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When KRCH signed on in May of 1967, Igor was there, pumping out 24 hours of “adult music” every day. Chief engineer Mike Waldman remembers Igor well: It was an IGM automation system installed in the control room in the Siteman Building at 111 South Bemiston in Clayton.

The nickname can be attributed to those people who had to baby sit the machine, and it’s doubtful the moniker came out of admiration. Anyone who dealt with those early automation systems knows they were finicky and undependable, prone to malfunction on a whim and for no apparent reason. Unlike today’s radio stations’ KRCH always had a live person on duty. The announcers were expected to be personalities, producers of commercials, and babysitters for Igor.

Born near the beginning of the FM boom, KRCH was on a frequency of 98.1 mHz, which was the old KSTL-FM dial spot. Foreground Music, Inc., the corporate name for the company owned by Gerry Mollner and Richard Friedman, was the licensee, but their first priority had been to buy KSHE from then-owner Ed Ceries in 1963. The amount they offered was $5,000 too low, and Century Broadcasting, owned by the Grafmann brothers, was the successful bidder. Foreground was able to purchase KSTL-FM from the Haverstick family in 1967, and they were required to jump through a few hoops with Clayton’s municipal government in order to get a “special permit” to locate their offices there. Initially, company vice president Richard Friedman got a recommendation of conditional approval, providing he put the transmitter and tower somewhere else.

Within three years, a new tower was erected in downtown Clayton. Dick and Nancy Friedman remember it well. “We had a helicopter take the pieces up. The man who owned the hotel, Meyer Loomstein, knew we had to drill through the roof. In fact, for a long time I had a cone of concrete sitting on my shelf. It had been a piece of the roof of the Colony Hotel that they had to drill through to anchor the 72-foot tower. We had to do it on a Sunday. We had cleared everything through the City of Clayton so it wouldn’t mess up traffic.”

The format was described in a Post-Dispatch article as relaxed, good music, “75 percent instrumentals and 25 percent vocals – selections from Broadway shows, updated versions of old favorites, and new, good music numbers.” The station bragged that it had pioneered an approach in St. Louis in which only eight minutes of commercials were played each hour. “We were probably one of four local stations with an easy listening format; Harry Eidelman’s KCFM, I think WIL-FM and WRTH were also doing it,” says Dick Friedman. “It was popular all over the country and was doing very well for the stations that had it then.” In 1970, an hourly gimmick was added in which the newsman would broadcast alternately in stereo through the left and right channel, which supposedly gave listeners an opportunity to appreciate stereo separation.

It was one thing to get a station on the air, but as many others had found, it was another thing to actually sell enough advertising to make money on the deal. “What you would run into was some people saying ‘You guys are going to ruin it with all those commercials. You’re going to make it like AM radio. We like it the way it is now with beautiful music for long periods of time and no commercials.’ We’d overcome that by telling them there’d only be 8 minutes of commercials per hour, which meant there were 52 minutes of music.

“I can’t tell you how many people told us we were going to go broke and we were crazy for going into the radio business. It was terrific. Don’t listen to the naysayers,” says Friedman. By the time KRCH was sold to Bartell Broadcasting 5 years later, the Friedmans felt they had done well on their investment. The purchase of KSTL-FM had cost less than $100,000. The sale price to Bartell was several times that amount. New call letters, KSLQ-FM followed the sale.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 04/02)

When KMOX ownership announced plans for a new experimental FM station in 1941, international circumstances prevented the project from coming to life. When the station finally did come back to life two decades later, no one seemed to know what to do with it.

While FM broadcasting in 1941 was in an experimental stage, the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 of that year put a halt to technological broadcast development, and although several FM stations signed on in St. Louis following the war, most “went dark” within a couple years.

On Feb. 12, 1962, KMOX-FM signed on. The broadcast day initially ran from 6 a.m. until midnight, and it was a 100 percent simulcast of the KMOX-AM programming. It was this simulcasting practice that had caused the failure of those other FM stations in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. Listeners, it seems, saw no reason to buy a new radio to listen to programs they could hear on the AM radios they already owned.

Then, in 1967, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that 50 percent of FM programming on co-owned stations had to be original rather than simulcast. KMOX-FM began providing its listeners with what was called “The Young Sound,” a format consisting of middle-of-the-road music with selected current hits mixed in. These music tapes were provided by CBS in New York. The fact that the music was in stereo was a big selling point and gave reason to listeners who had considered buying high quality FM receivers.

This evolved into “The Sound of the ‘70s.” A Globe-Democrat article on April 11, 1970, quoted station general manager Robert Hyland, “KMOX-FM stereo…avoids the hard rock to concentrate on adult pop – the tops in popular music for the 20-40 age group.” In the Post-Dispatch in November of that year, Hyland wrote: “To keep KMOX-FM stereo on top of things, we select new music each day. Each week we review the music we are broadcasting and add at least eight new singles and ten new albums to the station’s repertoire.

“Our future plans include specials devoted exclusively to various types and categories of music, as well as programs built entirely around individual artists.” Hyland didn’t mention that his FM station would also serve as a dumping ground for sports broadcasts. In those days, KMOX-AM had play-by-play rights to every major sports team in the city. When there were two teams scheduled to play at the same time due to the overlap of sports seasons, one team would have its broadcast shifted to the FM station.

Most of the musical programming decisions came from Bob Osborne, a KMOX employee who wore many hats. He was also heard as a deejay on KMOX-FM and was the voice on many of the station imaging spots. Many other people were deejays on the station during those two decades, and their paths to the seventh floor studios at 1 Memorial Drive weren’t always pleasant. There were times when GM Hyland would “farm out” talent from KMOX. Some saw it as a punishment – radio’s equivalent of the proverbial trip to Siberia. But there were others who used their announcing jobs there to supplement their free-lance voiceover income.

Live deejay shows were seldom heard on KMOX-FM. Instead, taped voice tracks were inserted into the station’s huge automation system in the hope listeners might think they were hearing someone live. The black monster filled an entire room and contained all sorts of electronic bells and whistles. There was even a large tape cartridge that contained a time signature for every minute of the day (“It’s 12:15 at KMOX-FM.”), with everything designed to make the station sound live. But it cost CBS less to pay people to record voice tracks because each jock could turn out several shows in a short time, and they were only paid for the time spent recording. It didn’t seem to bother station management that there were occasional technical miscues, causing listeners to hear the announcers introducing a song that had been heard ten minutes before.

The end of KMOX-FM began in August of 1981 when CBS began the national experiment known as “Hit Radio.” The station’s playlist began its transformation with more current pop hits being added, and by the end of the year, the KMOX-FM call letters were dropped, replaced by KHTR.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 02/08)

It was a relatively short and uneventful life for KGRV. The station came to life from the ashes of KACO, which was destroyed by fire. Operations of KACO were officially suspended by the FCC on January 5, 1970. The station returned to the air March 16 of that year with new call letters.

The 107.7 frequency had not been used to its fullest extent by the old owner, Apollo Broadcasting. They were on the air 36 hours a week, which resulted in a fine of $1,000 levied by the FCC. Music had been straight line middle-of-the-road, but in its KGRV identity, the music was termed “contemporary middle-of-the-road.”

Broadcast hours were 6:00 AM to midnight, and management boasted that 18-20 songs were played each hour. It was “music for groovy adults,” and there was even a female announcer who called herself Kay Groove. Studios were at 1215 Cole and the transmitter was at 532 DeBaliviere.

On November 25, 1970, Apollo finally found a buyer for the property, Kansas City-based Intermedia, which paid $250,000 for the station. On July 3, 1973, Amaturo Group paid $4.677,500 for KGRV and two other Missouri stations. The call letters KGRV were changed to KKSS effective January 1, 1974.