In a blaze of justifiable glory the corporate name of KWK was changed last week to Thomas Patrick, Inc., honoring Thomas Patrick Convey, founder and principal builder of the station through whose ceaseless efforts KWK has risen from humble beginnings to nationwide importance.
In a surprise program by his own associates the announcement went out over the air to KWK listeners, and Mr. Convey acknowledged the distinction in one of his characteristic, friendly speeches in which he pledged continued efforts on his part to bring to KWK listeners the best in radio features, keeping abreast with all that is new in radio, both artistically and technically, not only for the benefit of KWK and its well-wishers, but for St. Louis as well.
Radio and Entertainment joins with the great host of Thomas Patrick radio fans in extending felicitations to KWK and the man through whose efforts the station and St. Louis have become important links in the great NBC national network. More power to you, Mr. Convey!
(Originally published in Radio and Entertainment 11/21/1931).
To the average American there are two things which make hot weather bearable – namely baseball and beer, a combination as truly American as any tradition handed down since ‘76. And for that reason the radio program of the Columbia Brewing Company must be considered a strategic bit of sales.
It is the baseball motif that makes the Columbia program an unusual one. The program, known as “The Man-in-the-Stands Broadcast” was heard for the first time on April 14, when the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs opened the 1936 National League Baseball season at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. The program, scheduled daily, is broadcast direct from Sportsman’s Park. It consists of impromptu interviews with baseball fans in the stands, prior to the game, and makes for a chatty, interesting type of broadcast. Radio Station KWK, National Broadcasting Company outlet in St. Louis, is handling the broadcast. “Alpen Brau,” the Columbia Brewing Company’s brand of bottled beer, is featured on the commercial side of the broadcast.
The program goes on the air daily at 2:45 o’clock – fifteen minutes before the game begins. The fact that KWK is broadcasting all weekday games of the two St. Louis major league teams assures the “Man-in-the-Stands Broadcast” an unusually good ‘spot.” For already the rabid baseball fans – and all St. Louisans take their baseball seriously – are discovering that the “Man-in-the-Stands” is the kind of program that makes those last few minutes before game time slip by like magic. There was a time, too, when anything built around the baseball motif was generally considered for “men only.” That isn’t the case today, for women have become devout followers of baseball, thanks to radio broadcasting, “ladies’ days,” and other promotional efforts.
For that reason the Columbia Brewing Company’s radio program is the type that arouses the interest of the feminine radio audience. For that reason the concern can get over its sales message to the housewife. But, by and large, the success of radio advertising depends almost entirely upon the program backing up the advertising. That is why the advertising of the Columbia Brewing Company is getting results. By utilizing the baseball motif – a sport which appeals to everyone – the company has produced a type of radio program that has the same wide appeal.
(Originally published in Brewers’ Journal May 1936).
The first radio country club in America is now being developed within the city limits of Kirkwood – on the grounds of the transmitter plant of KWK. When completed early this summer it will have bridle paths, swimming pool, tennis courts, handball courts and even a trapshooting field.
Thomas Patrick Convey, president of Thomas Patrick Incorporated, owners of KWK, conceived the idea of a retreat for staff members last summer. One hot night he and Clarence Cosby, KWK director, were at the transmitter plant, which is located on the Manchester road, near Lindbergh boulevard. It was a moonlit night and Convey was impressed by the scenic value of the site. It was then that he decided to build a sleeping porch addition to the plant where he could spend sultry nights.
The sleeping porch soon became a reality and since then ten rooms have been added. Now it is the summer home of the KWK staff, and landscape architects are at work beautifying the grounds. More than 3,500 shrubs and trees have been planted and when summer comes, it will be a haven for tired continuity writers, announcers, singers and other KWK attaches.
The plant is open to the public and hundreds of visitors pass through it each week. The studios of station KWK are at the Hotel Chase and [are] where the programs originate, but without the transmitter plant KWK would not be able to reach out into the distance with its programs.
(Originally published in Radio and Entertainment 4/9/32).
When the St. Louis Globe-Democrat finally got on the bandwagon of newspaper ownership of radio stations, it did so in a big way. KWGD-FM was given a state-of-the-art facility of its own at 12th and Cole, down the street from the newspaper offices.
KWGD Studios architect rendering
The building, which now houses Sinclair Broadcasting’s St. Louis operations, cost $1.6 million to build in 1948, and the new station went on the air in December of that year. The newspaper admitted that it spent so much on the building because it also planned to set up a television station there.
The newspaper’s owners had actually applied for the frequency in 1941, but U.S. participation in World War II brought about a freeze on all new broadcast licenses. By the time it signed on December 19, 1948, at 92.9 mHz, KWGD-FM was beamed through its 10 kilowatt transmitter to the area’s nearly 100,000 FM receivers.
The paper touted the possibilities of FM, which was springing to life in the period following the war: “Listeners…will be assured of a new experience in radio enjoyment, free from the annoyance of interference by electric razors or vacuum cleaners, atmospheric static, and competing programs which set up a stream of ‘cross talk’ on standard broadcasting dials.”
Globe-Democrat staff writer Bob Goddard was given the task of writing the full-page introductory piece about the station. He described the building, writing, “The layout and décor are well calculated to put the prospective advertiser in a warm and receptive frame of mind from the moment he steps through the entrance door on Cole Street.”
There were four radio studios on the street level, two of which were nearly 1,400 square feet so they could handle studio audiences of up to 50 people. The studios were described as “floating,” That is, the walls and floors were constructed on “cushioned members, which creates acoustic isolation for the highest fidelity sound reproduction.”
The KWGD-FM newsroom was located just off the lobby, and passers-by were invited to stop and watch through the large exterior plate glass windows as the news staff worked. Although the newspaper dubbed the facility “Radio City,” a portion of the second floor was set aside to house television transmitting equipment and studios.
The fanfare was short-lived, though. FM radio stations in St. Louis, which at that time did little more than simulcast the programs of their co-owned AM counterparts, failed at a rapid rate. In a six month period, KSD-FM, KXLW-FM, WIL-FM, and WEW-FM went dark.
KWGD was acquired in 1949 by Thomas Patrick, Inc., which owned KWK, and KWK-FM began using the facility and transmitting equipment. The station was now located at 98.1 mHz, but in less than a year after the acquisition, the plug was pulled. In April of 1950, KWK-FM became the fifth FM station in six months to fail in St. Louis.
(Reprinted with permission of the St.Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 12/98.)
It was a powerful wind that blew through St. Louis the evening of July 19, 2006 . Forecasters did not see it coming, so there was little, if any, chance for broadcasters to get out warnings. But even if they could have foreseen it, it would not have helped KTRS.
KTRS loses two towers to strong storms in late July, 2006.
Photo by David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Copyright St. Louis Post-Dispatch 2006
After the fact, a National Weather Service spokesman said the St. Louis region experienced a series of north-northeasterly downbursts, which included several microbursts. The storm, he said, is called a “derecho.” Anything in the path of the wind was in danger, including radio towers.
Just a couple miles northeast of downtown St. Louis , the tower site of KTRS was hit hard. The four-tower array was built on the Mississippi River flood plain in Illinois half a century ago. Two of the station’s four Blaw-Knox towers were felled that July evening. A National Weather Service spotter in nearby Bunker Hill , Il., recorded a gust of 92 miles per hour.
Now, KTRS station ownership must cope with an extensive rebuilding process, made more costly and complicated by the possibility that all four towers are covered with lead-based paint.
58-Year-Old Site
The transmitter facility was built by Pulitzer Broadcasting in 1948 for its St. Louis station, KSD. Officially activated November 22 of that year, the towers were constructed during a major expansion of the broadcast facility, which included the establishment of the market’s first television station and a signal upgrade that gave KSD 5,000 watts, both day and night. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch story heralding the site construction noted each tower was 450 feet tall and weighed 70,000 pounds. The westernmost tower ran a 5,000 watt daytime signal and, with the other three towers, providing the 5 kW nighttime pattern. At that time, there were 16 stations at 550 kHz; KSD had to protect WKRC in Cincinnati , WJIM in Lansing , Mich. , and KFYR in Bismarck , N.D. Each tower leg sat on a concrete pyramid base. “At the base of each tower is a small building which houses the apparatus used for tuning the antenna to serve its special part in broadcasting KSD programs and preventing interference with other stations,” the article revealed. “The transmitting apparatus is housed in a building about 830 feet from the westernmost tower.”
Development of the site had taken two years, as the F.C.C. construction authorization came December 9, 1946 , a time when materials were scarce due to World War II. The 68-acre plot of land – rural at the time of construction – is still considered remote today, surrounded by cornfields and a huge landfill.
“It’s one of the great old tower sites,” says KTRS chief engineer Mike Breitenstein.
Mother Nature has shown destructive powers throughout history, but recent history in the St. Louis area had been relatively calm. When the wind storms rolled through on that evening in mid-July, the destruction that was left behind was incalculable. Thousands of trees were uprooted or destroyed. A large percentage of them fell on electrical wires.
The local electric utility, Ameren Union Electric, estimated 500,000 homes were without power – it was the largest outage in the history of the utility. The emergency was the logical time for the public to turn on battery-operated radios, and it was the wrong time for a talk-format station to be off the air.
The Benefits of Planning Ahead
Breitenstein says the station was quick to recover from the effects of the loss of two towers that night, in part because of something he did several years ago.
“In the late ‘90s I created a second non-directional tower,” he says. “We needed it for those times when maintenance was necessary. It gave us the ability to continue a non-directional signal during those times when we had to perform maintenance on the primary non-directional tower.”
So when the July storm hit, felling two of the towers, “I was able to get us back up and running within a couple hours,” Breitenstein said. “I took us down to 500 watts until we got the [FCC’s] authorization.” After the station’s signal was restored, KTRS was able to switch into a local mode in which the programming focused on storm damage and making sure listeners got the information they needed for their safety and recovery.
Station manager Craig Unger says their Washington attorneys were in the FCC offices the next morning. They asked for and got permission to go with a nighttime signal at 1250 watts, non-directional, rather than the normal 5,000 watts, directional. The Commission gave the station an initial six-month Special Temporary Authorization (STA) window for repairs.
Assessing the Damage
In the daylight following the storm, KTRS management was able to gather information on what had transpired. “You don’t really understand the magnitude and power of a storm until you see something like this,” said manager Unger.
Breitenstein said it looked like the failure point had not been in the towers’ steel structure but rather in a much smaller part. The steel, he says, was in good shape, even though the towers were 58 years old. But the Lapp insulators appear to have been the weak points.
Those insulators failed,” he said. The National Weather Service spokesman said the highly variable winds at excessive speeds put unnatural stresses on everything. Hardest hit, he said, were trees that were subjected to twisting.
In the case of the KTRS towers, it appeared the winds exerted stresses that shattered the insulators at the base of each tower. One tower simply collapsed. The other, Breitenstein says, looked as though it had been picked up completely from its base and deposited next to it, where the structure collapsed. He said there were distinct prints from the tower’s four legs in the soil next to the base.
A station employee had an apt description: “It looked like it had jumped,” he said.
Looking Ahead and Planning
For KTRS ownership, the storm may have a silver lining. They had recently installed a new transmitter in an effort to improve nighttime coverage. Now the loss and subsequent tower replacement could further that effort by giving KTRS a chance to improve its night pattern. The timeline, says the station manager, is loose right now. Insurance will help, says Unger, “but as all station managers know, the insurance manual for this sort of thing is usually about 80 pages long. We’re getting bids now and weighing our options.”
Those options could include relocating the nighttime towers to a new site, but that’s not too likely. In any event, nothing can be done until the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency checks out the lead content in the old tower paint. Unger believes there’s no real problem there, but station ownership will have to go through proper channels when it comes to disposal of the scrap metal – and that disposal may not be limited to the two flattened towers.
Unger says consulting engineers will probably be brought in to design a new site plan for four new towers. “There’s great ground conductivity out there in the flood plain,” he says, “and we want to continue to take advantage of that. There are probably a lot of different things we can do with that site.”
In the meantime, thanks to Breitenstein’s planning, KTRS continues to pump out the watts, serving its listeners during fair weather and foul.
(Reprinted with permission of Radio Guide.Originally published 9/2006)
The year was 1948. GIs returning from the European and Pacific theaters were being assimilated into the nation’s booming economy and the nation’s metropolitan areas were spreading rapidly as new housing units sprang up in the suburbs.
It was in this environment that James L. Grove, president of Grove Laboratories at 2630 Pine, began his quest to build a new radio station for St. Louis. He incorporated Radio St. Louis, Inc., and applied for an AM frequency (690) for a new 1,000 watt radio station. Grove’s medicine manufacturing business was well-established in the community. He made himself chairman the station’s board of directors.
Application for the station was announced February 6, 1948. Grove said he would name the station KBGS. He hired Frank E. Pellegrin to be president and general manager of the company. Pellegrin brought significant background to the job, having served as the director of the broadcast advertising department for the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, DC.
When the station’s inaugural broadcast was heard on June 4, 1948, it was under a different set of call letters, KSTL. Studios were located on the mezzanine level of the American Hotel at Seventh and Market Streets downtown. As for format, a spokesman called the sound “mood sequence programming” of music and news, and it was clear the station was avoiding certain images. One news account noted there was a “wide range of recorded music, but [it] includes no hillbilly numbers or hot jazz…the station, which uses no disc jockeys [and] uses the slogan ‘less yakity yak.’”
Pellegrin announced his intention that the music would accent the melody rather than novelty with no “hot jive programs. On the other hand, we will not be too highbrow or longhair…Our announcers will introduce the programs and musical numbers with a minimum of chatter.” KSTL reportedly showed a profit after four months of operation Employees from other stations in the market were hired: Brad Harrison from KMOX became the KSTL news director and Edward Galloway from WEW was appointed musical director. Edward Haverstick from the investment firm of Smith, Moore and Company, was the corporate secretary-treasurer.
An ad in 1949 bragged that the station had “the 4th strongest signal at the lowest cost per thousand of any St. Louis station. By then, less than a year after it signed on, the station had a new general manager, R.L. Stufflebean. William Ware was next in line as GM, but he died in 1953, so Dick Kasten was appointed to the job in February 1954. It was during his regime that KSTL-FM signed on in April of 1960.
But Pellegrin and Ware had been given ownership positions in the company. In 1955, Haverstick, now chairman of the board, filed for a change of ownership so he could buy out those shares. Eleven years later the Haverstick family bought out Kasten’s shares. KSTL was sold by Radio St. Louis, Inc., to Crawford Communications in 1994.
(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 8/2000)
