Radio Articles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When KMOX ownership announced plans for a new experimental FM station in 1941, international circumstances prevented the project from coming to life. When the station finally did come back to life two decades later, no one seemed to know what to do with it.

While FM broadcasting in 1941 was in an experimental stage, the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 of that year put a halt to technological broadcast development, and although several FM stations signed on in St. Louis following the war, most “went dark” within a couple years.

On Feb. 12, 1962, KMOX-FM signed on. The broadcast day initially ran from 6 a.m. until midnight, and it was a 100 percent simulcast of the KMOX-AM programming. It was this simulcasting practice that had caused the failure of those other FM stations in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. Listeners, it seems, saw no reason to buy a new radio to listen to programs they could hear on the AM radios they already owned.

Then, in 1967, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that 50 percent of FM programming on co-owned stations had to be original rather than simulcast. KMOX-FM began providing its listeners with what was called “The Young Sound,” a format consisting of middle-of-the-road music with selected current hits mixed in. These music tapes were provided by CBS in New York. The fact that the music was in stereo was a big selling point and gave reason to listeners who had considered buying high quality FM receivers.

This evolved into “The Sound of the ‘70s.” A Globe-Democrat article on April 11, 1970, quoted station general manager Robert Hyland, “KMOX-FM stereo…avoids the hard rock to concentrate on adult pop – the tops in popular music for the 20-40 age group.” In the Post-Dispatch in November of that year, Hyland wrote: “To keep KMOX-FM stereo on top of things, we select new music each day. Each week we review the music we are broadcasting and add at least eight new singles and ten new albums to the station’s repertoire.

“Our future plans include specials devoted exclusively to various types and categories of music, as well as programs built entirely around individual artists.” Hyland didn’t mention that his FM station would also serve as a dumping ground for sports broadcasts. In those days, KMOX-AM had play-by-play rights to every major sports team in the city. When there were two teams scheduled to play at the same time due to the overlap of sports seasons, one team would have its broadcast shifted to the FM station.

Most of the musical programming decisions came from Bob Osborne, a KMOX employee who wore many hats. He was also heard as a deejay on KMOX-FM and was the voice on many of the station imaging spots. Many other people were deejays on the station during those two decades, and their paths to the seventh floor studios at 1 Memorial Drive weren’t always pleasant. There were times when GM Hyland would “farm out” talent from KMOX. Some saw it as a punishment – radio’s equivalent of the proverbial trip to Siberia. But there were others who used their announcing jobs there to supplement their free-lance voiceover income.

Live deejay shows were seldom heard on KMOX-FM. Instead, taped voice tracks were inserted into the station’s huge automation system in the hope listeners might think they were hearing someone live. The black monster filled an entire room and contained all sorts of electronic bells and whistles. There was even a large tape cartridge that contained a time signature for every minute of the day (“It’s 12:15 at KMOX-FM.”), with everything designed to make the station sound live. But it cost CBS less to pay people to record voice tracks because each jock could turn out several shows in a short time, and they were only paid for the time spent recording. It didn’t seem to bother station management that there were occasional technical miscues, causing listeners to hear the announcers introducing a song that had been heard ten minutes before.

The end of KMOX-FM began in August of 1981 when CBS began the national experiment known as “Hit Radio.” The station’s playlist began its transformation with more current pop hits being added, and by the end of the year, the KMOX-FM call letters were dropped, replaced by KHTR.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 02/08)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The grand experiment that was KDNA in the 1960s appears to be part entrepreneurial, part pie-in-the-sky and part fun. It didn’t work, mainly because voluntary donations from listeners couldn’t overcome the station’s red ink. 

Ostensibly the brain child of Jeremy Lansman and Lorenzo Milam, KDNA-FM went on the air on February 8, 1969 on a commercial FM frequency, 102.5 mHz. The two men had met in Seattle at a similar type of radio station with the call letters KRAB. Lansman had dropped out of Clayton High School here and gone to radio school.  

Milam reportedly put up $50,000 to start KDNA, but it was several years before the Federal Communications Commission granted the duo a license because there was a competing application for the frequency from the First Christian Fundamentalist Church. There were even charges that the radical group Students for a Democratic Society was behind the station’s founding, a charge Lansman denied.  

KDNA developed a loyal audience among students at both Washington and St. Louis Universities. Staffers were paid, albeit not much, to do their programs, and Lansman told listeners he wouldn’t sell ads so long as their voluntary contributions covered costs. Studios were at 4285 Olive in Gaslight Square in an old house. Lansman, his wife Cami and their young son lived upstairs, and rooms on the house’s third floor served as a dormitory for some staff members.  

Some might call the programs wonderfully “free-form.” Music seemed to have no sense of format except that the songs heard were those the disc jockey wanted to play. Listeners were treated to unexpected monologues espousing personal opinion or discussions of social problems. There were on-air conversations with Jeannie, the affectionate name for the station’s transmitter, sometimes chastising her for allowing the frequency to wander. The St. Louis Symphony’s Leonard Slatkin would drop in every Thursday afternoon to spin records.  

But there were detractors.  

These were the late 60s and early 70s, and anti-war tensions ran high. People with long hair were deemed the enemy by many.  

Police raided the KDNA studios on a drug search. Lansman and two staff members were charged with violating the state’s drug laws. Lansman said the drugs had been planted. The charges were later dropped. A very vocal challenger appeared in the person of evangelist Bill Beeny, who sought to have KDNA’s license assigned to himself and lawyer Jerome Duff.  

They ultimately failed, and so did KDNA. The writing was on the wall for the station’s demise when it began a “pledge drive” with a goal of $400,000 and collected only $20,000. Lansman had said he would use the donated money to cover the station’s debt and buy out Milam’s half. The remainder, he said, would be used to form an umbrella group to oversee community radio in St. Louis. The group’s name, he said, would be Double Helix Corporation.  

Lansman sold the station to Cecil Heftel for $1.4 million in 1972 and the call letters were changed to KEZK. Proceeds of the sale were split 50/50 between Lansman and his partner Milam.  

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 10/97)