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It was 15 years ago or more when I decided to put a radio station on the air. I was in the high fidelity business at Jefferson and Olive. Somewhere along the way I got the brilliant idea that if I put a radio station on the air I could advertise my high fidelity business and get lots of customers, because I would have a captive audience.

Without really checking into anything, and not knowing any better, I started looking around and bought an FM transmitter. At that time they were easily available because just about everyone in the country believed FM was dead. St. Louis even felt that way because I believe the only noncommercial FM station on the air at that time was KFUO. But nothing bothered me. I was determined.
I scraped up the money for the down payment and applied to the FCC for a license to operate a station at Jefferson and Olive. It was my intention at that time to put a small tower on the building there. I got the license and the list of available call letters. I liked the sound of KCFM and chose that one. Since then I’ve had reason to wonder why. People keep thinking it’s a Kansas City station.

Then the fun really started. I found an engineer to help me get things started. The first thing he told me was that with a small tower on a building at Jefferson and Olive I wouldn’t get a signal out 30 feet. He said I needed a larger tower with some height. I started looking around and found an old tower on top of the Boatmen’s Bank Building that was used by an old Transit Radio Company. I found out they were paying $5000 a month on lease, and would like to get out from under it. So we negotiated a reasonable deal for them, pretty high for me, where I got the tower for half price, payable in advance. Again, I scraped up the money. The great day arrived. My engineer and I hooked it up, turned it on, and strangely enough we got phone calls.

People loved the station with all of the classical music. Being naïve, we went full steam ahead. I was operating with free help. People loved the idea of glamorous radio and wanted in on the ground floor. For the first month everything was fine, and lots of volunteers came in to get in on the fun and help run KCFM.

These were truly dedicated people who believed in FM. They played the records, made the announcements and cleaned the equipment. But after a few weeks the novelty wore off and I would get calls from this unpaid help saying their mother wanted them to cut the grass, or one would call up sick, or one would have a big date. Before I knew what was happening I found myself running the transmitter and the turntables, day and night, and neglecting the high fidelity business. Glamorous it wasn’t.

It was inevitable. I had to start salaried people. Even though the salary rate then was around $1 an hour, we were on the air 19 hours a day, and no revenue was coming in. The electric bills were coming in though, and there always seemed to be a $700 tube that would pick a bad time to burn out. Things really got rough.

We practically bankrupted the Hi Fidelity Co. to keep KCFM on the air, and it was getting discouraging, particularly when we couldn’t sell a 5 cent piece of advertising. Nobody believed we had a big enough audience that would buy. I was beginning to believe they were right. It hadn’t helped my high fidelity business in sales.

But a few dedicated people and I marched on, and we weathered two hectic years. During that time I found out that among my other duties at KCFM, I would have to do some selling on my own. One of the accounts I sold was a banking institution.

The president of that bank claimed we didn’t have any listeners. So I got our announcers to ask everyone listening to KCFM at that time to drop us a post card with comments. The replies filled a bushel basket, which I promptly took into the president’s office and dumped on his desk.

The post cards and letters covered his desk and spilled over on the floor. That was one of our finest sponsors for quite a while.

Advertisers still weren’t breaking down our doors though, so I decided to get into the background music business to help carry the freight. I went to the people who had all of the transit radio receivers and bought them all for $1 a piece. That night my partner and I sat down and started rebuilding them to make them work for background music.

We played easy-listening music during the day and whenever a commercial came on, we pushed a button which shut off the commercial so the background music customer couldn’t hear it.

Unfortunately there were times when our system didn’t work, and the customer in the store would be listening to soothing music and suddenly the commercial would come on loud and clear and tell him to go to that customer’s competition.

While we were fighting this problem, the FCC came up with a ruling that we couldn’t use this system. We had to go into what they call multiplexing, which was a scrambler built into the transmitter which scrambled a separate program and for which you needed a special receiver.

This was a very fine idea with one minor exception. It didn’t work. But, we got the equipment anyhow and started ironing out the bugs. In one year we debugged it sufficiently to get ourselves into the background music business on a small scale.

Among the other impressions that multiplexing made on me – I found that I liked the sound of the word, and so our background music service became “multiplex music.” Multiplex music not only helped the overhead, it carried the entire overhead for a while.

Time marched on, and we decided to get out of the location we were in because we needed larger facilities. We rented a large warehouse on DeBaliviere and put up a small tower, right through the roof, and moved our equipment in.

To say the roof fell in is putting it mildly. Our signal at this location was not getting out the front door. After many phone calls to the company that made the antenna we were using, with many suggestions from them that didn’t work, they sent us a new antenna.

The men on the staff at that time, along with yours truly, climbed the tower that very day, at 2 a.m. We started making the necessary changes and taking measurements. It wasn’t funny that cold morning, but now it seems pretty comical.

Here we are, freezing on that tower in the pitch black night, and all of a sudden two policemen come up the ladder with flashlights and guns drawn and want to know what we are doing there. My answer was, “What do you think we’re doing in zero weather a couple hundred feet off the ground?”

Things finally got it shape. We got a signal out. We had a sales staff. Our problems seemed to be diminishing. Then one week later I got a call about midnight from the announcer on duty who said the place was full of smoke, what should he do? I gave him the only advice I could come up with at the moment. Call the fire department and get the heck out of there.

I got dressed and started out for the station. When I got within a mile of the place I could hear the sirens and see the flames. The tower was down, lying across the National Food Store next door,  and 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.

Through the courtesy of Channel Nine, we put a small antenna on their tower at Boatmen’s Bank. We took the antenna out of the ashes and fixed it up, took an old transmitter and rebuilt it and carried it down to Boatmen’s on a Sunday, up the elevator and hooked it up ourselves.

(By Harry Eidelman 11/30/1969)

KDNA, “free speech radio,” the only place in St. Louis where you could hear decent jazz, live local musicians, unreleased tapes of Firesign Theatre, and one of the few, struggling listener-supported-no-commercials stations in the country, has been sold to a commercial business interest. Free radio, for many the only radio, is in perilous straights (sic) in St. Louis.

To put it bluntly, the two legal owners of KDNA’s frequency (102.5 FM) have sold the station in order to pay off debts incurred by the station’s original good angel, Lorenzo Milam. The sale price? The latest figure mentioned is a cool 1.1 million dollars.

But the money from the sale of the frequency to Cecil Heftel (owner of several “successful” commercial stations) will not be going to KDNA, nor to the dozens of people who have worked at starvation levels to help the station grow. It will be divided between Lorenzo Milam and Jeremy Lansman. The sale was made necessary by a series of events stemming from the beginning of KDNA.

In the beginning, there was an open frequency at 102.5 FM which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was about to allot. As has been the usual practice, hearings were held, and petitions submitted by those who were interested in owning the frequency. The main contenders for 102.5 were a church and Jeremy Lansman. Jeremy spent five years trying to get the frequency and, with a little help from his friends, he finally succeeded. Lorenzo Milam fits into the picture here. At various points in KDNA’s youth, as it was on its way to becoming “listener-supported,” he donated about $250,000.

Thus, KDNA was begin as a partnership: Jeremy’s work and Lorenzo’s money. As it grew, Lorenzo faded out of the picture. He criss-crossed the country helping to establish other listener-supported stations, and KDNA came to be run by a substantial number of “volunteers.”

Then one stormy night, Lorenzo appeared at the door of KDNA’s gaslight square studio-cum-office-cum-living quarters and told the sad tale of economic demise. It seems that he had spent rather recklessly, squandering his entire fortune on various ventures and had in fact, racked up about $400,000 in debts. The station was Lorenzo’s only major liquid asset.

A plan was formulated optimistically allowing for the greatest benefit to both Lorenzo and the station staff. It involved the formulation of The Double Helix Corporation, a non-profit corporation which, when the money was raised, would buy out Lorenzo’s share of the station and insure local ownership of the station forevermore. Lorenzo would get out of debt and the people of St. Louis would have free access to a radio station. As an incentive, Jeremy offered to donate his half-ownership to Double Helix if the money could be raised to buy out Milam.

However, raising $400,000 turned out to be very difficult. At the same time the station had to continue to run, and the $100 a day just to make ends meet had to keep coming in. By August 16, Double Helix had raised only $20,000 over and above the station’s minimal operating expenses.

Lorenzo’s creditors were knocking louder. During a recent conference of “free” radio stations in Seattle in mid-August, Jeremy and Lorenzo decided to sell the station to the highest bidder.

Lorenzo’s share will in part go to paying off his debts. The rest he intends apparently for developing listener-supported stations in other cities; he is disenchanted with St. Louis.

Lansman says that he intends to invest his half of the proceeds in a national non-profit foundation, as yet unformed, with the intention of building, as quickly as possible, listener-supported stations across the country. He and Milam have what they refer to as “the national perspective.”

There is something to be said for this “national perspective.” There are not an unlimited number of radio frequencies left in the U.S. Every so often the FCC opens up one of the remaining frequencies for grabs, and there is usually a frenzied scramble for it. According to Lansman, it is likely that all the available frequencies will be taken within a few years. His intention is to begin as many groups building free radio as possible before the medium falls into the hands of large entrepreneurs.

The lack of new frequencies is a major drawback in KDNA’s fight to survive. After the final contract is drawn up (a process involving several months) and the station is sold where will KDNA go? There are no more frequencies in the area. None. At first glance the prospects appear to be bleak.

The staff of KDNA has not stayed alive this long by taking a defeatist attitude, however. They are now pursuing a plan to share airtime with another station which only broadcasts short hours on weekdays. If they are successful they may be able to buy that frequency. At worst, they hope to be able to share the station’s air time in exchange for certain services.

In addition, the Federal government has recently changed its regulations to allow the office of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) to allot grants to non-profit, locally owned stations like KDNA. The Seattle “free” station has obtained a $20,000 grant, and a Pacifica network station has received some money. If Double Helix can raise some more money, they may be able to get an HEW grant. Lansman says aid will also be available through the national fund he intends to establish.

At any rate, the deal will take several months to close, and the station will be broadcasting all that time. They need donations to stay alive and to build for the future, and they need other kinds of help to pull it off.

So all is not lost. The survival of KDNA is basically a matter of the dedication of local people to maintaining the concept. The staff of KDNA is dedicated. Many are even optimistic about its survival on another frequency.

(Originally published in St. Louis Outlaw 8/25/1972, bylined “D.N.D.”)
 

WIL Artists Enjoy Broadcasting in New, Well-Arranged Studio in Star Building But Miss Applause

To the thousands of listeners-in who, last night and Saturday, heard the two opening programs of station WIL, operated by the St. Louis Star and the Benson Company, the inside story of broadcasting should prove interesting.

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.

Bud Fox, the studio pianist, throws down his cigarette and enters the room, glancing at the red light on the wall with its warning that absolute silence must be maintained.

Billy Knight, the Little Old 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.

Operator’s Room
Two stories higher sits “Dink” Garrison, the operator, in a little room reminiscent of the radio operator’s quarters aboard ship. Around him are switchboards, receiving sets, batteries and telephones. A direct line connected him with the studio below, and with a telephone circuit operator stationed at the Arcadia Ballroom, where two orchestras are already playing.

It is ten, lacking a minute. The Professor has finished a telephone conversation with Dink. 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.

Performers “Doll Up”
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 set 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 her knee in time to the music and roll her eyes, too, if she wants to.

The microphone provides something to sing to, as it stands unemotionally on its glass stand, but there is nothing in particular to look at and the glance of the singers roves over the wall before them.

But even before the program began, the two telephones in the reception room started to ring, to continue during the whole evening. Some called to say “It’s coming in fine,” and turned away from the phone so that the voice of their loud speaker returned over the telephone wire to the place whence it started on the ether. There were telegrams, too, and requests for favorite numbers.

The majority called to comment on the remarkable clarity with which station WIL is heard on receiving sets. This clarity, according to WIL fans, is in marked contrast to the indistinct reception of some other stations on which they have been accustomed to tune in.

One thing is lacking, though, when midnight comes and signing off time. Half the fun in good singing or acting is the applause. All radio singers get is the silent approbation of the half a dozen persons in the studio, who smile and clap in pantomime at an extra good note.

(Originally published in the St. Louis Star Feb. 3, 1925.)