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When Bettye Robinson started working at WESL July 31, 1972, as a receptionist, she had no way of knowing how many changes she’d see in her 35 year career there.

You may not recognize her name, because most of her work was behind the scenes, although she was called on to work in the control room occasionally when a jock was late for a shift. She readily admits to becoming the mother figure for many of the station’s announcers over the years.

The station had just recently returned to the airwaves when she was hired, having gone dark because of financial problems. WESL signed on July 10 of that year under the ownership of E. St. Louis Broadcasting. The company was overseen by majority owner Dr. Wendell Hansen. “He was a jewel. I loved him,” says Bettye Robinson. “He would come in once a month. We’d have a sales meeting and he’d give us a pep talk. We made a lot of money with him.”

Hansen was a real character, even by radio standards. He had a group of trained birds which he’d occasionally bring to the station, where he would put on a bird show. “He was just good for the station,” Robinson recalls. “I think we made more money under Dr. Hansen than we did under any other owners. He’d worked with radio and with black people before and he knew the kind of music blacks liked. He knew how to deal with people.”

Reverend Robert Wolf, the station manager, had hired Bettye Robinson, a process she recalls fondly. “He was the best manager I had. He taught me so much about radio. There was an article in the paper and he said he was looking for a receptionist. So I came down. He said ‘Are you sure you want to work in radio?’ I told him I’d give it a try. And Reverend Wolf asked if I could type. I told him I could, so he sent me to the E. St. Louis employment office to take a typing test. That was on a Thursday. He called me at home the next day and asked if I wanted to go to work. I asked when I could start and he told me to come in Monday.”

At that point, WESL featured block programming. Don O’Day had an oldies show. Ken Brantley hosted a program of gospel music. Program director Decatur Agnew even asked the station’s receptionist to host a daily five-minute household hints show. Bettye Robinson remembers writing the scripts using a big book full of information. She also took calls from listeners who had specific questions. Her 2:00 p.m. show, Bettye’s Household Tips, ran for about a year.

Everything at the station changed in January, 1984, when Bishop L.E. Willis of Norfolk, Va., bought WESL. The format was switched to gospel and all the announcers quit. Bettye Robinson has been the administrative assistant to Dr. Hansen, and she performed many of the same duties as the station liaison to the bishop.

Ten years later there was another owner, nightclub impresario Robert Riggins. His hope was that he could use the station to promote his club, and for awhile it worked well. Blues musicians appearing at the club would drop by the station, which was a thrill for Bettye Robinson. “With Mr. Riggins I met all the blues people and they’re very nice. Johnny Taylor, Bobby Bland, Bobby Rush. I met so many entertainers I’d heard about.”

But Riggins’ lack of knowledge of the radio business proved to be his downfall. He spent money to add on to the studio building, envisioning an increase in the sales staff. “He was going to hire all these people to come in and turn things around,” says Robinson, but it never happened. “Mr. Riggins never really moved into the new building because he got sick. That was his dream – to move into the new building.”

In the late ‘90s, Bettye Robinson decided to retire to pursue another dream, but those plans took a detour. ““I retired from WESL in 1999 on a Saturday evening. I had a big retirement celebration. Mr. Riggins asked ‘What are we going to do without you? I don’t know radio.’ And Mozella, his wife, said, ‘You can’t leave us.’ So I told them I’d come back and help until they could find someone. I went back the next Monday morning and ended up staying.”

Another ownership change came in November of 2004. Simmons Media bought WESL and later moved out of the E. St. Louis studios, consolidating operations with another radio property in a building on Laclede’s Landing on the Missouri side of the river. The format was also changed, bringing back Bettye Robinson’s thoughts of retirement. WESL, she says, would never be the same. “Home is that little building that sits at 149 S. Eighth Street, and when I think of WESL, that’s what I see in my mind.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 3/2007.)

The date was April 10, 2005. Smooth jazz listeners who turned on their radio station in St. Louis that day found something completely different from what they expected. There was no more smooth jazz on WSSM.

Overnight the music had been replaced. The music they heard was a mixture unlike anything else in the market. WSSM was history, replaced by a format that had been tried and proven in Phoenix. It would take St. Louis by storm, vaulting the station’s ratings to No. 2 (18-34), No. 1 (25-54) and No. 1 (35-64) in the most recent Arbitron survey period.
To hear John Kijowski tell the story, the idea for the station was hatched and developed shortly after Radio One bought St. Louis’ WRDA from Emmis and changed the format to Urban.
Kijowski, who is Vice president/market manager – Bonneville St. Louis, says the market is about 18 percent African American.
“To really do great with smooth jazz, you need to capture a majority of the African American audience and you have to make huge inroads into the KEZK audience. We only got a small portion of KEZK’s audience, and on the African American side we ended up competing with Majic. When Radio One got Tom Joyner and St. Louis picked up a second adult African American signal, there was no way I could be the third choice for African Americans.
“We began creating a game plan for “The Arch,” and I wrote up a summary of what we wanted to do. I called our Phoenix station and told them [at the Phoenix office] that I’d followed their success, and they told me they weren’t going to do the “Jack” format. They told me what they’d done and I thought we could do it in St. Louis. Phoenix is more of an A/C market, and St. Louis is more of a rock market. I knew I’d have to adjust the playlist.”

“Once I got the go-ahead for a format change, a team was assembled: Joel Grey (P.D. from The Peak in Phoenix), Greg Solk (head of programming for Bonneville), Matt Bisbee (Director of Creative Services for Bonneville Chicago), Drew Horowitz (Senior Regional Vice President Bonneville, Inc., from St. Louis), WVRV Imaging Director Jude Corbett, former WVRV P.D. Marty Linck, our Marketing Director Abigail Pollay and myself.
Greg Solk would later tell Radio Monitor magazine the actual format change took about 45 hours, “It was quite a launch,” he said.

Grey agrees: “Greg Solk and I showed up in the middle of the night, took the Peak basic format from Phoenix and put it on the air in St. Louis and then modified it to make it a St. Louis radio station.”
Kijowski says, “When other broadcasters ask us how we did it, I tell them it was totally a group that did that over a weekend, turning it around in 48 hours. The first month we did not have an on-air personality. Then we brought in locally known players.”

Jules Riley arrived from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in June and took the job of program director at The Arch. She says initially, the target audience was 25-54 women, but the current Arbitron shows listenership is evenly divided between men and women. “Our station came out of the gate strong, and we already had guidelines in place on spots and clutter – things that people had said they didn’t like about other radio stations. Recently a caller told her, ‘We listen to the station because my wife and I can agree on it.’”
Riley and music director Al Hofer pick the daily playlist from 1,100 titles (at least double the size of most station lists) and constantly tweak it.

The success of The Arch in St. Louis isn’t surprising to a longtime radio observer. Bob Kochan, owner of Kochan and Company advertising, is quick to praise the large playlist. “A music mix that is not so narrow allows for variety without the frequent repetition of songs to work to their benefit. The decades of music they cover gives them the ability to capture the listening of more audience in more demos. It also reinforces the theory that the market will embrace a station that is promoted as different and fresh.”

That promotion has an attitude. Using the highly recognizable voice of John O’Hurley for imaging, the station assigned the actor an identity: Simon Archer. He records scripted material provided by station personnel to help give The Arch local flavor. Riley says humor is an integral part of the atmosphere at WARH. “You can’t take yourselves too seriously. I mean, it’s radio. We’re not saving lives here.”

The image is also enhanced by the pledge to never play the same song twice in the same day. This philosophy came from studies that showed heavy music repetition to be a tune-out factor among listeners.
There’s no doubt the station is a huge success, not just locally either. It’s getting national trade press attention for its huge Arbitron ratings.

John Kijowski tells SJR he’s running The Arch with an eye toward the future. “Technology has allowed people to get the music that they want to hear when they want to hear it, completely customized for them, whether it’s their I-Pod, satellite – whatever they want to hear they can get now. Tightly fitted formats have less and less appeal. We keep our ratings up by keeping the music fresh, and we live up to what we say we’re going to do. We have to do it differently to keep them listening to local radio. Local jocks are vitally important. We intentionally try to make the music flow crazy.”

And the result of that crazy music flow? “This means we’re going to have [formatic] trainwrecks all over the place,” Kijowski laughs, “because that’s what the adults want to hear.”

But Kijowski says music mix isn’t everything. “Personality is really important in how we built this radio station, because if it were nothing more than a juke box I don’t believe we would be as successful as we’ve been. The jocks have a lot to do with the success.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 09/2006)

Guy Runnion made a name for himself as a broadcaster in St. Louis reading the news on KMOX, but he had higher aspirations. On January 1, 1947, he left the CBS powerhouse and signed his new radio station, KXLW, on the air. Later he probably wished he had stayed at KMOX.

There was plenty of publicity prior to sign-on, thanks to Runnion’s second-in-command, Edgar Mothershead, who is listed as the company’s vice president. Mothershead had been an editorial writer for the Watchman-Advocate, and his contacts in the city’s print media allowed him to get plenty of exposure. The Globe-Democrat, on the day of sign-on, wrote, “The station will present a varied program of music, news, sports, food talks, fashion hints, agricultural and outdoors information.”

The first day’s broadcast was similar to many other inaugural broadcasts here. After an invocation by Rev. Dr. Frank Hall of Central Presbyterian Church, Clayton’s mayor Kenneth Thies welcomed KXLW to the airwaves. Studios were located in the brand new Plaza Building at 8135 Forsythe (the “e” was later dropped from the street name).

The station was limited in its coverage, having been assigned 1,000 watts of power at a frequency of 1320 Kc. Programming began at 6 in the morning with a farm almanac show. At 10:00 KXLW had a show for women, and there was an hour of news and sports at noon. Runnion quickly found that disc jockeys were popular with his listeners, and, since he had no network to provide programs and the production of local dramatic and live music shows was expensive, he took the inexpensive, easy way out.

There were stories of a pending move to new studios, but that never happened. Runnion was served with notice that he could no longer broadcast from the tower he had erected without a permit at the corner of Warson and Old Bonhomme in Olivette. He had spent $6,000 to put it up. The case would be tied up in court for the next several years.

On December 6, 1948, members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers set up pickets at the KXLW studios and at a new tower site in Brentwood in a wage dispute. Just over a month later, the station was silenced, and Runnion accused the engineers of sabotaging the transmitter. “Two wires on the lightning arrester were grounded out sometime Saturday night…causing some of our equipment to burn out,” he was quoted as saying. “The damage could have been done only by someone familiar with such installations generally and with KXLW facilities in particular.” The Post-Dispatch quoted IBEW spokesman Robert Stetson: “Any inference that our men caused this damage is ridiculous. Our men prize their Federal Communications Commission licenses too highly to risk them in any such undertaking as this.”

The new tower finally arrived at the Brentwood site, but steelworkers who were hired to erect it refused to cross the engineers’ picket line. Olivette officials continued to pressure Runnion, and things came to a head there when County Police arrested him and two of his remaining engineers just as he was about to make a broadcast from his Clayton studio. He was charged with violating an Olivette ordinance regarding the tower. There were more arrests. In another episode, five staffers were arrested as they tried to enter the tower facility for a broadcast. Runnion told a Globe-Democrat reporter, “The malicious series of arrests seems to indicate pretty clearly that the officials of Olivette are trying to silence the station permanently, rather than simply trying to enforce zoning ordinance covering the 16-acre hog farm where the transmitter was put.”

There was obviously pressure from his co-owners as well. A shareholder filed suit in February of 1949 asking that the station be placed in receivership, alleging Runnion had “grossly mismanaged” KXLW. Runnion, meanwhile, filed a legal complaint against two marshals, charging them with trespassing and willful and malicious oppression in connection with the recent staff arrests.

In April of 1949, Runnion threw in the towel and an agreement was announced that would allow him to save face. His controlling interest in KXLW, along with the shares held by his wife Gladys, was sold to Lee, Silas and T. Virgil Sloan. Runnion would stay on as general manager, they said, and all other employees would keep their jobs. The marshals were found not guilty of the charges he had filed. In August of 1949, Runnion resigned after having reached agreements to settle the strike and completing construction of the new tower on Bomparte Avenue in Brentwood.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 07/02)