KBOA's addiction to baseball

Tenacious radio sports fans have been responsible for some of the stranger events and innovations in radioland.

During the first summer of KBOA-AM's operation in 1947 they carried the St. Louis Cardinal Baseball games during the daylight hours of the sun-up to sun-set operation but was unable to broadcast the ball games played at night. In that era they ran at 250 watts as a daytimer.

But in the summer of 1947 the Cardinals were having a good season and we all know how baseball fans can be. So KBOA hooked up The baseball loop. It was a telephone line feed direct to St. Louis so the station staff started could listen to the dame on a monitor. They just couldn't broadcast it on the air.

Then slowly a growing group of fans started dropping by to listen to the ball games. This crowd of cardinal fans grew until staff members had to install a public address system to serve and hundreds of cars which would park on the KBOA grounds along Highway 25. Former PD, nwo congressman Paul Jones estimated the total head count at about a thousand.

The following year they got an FM signal to carry those night games on.

Paul Jones interview here:
http://www.kboa830.com/People/Paul_Jones.htm

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