by Charles Suits at the University of Missouri-Columbia notes the station actually went on the air at 6:00 a.m. on Sept. 20, 1938, and the first show was a broadcast from the studios of KFRU radio in Columbia, MO.

That station had been purchased by Roberts in 1936, and in 1939, the station’s owners applied for permission to swap frequencies, which would put KXOK at 630 kHz. But once again there was a challenge from a St. Louis radio station – KSD, which was owned by Star-Times rival the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. KSD had been forced to share its frequency with KFUO and was looking for a way to end that arrangement. A three-way frequency swap was granted to the Star-Times which allowed KXOK to land at 630, KFRU moved to 1370 and an Indiana station which had also been at 630 was changed to 1250.

In 1951, Roberts sold his newspaper in St. Louis to the Post, and KXOK was eventually sold to brothers Todd and Robert Storz in 1960. Their new ideas, from programming rock hits and using strong personalities as disc jockeys, quickly propelled the station to the top in popularity in the market.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 2/98)

First Station To Broadcast Weather Reports Now Adds Another Feather To Cap

By Bill Nolan

Twelve years ago – when radio was a playtoy, and a listener was not worried with what he received, the broadcast of market reports was inaugurated over the St. Louis University radio station, WEW. In April, 1921, the first broadcast of a regular scheduled weather report left the studios of WEW to be received by a scattered few sets, which, however, brought the report to the ears of an astonished audience. In August of the same year, when the weather reports had proven to be of great value to shippers and farmers, as well as urban listeners, the market reports were added as an additional service.

During the years past, the market report service was spread out to include reports from the chief market centers of the Midwest. Constantly elaborated, the reports grew in scope until the service furnished was one of the most complete of its type of broadcasts from any station. Livestock quotations, reports from the grain exchanges and dispatches of conditions and activities at the various vegetable markets brought a complete news service to listeners within the area served by WEW.

Nearly twelve years after the beginning of this important extension activity, direct wires were established between the station transmitter and the St. Louis Livestock Exchange headquarters at the National Stockyards in East St. Louis, Illinois, making possible a more complete and up-to-the-minute report of interest from this point. The broadcast from that point, begun August 1, has been handled by Harry A. Powell, secretary of the Exchange and an experienced commentator on market news, conditions and activities.

(Originally published in Radio and Entertainment, 8/13/33)