The Highway Stations

Vibe Highway radio is a trimulcast targeting drivers on I-15 and I-40 from San Bernadino to Las Vegas. That target isn't a single community per se, but travelers, commuters, lost campers, tourists, truckers, desert rats and tweakers in the great nothing of the Mojave desert. After all, Barstow is a town whose crime rate is only overshadowed by it's appearance in the opening line of Hunter s. Thompson's book  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..." If you've ever been to Barstow then you know...

But it makes it all the more peculiar that the news stories insisted on referring to Highway radio as based in or from Barstow. In July of 1999, The Daily Press in Victorville, CA referred to the trimulcast as "Highway Stations 98 & 99 FM based in Barstow."  Of course none of the three stations are based in Barstow.  KRXV, KHWY, and KHYZ are licensed to Yermo, Essex, and Mountain Pass, respectively. Today they broadcast a hot adult contemporary playlist branded as Highway Vibe. The stations are currently owned by the Heftel Broadcasting Company, whose studios are in Barstow, CA. But they weren't always part of Heftel. That's a recent development.

Heftel Broadcasting was founded by Cecil Heftel in 1943. His son Richard later ran the company.  Cecil focused initially on the AM radio Top 40 format: KGMB, KSSK, WMYQ, WZTA, WSHE, WZPL, WLLT, KIMN, WJAS, and WHYI to name a few. Later he ran some of the nation’s top Spanish-language stations. The network was sold off to Clear Channel in 1996 who rebranded it as Hispanic Broadcasting Corp and then later Univision Radio. Heftel got out of the radio biz. Cecil Heftel got into politics; he died in 2010. 

The Highway stations were born in 1980. Howard Anderson was a VP of marketing at the Desert Inn.  The Desert Inn was founded in 1964 by Moe Dalitz, of the Maceo crime syndicate. Wilbur Clark ran out of money building it and Dalitz bailed him out. Dalitz owned the Desert Inn until he sold it to Howard Hughes in 1967. [I know he sounds like the Character Robert DeNiro played in the movie Casino but that was actually Frank Rosenthal] More here. But back to Anderson. He knew that a lot of Las Vegas tourists came from Southern California, and he envisioned a radio station that targeted those drivers and advertised Las Vegas casinos and hotels. Originally it would have been a project for Hughes, but he died in 1976. Anderson pushed forward without him. He scouted transmitter sites and launched 98.1 KRXV and 99.5 KXVR in 1980. The call signed pay homage to Route 15 with the roman numbers "XV" in the call signs. Their playlist was heavy on the Tony Bennett, and Frank Sinatra. The Mighty Fybush did a deep dive on this back in 2005, More Here.

But the radio model that worked in 1980 didn't work forever. Even when Fybush wrote that article for RW Online the station was on the wane. Sirius and XM Satellite Radio, and other in-car entertainment cut into their market. In February 2021 Anderson devided to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. On Monday, April 3rd, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Nevada auctioned off the assets of The Drive LLC and KWHY, Inc.. Educational Media Foundation lost out to the $620,00 bid from Richard Heftel's reformed Heftel Broadcasting. In addition to the original two Highway radio stations he got KHYZ, KHWY, KHDR, KHRQ, KHWY, KIXF and KIXW. He tweaked the brand name to Vibe Highway Radio, and added KHYZ to create the trimulcast. More here.

All that would be interesting enough but Highway Radio did generate exactly one national news story in it's whole history. To tell that story we have to go back to 1979, a year before Highway radio even signed on. Skylab, the first United States' first space station orbit decayed, and it disintegrated in the atmosphere on July 11th 1979. The debris landed about 300 miles east of Perth, Australia stretched over a 100 mile area between Esperance and Rawlinna. The Shire of Esperance, in a cheeky moment of local government, fined NASA $400 (AUD) for littering.

30 years later, DJ Scott Barley co-host of the program “Barker and Barley in the Morning” discovered that NASA's fine had never been paid. He used his program on the Highway Stations to raise that money and pay the fine. A local gym pledged that they’d match anyone that sends in a $50 donation. After raising the funds, Barley mailed off a check to Esperance, zipcode 6450. Two months later the city of Esperance contacted Barley and invited him to be the guest of honor at their 30th Anniversary celebration of the Skylab crash. At the ceremony he presented the $400 payment in the form of an oversized check. Today parts of Skylab and the oversized check itself remain on display at the Esperance Municipal Museum. More here and here.