Many people tend to think that radio’s “golden age” ended in the 1940s, but one local media veteran has memories of that golden time extending into the ‘50s in St. Louis.
In 1950, the KMOX studios in the Mart Building were the site of a veritable beehive of activity. Ollie Raymand was there, newly hired as a staff announcer. “At that time,” he says, “St. Louis was the network’s third-most-active radio production center.”
That meant that the multiple radio studios in the massive downtown building were kept busy, often with two programs being broadcast live at the same time – one to St. Louis and another to the CBS affiliates around the country.
“We started in the morning at 7:30 feeding the Ozark Varieties Program around the country,” says Raymand. “We’d occasionally feed our noon news to the network. There was the Housewives Protective League. From 3:00 to 4:00 we produced Matinee.
“That featured our 26-piece KMOX orchestra. Curt Ray and I were emcees. Jack Hill was our male singer. The female singers were Dottye Bennett and Fredna Parker.”
The high cost of Matinee led to its demise after about nine months. But KMOX still fed a lot of nighttime material to the nation. Big band remote feeds often featured Stan Daugherty and the KMOX musicians, and other bands could be heard appearing at the Jefferson Hotel and the Chase Hotel.
Saturday at the Chase was, as the name indicated, a remote from the famed hotel’s Starlight Room. The program featured whatever big-name talent might be appearing at the hotel at the time or, occasionally, stars from the Muny Opera.
Jazz Central originated from the Ambassador Hotel. Raymand says with that much activity going on, the job was full of surprises.
“One time an orchestra leader whose band was scheduled to go live on the network in a few hours became, shall we say, indisposed. I got a call from the manager of the Sheraton Jefferson Hotel. He knew I played trumpet, and he called and asked me to come in and take over the band. I’d never played with them and, of course, didn’t know their arrangements, but I did it and went on to finish out the final two weeks of the band’s engagement there.”
The KMOX production facility and offices occupied over 40,000 square feet of Mart Building space. In addition to talent, the programs required a staff of writers, since nothing in those days was ad-libbed. Engineers were needed to operate all the equipment, and there was a large news operation.
Raymand captured the atmosphere of the place when he said, “I used to love the job because it was so exciting. We’d rehearse and go through the script. You could work directly with the writers to make changes so the phrases were more natural for the way you spoke. It was totally different from what radio people have today.”
CBS had built the KMOX Mart Building studio complex at the height of the Depression, pumping much-needed money into the local economy. But the death of network radio’s Golden Age was looming in the ‘50s. That, along with a notice to vacate from the building’s owner, who needed the space for a larger tenant, forced KMOX to relocate to smaller quarters in 1957.
The programming changed too, and St. Louis’ position as a CBS Radio production center soon evaporated.