The first broadcast of the sister FM station of KSTL was April 2, 1960.
It signed on as a Class “B” station at 98.1mHz with 76 kw of power. General manager Dick Kasten had managed to pick up used equipment from a station in Joplin, MO, that had gone dark. The transmitter was in Illinois at the same site as the KSTL transmitter in East St. Louis.
The station was sold 7 years later to Foreground Music, Inc., which changed the call letters to KRCH.
When radio stations had individual, rather than corporate, owners, the competition for listeners was evidenced by what was on the air, and what was promised off the air.
KSTL signed on in 1948. The market already had strong radio stations, so instead of emphasizing what it would be, KSTL was promoted by telling the audience what the station wouldn’t be.
The entire radio industry had begun to face the inevitable: television was here to stay and it was taking away all the network stars radio had relied upon. However, in 1948 there were still plenty of network programs for affiliates. NBC and CBS still filled most of the broadcast day and evening, but those stations with no network connection had to come up with their own programming.
There were the special interest shows aimed at women and kids. These were simple and cheap to produce: Hire a host and come up with a script. The more dramatic programs required a staff of actors, sound effects, live musicians and scripts with actual plot lines.
It was easier, and much cheaper, for the stations to hire disc jockeys to play records. And that’s where the station’s image was developed.
KSTL told its audience it would hear “a mood sequence technique with middle-of-the-road musical selections, ranging from old familiar to popular and classical.” Instead of establishing itself by creating a strong, positive identity, KSTL was established as a comparison with other stations, telling people what it was not. “Less talk, less chatter, less yakity-yak.”
In fact, just before KSTL signed on, management told St. Louisans the music would accent “melody, rather than novelty. KSTL will carry no hillbilly or hot jive programs. On the other hand, we will not be too highbrow or longhair, and we do not intend to have disc jockeys as such. Our announcers will introduce the programs and musical numbers with a minimum of talk and chatter.”
KSTL Weatherman Harry Wahlgren In other words, the station’s management was trying hard to not do what the other successful stations in St. Louis were doing.
Within a year, some of the programming boundaries were loosened. Local news was provided through a reciprocal agreement with five community papers. A station profile also boasted of “two noteworthy series of programs: ‘Who’s Who in St. Louis’ is a daily feature presented by tape interviews with outstanding local personalities in all lines of activity, and ‘The St. Louis Forum,’ a weekly discussion of major local issues.
How successful was the station?
A few years later, in 1956, KSTL’s programming included farm reports with Charley Stookey, livestock market reports, the Johnny Rion Western DJ show, Harry Wahlgren’s specialized weather reports and Tony Glenn’s daily mobile transmitter show. So much for no hillbilly programs and less “yakity-yak.”
(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 7/07.)
They called it the “Q” format, and it made a big impression in St. Louis.
And according to those who were on the ground floor, getting there was a lot of fun.
Q hit St. Louis compliments of Bartell Broadcasting, which purchased KRCH in August of 1972. Studios remained in the same place at 111. S. Bemiston in Clayton. The call letters were changed almost immediately to KSLQ, and within a year, the station’s power had been upgraded from 76,000 to 100,000 watts. Al Casey arrived on the scene from Bartell’s Detroit property to engineer the format change from middle-of-the-road music to Q, which would steal away a huge chunk of KXOK’s AM Top 40 listeners.
KXOK had been the station of choice for young people who wanted to hear Top 40 radio. Other rock fans got their kicks with KSHE and KADI on the FM dial. Bartell was breaking through that invisible barrier by bringing high-energy pop to FM radios in St. Louis.
Jonnie King remembers a great work environment, and a trick that created a high-energy sound. “We slightly tweaked up the rpm’s on some of our uptempo hit records. The reasoning was simple: If you were listening to KXOK on AM and switched over to KSLQ-FM and heard the same song, you’d swear we sounded better!”
Peter Skye was working at KADI-FM at the time, and in a conversation with KSLQ’s engineer, learned that program director Al Casey wasn’t happy with the way Q’s sound compared to KADI’s. Skye offered to come over and show them how to adjust the equipment but swore Casey to secrecy, so KADI’s owners wouldn’t know he’d “helped” the competition. But a couple weeks later KADI’s studios burned and KSLQ invited KADI to use Q’s spare studio until replacement space could be found, thus returning the favor.
Skye, who became a Q disc jockey in 1974, remembers, “Jonnie did callout research constantly, asking people he selected randomly from the phone book what they listened to and the names of their favorite artists and songs.”
JoJo Kincaid was part of the Q’s jock staff, and he remembers a high-energy creativity that permeated the on-air side of the building. “GM Ted Smith had mannequins of a mom, dad and two teenaged kids placed just outside the on air studio to remind jocks of our target audience. Considering the fact that most of the air staff at that time were males in our early 20s with ‘creative minds’ to boot, you can imagine the pornographic situations those adjustable, plastic humanoids wound up in.
“Day after day you would come in and find mommy and daddy in different sexual positions…Ted had absolutely no sense of humor. He hit the roof, threatened everyone’s job and ended up removing our demographic inspiration.”
Young Bobby Day says he would occasionally forget the mannequins were outside the studio door and would be startled by them if he came out in a hurry. “I even think I said ‘hi’ to them a few times. Strange thing is, they said ‘hi’ back.”
Young, creative, inspired talent gave KSLQ the early boost it needed. The energy seemed to come pulsing out of the speakers of listeners all over St. Louis. Deejay Gary Bridges has fond memories of one of his assistants. “Frank Accarino was answering phones for me during my show while trying to convince me that he wasn’t hustling the female callers. He just liked to get a rise out of them. Frank was way too smart for the job.
“Mike Jeffries was way too smart to be a deejay, but that’s what he wanted to be. He had a weakness for Mallomar Cookies, which you couldn’t buy in St. Louis back then. Always dated the best-looking women.”
But one of the most creative was Bill Taylor. Bridges remembers his knack for technical work with telephone lines “constructing elaborate party-line calls among nighttime deejays all over the country. He would sit at the grand switcher and ring the hotline numbers of a dozen or more stations, dump us all on a single line to compare notes and, occasionally, all start a song at the same time in cities all across America.”
Terry Fox was 20 when he started at KSLQ, moving over from a disc jockey gig at KWK. “All the guys on the air were single and young and we all loved playing radio and having fun. We even hung out together when we weren’t at the station.”
Fox remembers a station promotion called “The Un-Lottery” based on Jack McCoy’s “Last Contest” on KCBQ in San Diego. “We had 98 different prize packages. They were astounding. Chuck Roberts was our program director at the time. We were just coming up with these prizes off the top of our heads. We blew out the Clayton phone system with listener response. The kid who won wanted the Rolls Royce but he settled for $10,000 cash which is a good thing because we couldn’t afford to give him the car.”
Bartell’s brainchild brought energetic Top 40 radio to the FM dials of St. Louis, and those who were a part of the evolution have nothing but fond memories of the time.
It’s impossible to describe on this page the electricity that permeated the hallways of KSLQ in the 1970s.
Although many on the air staff were part of broadcasting’s proverbial revolving door as management struggled to find the “right” people, those who worked there describe it as the best time of their broadcast careers. In the words of Gary Bridges, “While most other St. Louis stations had long-established air staffs, we swapped out dozens of parts ‘til we found a committed staff of people who worked, and who loved to work…From the day Bartell took over KRCH, the pressure was on to win in St. Louis.”
Terry Fox was “20 or 21 when I got to KLSQ. Here I was in my hometown making radio history. This was FM and the whole market was listening!”
Young Bobby Day, “Working at KSLQ was extremely fun and it was a reflection of the high passion for radio that we had as a staff…The station had a great vibe and we were just radio hippies having the time of our lives together.”
As with most media in those days, there was a business side and a “production” side that developed the public product, in this case, the on-air sound. Corporate program director George Wilson publicly referred to his company’s disc jockeys as “pieces of meat. Instead of causing rebellion, the remarks were largely ignored. After all, the station had soared to the #2 position in the market. The kids must have been doing something right.
Station manager Ted Smith, who always took pains to let you know he’d been a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force, became the perfect foil for his young on-air staff. His tightly buttoned-up demeanor was that of a too-strict father in a houseful of teenagers. This actually worked to his advantage, giving the on-air guys a rallying point that helped create an us-against-him mentality.
Mike Jeffries, who was also known as The Red Baron, was a grad student when he began working at KSLQ. “Studio G-1 was a dump,” he remembers. “While Bartell built new studios on the third floor, we slaved in the basement, really about three steps down off the lobby at 111 S. Bemiston.”
There were plenty of young women, too. The station format had a strong appeal to them, and they were as close as the request line. Announcers never wanted for dates or companionship. Mike Jeffries: “Otis Thomas was a riot. If you heard ‘Stairway to Heaven’ followed by ‘Nights in White Satin’ followed by ‘American Pie’ during his overnight shift, you knew the Boogie Man was in hog heaven.”
(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 9/05.)
(KSHE GM Shelley Grafman)
In 1967, Tom Donahue made waves in California with a radio format unlike anything heard before. A St. Louis disc jockey who was without an on-air gig helped import it to the Gateway City, and a legendary station was created.
Donahue was quoted as asking “How many…times can you play Herman’s Hermits and still feel good about what you do?” He began his first show on KMPX, Los Angeles in April of 1967 saying “This is Tom Donahue, and I’m here to clear up your face and mess up your mind.”
In St. Louis, Howard Grafman knew he had to do something with the FM radio station he had purchased. It had started out, under different ownership, playing classical music. That morphed into a conservative middle-of-road format, including “The Lawrence Welk Show” and a weekly German-language program. Few sponsors were buying ads.
Grafman hired a West Coast man named Harvey Sheldon as station manager, bringing him to St. Louis to turn the station around. Sheldon is portrayed as disliking the idea of changing to a rock format. Nonetheless, that was the job he was given. He was familiar with the work of Tom Donahue at KMPX in San Francisco and Grafman gave Sheldon marching orders to make the format work here.
Enter Ron Elz, who had been running a school for radio announcers in St. Louis. He visited in San Francisco, listened to KMPX, and returned to St. Louis with a blueprint on how to introduce the format here. Grafman wanted a gradual change, saying “We can’t afford to lose our audience that we have now right away.” He also told Elz there was no money to buy any records.
But Elz persuaded local record distributors like Al Chotin, Record Merchandisers and Roberts Records to help him build a station music library.
KSHE also hired new disc jockeys to appeal to its new, younger audience. Richard Palmese, a student of religion at St. Louis University, was given the air name “Brother Love.” Elz’s air name was “Johnny B. Goode.” Lee Coffee was “The Musical Pumpkin,” and Ron Lipe became “Prince Knight.” Don O’Day and Jack Davis rounded out the staff.
There was also a new hire at the top. Grafman brought in his brother Sheldon to manage ad sales. Within a few months, Shelley was essentially managing the station and its playlist. His wife remembers some lean times when the only way the family could eat was on the trade coupons local restaurants had used to pay for advertising on KSHE.
(KSHE announcing staff)
Those first announcers recalled phone calls from angry listeners upset with the music change, but it was also obvious young people were discovering KSHE. Word of mouth was spreading among those kids who saw themselves as part of the counterculture movement.
Radio historian Michael Keith wrote about the national movement in “Sounds in the Dark: “Underground radio’s raison d’etre was in step with that of the growing counterculture. It resented the mainstream gestalt of the day regarding countless social issues (war, drugs, race), but most of all it detested formula radio with its 2-minute song cuts and hyper jocks.”
The gradual format change continued at KSHE. Listeners were asked to vote on which artist they preferred – Frank Sinatra or the Rolling Stones. The Stones prevailed.
There is disagreement among station veterans on the exact date of the format switch, but one memory is very clear: The first song played on KSHE to signal the completion of the format change was “White Rabbit” by the Jefferson Airplane.
(Reprinted with permission of The St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 1/10).
In early April 1998, a man who could be called the father of FM rock radio in St. Louis passed away in Jacksonville, Florida.
Ed Ceries and his wife created a classical radio station in the basement of their home in Crestwood on Feb. 11, 1961. They called their station “the lady of FM” and they gave it the call letters KSHE.
An article by James Kearns, Jr., in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch back then described the infant station at 1035 Westglen Drive as being spread out through the home’s rathskeller and basement, with the Associated Press teletype next to the clothes washer. Ceries had been an engineer for 20 years at KSD radio and television, then owned by the Post. At the age of 40, he decided to build his radio station.
KSHE broadcast fine arts, classical music and drama seven days a week from 7:45 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. The couple had one full-time and two part-time announcers to help them. Their life savings went into building the station, and Ceries is quoted in the article as saying, “The advertisers are staying away in droves. They find it hard to believe that FM is here to stay”.
This lack of advertising support forced the couple to slightly modify KSHE’s format in July of 1962, lightening the music but maintaining 10 percent of its music list in classical selections.
Drama was also a factor on the station. Sundays meant listeners could hear history’s great dramas, including many works by Shakespeare. Lectures from the Washington University Graham Chapel series were also broadcast. The Ceries admitted their operation was run on a shoestring. The news desk at KSHE consisted of several trays atop the chest-type freezer, into which wire copy was sorted. The trays had originally served as Mrs. Ceries’ baking pans.
(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 5/98)
Anyone who ever worked at the “Old” KSHE has vivid memories of “the window,” that small aperture in the studio wall that served as the connection point between the deejay and the outside world. The cinder block building in Crestwood became a virtual mecca for rock music fans, and “The Window” was their blarney stone.
In the words of former KSHE jocks:
Gary Bennett: “I helped a guy one night find his lost dog. I went on the air and said where this fella lived and described his dog. Sure enough, two days later there’s a knock on the window and it was this guy. Somebody had found his dog. He was so appreciative he gave me a big chunk of hash and a couple of candy bars.”
Sir Ed: “Of course, people would come up and knock on the window. That’s how I met my wife. John Williams was really good friends with my wife’s friend. And she had befriended me. She worked at a couple bars and John would get free drinks from time to time. The two women came out one Sunday to get tickets and that’s how I first met my wife.”
John Williams: “The window had curtains, and if you kept the curtains open, everyone could see you. Your back was to the window and you’d have to turn around to see someone. They’d hold up notes. They’d bring you food. They’d bring you dope. They’d ask you for dope. If you opened that window it was like a floodgate. I had incredible experiences through the window.”
Steve Rosen: “I remember one time I was at KSHE and somebody knocked on the window and it was Chuck Berry and his girlfriend. And he came in and we interviewed him. He just came in, sat down and talked. He knew Shelley [Grafman, one of the station owners].”
Don Corey: “People would come and knock on the window which could be frightening at 3 in the morning. A lot of the time they just wanted to talk. Some would buy tickets. Sometimes there’d be a group of six or seven people just standing around talking.”
For Joy Grdnic, being a woman on the air meant there were plenty of window visitors, but for a different reason than most of the other jocks. “People would come to the window just to see what I looked like.”
Bob Burch: “The window was really fun when the streaking fad hit. The girls would come up and press their breasts against the glass. We always had a bunch of characters coming up there. I had a guy put a gun up to the window once. Then he turned around and ran away laughing. I’d keep the curtain closed.”
Ken Suitter: ““It was nothing to hear a knock at the window and turn around in your chair and a naked woman would be standing at the window. The window, you got to meet all kinds there. People offered you drugs. I remember people coming down to the window with a barbecue pit, and the guy said he didn’t have anything else to do so he decided to come down and cook me a steak.”
Loren Cornelius: “If you were doing 7:00 to midnight or midnight to 6:00 you’d turn around and there’s be people at the window and it’d scare the shit out of you. Most of them were stoned out of their minds when they showed up.”
Joe “Mama” Mason: “You really could talk to the listeners. You could crank the window open. One time a guy came up and knocked on the window and asked if I remembered him. He was about 22 years old. I didn’t remember him. He said ‘I came here four years ago and talked with you and you talked to me all night long. I was just out of high school. I’m here to thank you. You talked me into going to college. I just graduated and I’m here to thank you. You were the only reason I went to college.’
“When I was really in the thick of things, every single night there’d be at least 10 girls who would come up and take their tops off at the window. It was really that crazy.
“There were girls just coming out of the woodwork. They’d show up at the studio or take their clothes off at the window.”
Rich Dalton: “The world famous KSHE window became a rite of passage in St. Louis. Especially on weekends, people would come and party at the KSHE window. And as crazy as it seems now, t-shirts and concert tickets were sold out that window by deejays. One deejay was busted by a St. Louis County cop for selling dope out that window.”
For Brother Love, who had the wake-up shift on KSHE, the window wasn’t sex and drugs. It was rock and roll. “The record guys would come by before the station opened. They’d come to the window and bring me the new records.”
Al Hofer: “I think if you want to build a legendary radio station and you want to reach out and touch the community, you need a window like KSHE had.
“When I would do weekends, people would literally come up there when I was on and hang out all night long. I was on from 7 ‘til midnight Saturdays and Sundays, and they would bring their coolers and other party paraphernalia and hang out, occasionally request songs, but it was a party.
“People would come from miles around. There was this great mystique about the station. And the fact that the tower was right there was extremely cool too.
Mark Klose: “Behind you on the back wall was the window, like a transom window that leaned in. You’d be on the air and they’d stick their head by the window and call out to you. Some of them would reach in while you were on the air and grab some records and take off.”
Ted Habeck: “I remember getting the shit scared out of me a lot from that window. The station wouldn’t spend $5.00 for a mirror so you could see it when you were on the air. Invariably somebody would wait until you opened the microphone before they’d come banging on the window.”
Gary Kolander: “You’d be there doing the overnight shift and all of a sudden at 3:30 in the morning BAM, BAM, BAM on the window. It’d scare the hell out of you.
“There was one New Years’ Eve I’ll never forget where this blond came up with two glasses of champagne. She handed me one through the window and said she’d just come up to wish me a happy new year. We toasted, and I said ‘Just a minute, the song’s ending.’ And she said ‘Happy New Year,’ and she lifted up her shirt and pressed against the glass. I’ve got about five seconds left on the song I was a little flustered, to say the least. I got the next record going. It took maybe 30 seconds. I turned around and she was gone.”
KSHE’s window went the way of all great legends when the station moved from its infamous cinder block studios in Crestwood to their downtown location at Union Station, and with the move a part of rock radio’s fabric was lost.
(Reprinted with permission of The St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 1/2-10).