News from Our Archives

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.)

“Radio Park.” It’s a name that prompts a variety of visual images, which is why it was a perfect home for a radio station that relied on theater of the mind. Listeners usually had a much different mental image and many were somewhat disappointed when they saw it, but that didn’t change the way they felt about the station at Radio Park.

The real estate was purchased from Florence Eilers, widow of St. Louis patent attorney Roy Eilers, in July of 1955. Elzey Roberts, Jr., and Chet Thomas announced they planned to move their radio station, KXOK, to the two-and-one-half acre tract of land at 1600 North Kingshighway between Warwick on the south and Aldine Place on the north. Buildings on the land totaled 10,000 square feet. The move took place Sunday night, Aug. 28, 1955. By the time they opened for business that Monday morning, all 110 employees were in place at Radio Park.

The work atmosphere at KXOK had been strained over the previous couple years. Original owner the St. Louis Star-Times had ceased publication in June of 1951, but the station’s studios remained in the newspaper’s building at 12th and Delmar. In 1938. when the station signed on, the studios were the best money could buy, and the operation was designed to work in tandem with the newspaper’s staff. There were many locally originated programs and a large broadcast staff to put it all together.

By the late ‘40s, KXOK had become little more than a plug and play ABC Radio affiliate, running all the national shows and supplementing with local news. By then, the radio business was changing, and a station that relied solely on network programming was headed on a downhill track. Management hired some prominent disc jockeys and used the move to Radio Park to establish the image of the “new” KXOK.

And anyone who drove past 1600 North Kingshighway remembers that sign in the front. It was the first impression young Bud Connell had when he arrived to begin his job programming the station. “I was greeted by a massive all-weather sign announcing the famous call letters, KXOK. Each big, green letter, more than five feet tall and a foot thick, was mounted on a heavy, imposing 12-foot frame that appeared to have permanently grown from the block-long grounds known as Radio Park.”

Those who worked at Radio Park in later years have many pleasant memories, due in part to the fact that the radio station was not a sterile, business environment. The grounds were filled with huge oak, elm, mulberry and pine trees. Next to the building a walled patio provided a break area for employees. Author Robert Hereford wrote, “Three huge trees rise from the brick floor of the patio…Flowers, ferns and creeping ivy add to the Spanish motif.” Former newsman Robert R. Lynn remembers, “We often did our newscasts with the door to that patio open and the birds singing outside.”

KXOK occupied a newer two-story building, which was attached to an old former residential structure that the station used for storage. There was a small house behind the station where the caretaker lived with his family. There was even a hand-carved totem pole on the grounds.

Entry to KXOK was from the south on a circular drive. Most offices were on the second floor, studios on the first. Walking past the receptionist, who operated the old-fashioned patch cord switchboard, visitors went down a couple stairs, passing the door to a very messy newsroom (the opinion of Steven B. Stevens) into a viewing area to watch the disc jockeys at work. The main studio was about 1,000 square feet, and at one time, there were seats for a live audience.

In its earlier years, KXOK fed the ABC network signal to all affiliates west of the Mississippi from a master control room on this level. The echo that gave KXOK its full, rich on-air sound came from a wall in this room. There, housed in a plexiglass box, was an echo amp designed by corporate engineer Dale Moudy. It came from an old Hammond organ and consisted of three tubes and springs.

Another large studio on this level was used for commercial production. It housed the massive Ampex 300 reel-to-reel machines. Richard Ward Fatherley, who became the station’s production director, remembers “a lonesome, aged grand piano hugging the studio’s south wall, a testimony to radio’s good old days.”

The newsroom was eventually moved behind the main studio, and as Steven B. Stevens remembers, “the worst part of that was that those who needed to use the rest room (a facility described by Robert R. Lynn as ‘acoustically perfect’) behind the newsroom would go there and think up things to do. One trick was to come out with a large soda bottle filled with water and pour it slowly into a bucket of water during a newscast so it sounded you were broadcasting from the KXOK toilet.

“More than once I had my script lit on fire by a jock cruising by; I would simply ad lib my way on through the newscast.”

The magic of a place called Radio Park was summed up in the words of programmer Bud Connell: “Radio Park was an image, indelible in our minds and hearts, and in our loyal listeners – and it will never be repeated. It will be sadly missed by those of us who were fortunate enough to work there.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 6/08)

The video link below is to an 8 mm film shot by Richard Ward Fatherley while he was an employee of KXOK in the early ‘60s. It shows the grounds of Radio Park and a KXOK All Stars ballgame at nearby Forest Park.

The life of a staff announcer in local radio in the 1940s was not exactly filled with thrills and excitement. But Ralph Hansen remembers one day, even though it occurred over 60 years ago.

Hansen had grown up in Wisconsin, going to school in West Bend, north of Milwaukee. One day a group of students was taken on a tour of a local radio station and the hook was set for Hansen. Later, as a student at Northwestern University’s downtown Chicago campus, he applied for the job of page at WMAQ, NBC’s huge operation in the Mart Building. As a page, he was able to attend classes run by the network to train future announcers, and when that training was finished, the network helped place the successful students in radio jobs. Ralph Hansen ended up at WALA in Mobile, Alabama.

And he ended up in St. Louis because of a woman. She’d caught his eye in Alabama, but as a student at Stephens College in Central Missouri, she wouldn’t be spending much time in Mobile. Hansen auditioned at KSD in St. Louis for Frank Eschen, the station’s news director, and was given the job of staff announcer. He was 20 years old, and today, he says he has no idea what happened to that girl.

Working at KSD in the late 1930s and early 1940s was a pretty good gig. The station was owned by the Pulitzers, who also owned the Post-Dispatch. The company’s building was on the northeast corner of 12th and Olive, and they’d put a separate entrance on the Olive Street side of the building for the radio station. KSD was a strong union shop, with engineers who belonged to IBEW and announcers who were members of AFRA.

Eschen saw some possibilities in the youngster, but Hansen’s announcing needed some refining, so Eschen would take the young man upstairs into the observation booth overlooking the studios. There Eschen would have Ralph read copy while the news director would critique his work. Hansen soon scored a slot as the regular staff announcer for Russ David’s “Alpen Brau” program. But there were additional duties, and it wasn’t exactly a glamorous job. A schedule would be posted each week outlining the shifts of the announcers, and often, their only duty would be to sit in the studio during network feeds and voice the live station identification at the hour and half-hour.

This was the sort of shift that brought Ralph Hansen to the KSD studios one early December Sunday in 1941. He and the engineer were the only two people there. At 1:00, the NBC “Chicago Round Table” program began, and Hansen left the studio and wandered into the deserted newsroom. He was bored, so he was looking around for something to occupy himself when one of the wire service machines began a loud ringing sound, the signal that something of great importance was being transmitted. Hansen rushed to the machine and tore off the copy. As he read it, he inadvertently blurted out “Oh, my God!” and went running into the control room to tell the engineer he had to break into the NBC feed. Then dashing into the studio, Hansen gave the signal and blurted into the open microphone the news that the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

The engineer rejoined “Chicago Round Table” and Hansen went back into the newsroom to see if any more information had come in. A few minutes later, the flash bulletin containing the same information interrupted the program again, but this time the news came from the network. Here in St. Louis, a 20 year-old staff announcer had scooped the network by several minutes and, in the process, had also beaten all the other local stations in getting the news on the air.

The rest of Hansen’s day was anti-climactic. He finished his shift and went home to his apartment. Soon afterward he would join the armed forces, returning to KSD in 1946 to take up the position of staff announcer again. When the Post-Dispatch went on the air with KSD-TV on February 8, 1947, Hansen made the transition and never returned to radio.

(Reprinted with permission of the St.Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 3/w2004.)