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Art Ford really wasn’t sure what he’d do for a living, but he probably didn’t envision union busting. After getting a degree in journalism at the University of Missouri in the 1940s, he ended up working at a newspaper in Evansville.

But when he learned his wife was pregnant, he left that job and they moved back to St. Louis to be near family.

Ford quickly landed a job at the INS wire service, and it wasn’t long before a friend suggested some extra money could be made by doing weekend work at a local radio station, KSTL.
That inauspicious beginning in the broadcast business in 1953 led to a career that spanned four decades.

KSTL wasn’t a particularly glamorous place to work in 1953. The studios were located in a quonset hut on the east side of the Mississippi just under the MacArthur Bridge. The station had been put on the air by Grove Laboratories in 1948, but it was licensed for daytime only broadcasting. After about a year-and-a-half on the air, Art Ford was bored, and one of his managers suggested he move over to the sales side of the radio business.

That also meant a physical move across the river. It seems the station’s sales offices were at co-owned UHF KSTN-TV at the corner of Hampton and Berthold. It wasn’t long before circumstances evolved that catapulted Ford to a position of making radio station management decisions. This was when the real challenges began.

Running a daytime radio station in a major market can be extremely challenging. There were union contracts to fulfill and overhead costs to cover, but the limited power and number of hours of airtime meant there weren’t as many ad availabilities.

Ford says he got around this in two ways: The mornings were filled with religious programming which brought in enough money to cover operating costs. In the afternoon, Carson’s Furniture Store bought a daily time block and put country disc jockey Johnny Rion on the air to represent them. This allowed KSTL to turn a profit, although the Carson’s sponsorship forbade any ads for competitive products like furniture and jewelry. Rion was never actually an employee of the station. He was paid by his sponsor.

In the late 50s rock and roll swept into the market and Ford thought it would be a good idea to counter-program with “good music.” He hired the market’s only black disc jockey, Spider Burks, to do his jazz show from 1:30 – 3 and then brought in TV personality Chuck Norman to deejay until sign-off. “We had the best music programming in the city,” says Ford, “but the fact that we were a daytimer really hurt us.”

In 1965, Art Ford was made the station general manager, and country music soon returned. Jenny Jamison, a singer who had a couple of successful country records, was added to the on-air staff. KSTL became the top country station in the market, and the station’s studios were moved out of the quonset hut and into an office on Laclede’s Landing.

1975 was a rough year in the history of the station. The owners had sold their FM frequency three years earlier, but the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers insisted that the company maintain its full engineering roster.

This meant keeping four full-time engineers on the staff to operate one daytime AM station, a station that was limited to 9 ½ hours of daily broadcasting during the winter months of November, December and January. Ford says he brought this up each year during labor negotiations, even offering to find another job for one of the engineers, but after three years of negotiating, the union threatened to “walk” if the contract was not signed. “I said ‘I’ve worked with those guys for years, but if they walk it’ll be the saddest thing they ever did,’” Ford remembers.

That’s when the going got rough. The engineers walked out and management continued operating without them. There were charges and countercharges. Management hired a consulting engineer and continued operating. In the end, the union lost their battle and KSTL went on without their services. Art Ford, the former newspaperman, eventually moved on to manage WGNU and later retired from the business.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 11/04.)

What began on KMOX in 1937 became a bastion of radio drama for 25 years in St. Louis, thanks in part to the work of a twenty-something man named Kensinger Jones.

“The Land We Live In” was a presentation of Union Electric, heard at 5:30 Sunday evenings and performed before a studio audience. Each episode was a recreation of an historic event or series of events from the St. Louis area. Ken Jones was hired by KMOX in 1945, ostensibly as a continuity writer, but as he put it more succinctly, “My real work was to make sure there was never again a shortage of scripts for ‘The Land We Live In’ radio show.” He and his young wife Alice worked in conjunction with director Ted Westcott and music director Seth Greiner (Alice was never on the payroll) to produce 52 half-hour shows a year.

Even though that number was later cut to 39, the schedule was brutal. Jones says he did get some help from free-lance writers from time to time, but he still was expected to be the script editor.

An average week, Jones says, went something like this: “From 1946 on, Alice and I lived in a log house just outside of House Springs. That’s where I wrote the shows. We’d do our research at the Central Library, the Missouri Historical Society, and by visiting individuals related to stories. That would take Saturday through Tuesday or Wednesday.

“I’d write frantically on Wednesday and deliver the script to KMOX at the Mart Building where it had to be duplicated. Copies would go to Ted Westcott for casting, Seth Greiner for music, and to Walter Heren at U.E. for client approval. There would be a quick rewrite and then a full cast and orchestra rehearsal.

“Then the show would be timed and recorded. On Thursday morning the rehearsal record would be played for the agency and the client. Their suggestions were cranked into a final rewrite on Friday or maybe Saturday. On Sunday at 2:45, a rehearsal with rewritten ‘final’ scripts commenced. A timed run through occurred from 4 – 4:30. Ted raised his hand and threw the first cue at 5:30. Usually by that time I was back in House Springs working on the next show.”

His wife Alice adds that he was often researching several shows at the same time, and he was picking up free-lance work on the side and writing other shows for KMOX.

Sponsor Union Electric decided in the late 1940s to move the show from KMOX to KSD, and the writers and producers moved too.

In conversation with Kensinger Jones, it’s obvious he and Alice loved what they were doing. They dug deeply into St. Louis history, and while it would be impossible to recreate historically accurate dialog, all facts represented on the show were correct. Suggestions for show topics would come in from listeners, some of whom had material to help the Joneses in their research.

As Ken Jones says, in radio, sound effects, words and music, along with the listeners’ willing imagination, can create anything you want, from a skirmish to a full scale battle. “The theater of the mind is surely the best auditorium ever provided for a writer’s work.”

The scope of their accomplishment is even more admirable when one realizes that this was done before computers, before word processors, before the Internet. The late Bea Adams, who worked at UE’s ad agency, Gardner, wrote of this process in her book Let’s Not Mince any Bones, “In an office only big enough for a small desk, typewriter, chair and raft of reference books, Kensinger Jones wrote “’The Land We Live In.’ He wrote it, lived it, researched it, personally watched over it and shaped it into one of the finest radio shows ever to come out of St. Louis.”

An October 1975 St. Louisan magazine article penned by Nancy Leutwiler told of our town’s local actors who made a good living as regulars on “The Land We Live In.” Hiring was usually done through the St. Louis Players’ Guild, depending on the number of characters needed for the week’s production.

If only a few were needed, they came from the on-air staff of the individual radio stations. Conditions for the actors could be as stressful as they were for the writers. ”

The first run-through came Thursday afternoon when parts were assigned, and the production crew would tell actors which accents, if any were needed. Then followed rehearsals, musical insertions, dress rehearsal, and live production four days later when the staff announcer intoned: “The Land We Live In, where if you listen, you can hear echoes of the glamorous past.

There were also some well-known guest stars. One of Ken Jones’ fondest memories was of the program that featured Maureen O’Hara, a show written as a tribute to the late John Cardinal Glennon. Jones gave Miss O’Hara the narrator’s character, that of Kathy Dunn, a niece of Glennon’s friend Andy Dunn. But as the live presentation was wrapping up, Miss O’Hara began to sob and left the stage. Director Westcott immediately cued the orchestra and Jones was summoned to go onstage and finish the wrap-up speech. Later, Maureen O’Hara told those assembled that the script evoked such vivid memories of her own childhood in Ireland that she was emotionally overwhelmed.

Alice Jones was Ken’s partner throughout the whole “Land We Live In” effort. “It was an exciting time in my life,” she says. “Young, married, no kids, no car, and all these wonderful stories.” The couple truly enjoyed their work here.

“The Land We Live In” was primarily a public relations vehicle for the Union Electric Company. After the final broadcast in April of 1952, Kensinger and Alice Jones moved to Chicago where he accepted an attractive offer from the Leo Burnett ad agency writing for television.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 10/04)

E.B. was #1 with St. Louis teenagers even before rock and roll hit the local airwaves.
He began his ten-year-plus stint on local radio in 1951. It was a time when network radio programming was breathing its last gasps and disc jockeys had taken the place of the cancelled programs. Popular music of the day was performed by the likes of Eddie Fisher, Patti Page, Frankie Laine, Jo Stafford, Rosemary Clooney, Mario Lanza, and Les Paul and Mary Ford.

And all the kids knew E.B., Ed Bonner. They heard him on KXOK from 1951 to 1958 and WIL from 1958 to 1962, but his work involved a lot more than his airshifts. It seemed as though he spent every spare minute with his listeners, doing up to four personal appearances per week.

After graduating high school in California, Bonner became a fireman. His first radio job came in Idaho Falls, ID, but wanderlust soon took hold and he went to a baseball tryout, ending up as a shortstop on a Chicago Cubs’ farm team. Pro baseball didn’t pan out, but another radio gig cemented his future. Bonner became a disc jockey in Lynchburg, VA. The broadcast career was interrupted again by a 27 month Navy obligation, after which he found himself in St. Louis. He was 28.

His daily shows were broadcast from the KXOK studios in the Star-Times Building downtown at 12th and Delmar, and there was always an open invitation to teen listeners to come down and watch him work. His first show on the station was “St. Louis Ballroom.” Later he was heard from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 to noon on Saturday. One of his fans, Wayne Brasler, is now a professor at the University of Chicago. “In the early ‘50s,” Brasler remembers, “Ed got a teenaged sidekick on his Saturday morning shows, Maureen Arthur of University City, who went on to being part of Ernie Kovac’s cast and then on to TV and film acting in Hollywood.”
The early 1950s were also a time of unrest in the nation. Men were being drafted and sent off to war in Korea, rumors of communists among us led to nationally broadcast witch-hunt hearings in Washington, and the nation’s Negroes were beginning a movement toward equality and against discrimination.

In Prom Magazine, reporter Mary Lou Matthews quoted an unnamed civic official who said “Ed Bonner has probably done more to make St. Louis Teenagers prejudice-free, responsible citizens than any other person in show business.” His personal appearance roster included the Catholic Youth Organization, Cancer Fund, National Conference of Christians and Jews, Red Cross and the campaign for the Y.M.H.A. He was remembered as a sharp dresser with a great voice whose appearance at a public event would guarantee the event’s success.

E.B.’s influence was felt by the record industry too. Al Chotin was a record distributor who was quoted by Post-Dispatch gossip columnist Jerry Berger remembering Bonner. Chotin said Bonner, whose nickname was “Monkey,” was the top disc jockey in St. Louis, and when it came to promoting records, “If you didn’t offer Ed the artist first, forget it. He wanted total exclusivity.” At Christmas, Bonner was always showered with gifts from local record stores, but it wasn’t payola. It was their way of recognizing his contribution to their business.

Bonner held down a slot on KXOK until 1958, when he moved his allegiance to WIL, which had studios in the “lower level” of the Coronado Hotel on Lindell across from the St. Louis University campus. Neither E.B. nor KXOK management would comment on the change in employment. He was given the noon to 4 p.m. shift. His short-lived replacement on KXOK was Buddy MacGregor. It seems E.B.’s listeners moved up the dial to 1430 with him. The 1959 Hooper radio survey showed him topping every other disc jockey in town, including WIL’s Dick Clayton and Jack Carney.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 3/03)