PSC to PDX

I didn't drive directly from Tri-Cities to San Francisco. I drove from Portland to Tri-Cities and back to Portland, and only then down that long winding coastal road. Route 101 originates in Washington state where it wraps around the Olympic peninsula. Most sources give  that location as Olympia but I think the start of the ramp off is technically in Tumwater. The southern Terminus is in Los Angeles 1,540 miles away. The ramp  roughly at the ramp for S. Grande Vista Ave.

Two stations call Tumwater their city of license: 1340 KUOW-AM, and on 95.3 K237FR, the HD2 repeater of KYYO. Many stations give their city of license as Olympia: KAOS, KPLI, KXXO, KKWF, and seven repeaters and translators. Almost none of those towers are actually in either city. KAOS or course is local, as is KPLI; even KXXO way out on Capitol Peak at the Weyerhaeuser Radio Site in the Capitol forest is technically in Olympia. Strangely it's the repeaters that seem to be out of town like K270CJ and  K262CY repeater, are out of town.

K270CJ reminded me of something I've been observing for years now: the slow migration of oldies and classic rock playlists into the 1980s and even 1990s. By extension Country Oldies has also time-traveled to the 1980s which is frankly not a good era and I'm sorry to report that Nostalgia, the old big band format is basically extinct. But more on all that in a bit. 

Appropriate, to this topic, K270CJ at one point did broadcast "Olympia's Boomer Rock and Roll" as "Boom FM." But it's the HD3 channel of KRXY, that's not front row. HD3 is the back seat of the station wagon. (On the 94.5 FM stick they're broadcasting Hot AC.) But if you go to the website it has very mixed branding. It has KYA-FM in the header, but the URL is still Theboomfm, and the text describes the music as "Classic Hits" which is not oldies or classic rock. Notably the banner at the top is broken. I had forgotten this existed but this is all that remains of the old KYAgold site. That last flip of the FM stick happened in march of 1994 at 93.3 KYCY in San Francisco ending a brand stretching back into the early 1970s. [LINK] Per a December 2022 conversation on radiodiscussions.com [SOURCE] K270CJ flipped to SuperCFL and the steam flipped to sports which is what I found. However, I've found multiple other KYA streams... that are on-brand and still running.

• KYA Gold

• 1260 KYA Radio

• 94.7 KYA Radio1

I stocked up on  Calvin Johnson mix tapes at the Rainy Day Record Co. . but there's no tape deck in the car. So I spent this leg of the trip doing a bandscan while driving along the Columbia River gorge. This was an interesting experiment as there are no AM or FM transmitters in side of it but alternately behind the bluffs and hills around it. 

 

Heading to (Yakima-Pasco- Richland-Kennewick) Most of the drive is decidedly rural, these are white areas of the metro map. You can see the course of the river in the shape of the surrounding counties. But Route 14, aka The Lewis and Clark Highway,  starts in Vancouver, WA; home of 91.9 KOUV-LP, which is still a CP and 97.5 KDOA-LP a Caribbean station with a complicated resume. They sold their stick on 101.5 in the Dalles to the religious satcaster Educational Media Foundation (EMF). That station became KJYV in 2019 and then KDLZ in 2022. KDOA moved to 97.5 in 2021 but in September of 2023 filed a CP to move to 99.9. Both CPs are still active,but EMF (the E also stands for Evil) has a translator on 97.5 for KLVP making 99.9 the safer bet. They did file a proper STA [LINK] to remain silent due to that "copious interference" which they were when I drove through.

The first town of any note is Camas which has two location stations KIEV-LP "outlaw country" [LINK] and KNRK and by extension the HD-2 channel of KNRK, Alternative Classics. They were playing Kings of Leon when I last checked, a new cut from 2024. Alternative perhaps, classic? No. The Freeway ends at Washougal and while KMHD comes in clear there's nothing new on the dial I couldn't hear in Vancouver. The transmitters on Mount Hood are mostly on the south side of that summit and not particularly clear here.

Further down the road was the town Skamania, a perfect town for a ska-fest, or ska band. It's never happened but there have been a few near-misses. In 1964 Carlos Malcolm And His Afro-Jamaican Rhythms put out a record "Ska-Mania" which opened with the single "Skamania" it's mostly about curry. The Supertones and Five Iron Frenzy did a tour in 1998  named "Skamania." The band the Skatalites put out a record in 1996 "Greetings from Skamania." That's both one first wave and one second wave ska band, but still no love for the unincorporated community in Oregon. But if you're looking for local music in Skamania, Matthew McDonnell put our a cassette in 1992 "A Musical history and tour of the Columbia River Gorge."  Good luck finding it. A few miles later I pass the Bridge of the Gods.

After a quick stop at North bank Books I hit the road. 104.5 KPLP reports a city of license right on the water in White salmon, but they use a stick 23 miles away in Parkdale. It's another christian contemporary station.  I headed on to The Dalles; home of KQHR, KOTD, KMSW, KACI, KDLZ, KACI, KODL and another 9 FM repeaters.  92.7 KMSW purports to be Classic Rock and 1440 KODL to be Classic Country; both have slide into the 1980s. On the AM band are two more: news talker KACI-AM and and KODL-AM, both simulcasting on their respective FM sticks. I can just get 102.3 KRSX a standard issue country FM station.  They're 12 miles inland up route 97 to nowhere. Further down the road I can just get 106.1 KWCQ out of Condon, OR 33 miles away.

By the time I get to Boardman, before the river hooks north, The dial turns over to mostly Tri-Cities stations. Public stations KOLU, KRBM and KFAE comes in clearly but just like my last visit the college station KWCW is elusive. Half the dial is country music stations. I tried for 980 KTCR looking for an oldies station and got more 80s music. I can however get two other classic country stations out here: 1240 KTIX-AM and 1360 KOHU. Both have playlists that also lean into the 1980s but KOHU is certainly more interesting with a lot more old style lap steel. Both stations cover an area in the hills south east of Tri-Cities proper out in those white areas of the map. Station 101.9 KNHK is also classic country but I couldn't receive it. 

On the drive back there was one RF mystery that took me hours to make sense of. On 1230 AM I could hear this Spanish music for most of the drive. In trying to guess the location of the transmitter, I found it was strong fore and aft even as I rounded sharp corners, and tall hills loomed over head. I even considered it being a pirate. It turns out that 1230 KDYM-AM Sunnyside (near Yakima) and 1230 KRYN-AM in Gresham both simulcast "Estacion de la Familia radio". They are 170 miles apart at opposite ends of the Columbia river, but because of the depth of the gorge you can usually receive it anywhere between Portland and Kennewick. But which one you receive depends on which side of the mountain you're facing.

The Jazz Man Radio Show

I read the book Hot Jazz For Sale: Hollywood's Jazz Man Record Shop by Cary Ginell and by page 8, I found myself googling an arcane possibility. The founder of the Jazz Man record shop, Dave Stuart, had hosted a Los Angeles radio program featuring rare records from his private collection. His shop and subsequent record label were  actually named for his on-air name "The Jazz Man." Frustratingly, nowhere in the book does Ginell identify that radio station. I reached out to Mr. Ginell and he responded quickly "No, I could never find a listing for his program. Checked the radio listings in the LA Times, but nothing turned up."

The store was founded in 1939 and it's first address was 8960 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069, and the book tells me that at that time he lived in nearby Glendale, CA. The Jazz Information newsletter referred to his "daily broadcast" and also let the world know when the shop relocated to 1221 N. Vine street in 1940.  Then in 1941 it moved to 6331 Santa Monica Blvd. Regardless of the moves, Stuart was rooted in LA. So the question becomes... how many radio stations might have been airing jazz daily in and around Hollywood in 1939?

The answer is more than a few. But as you turn the clock back to cusp of 1940, the options thin out.  Dave Stuart recorded some area jazz bands and their discographies bear a lot of call letters. 1940 the Dawn Club (operated by the Yerba Buena Jazz Band) opened near Union Square in San Francisco, at 20 Annie Street. Friday night broadcasts begin on radio KYA hosted by Hal MacIntyre.  In 1942, the same band records five sides at at the studios of KFRC. Disc two of the complete Lu Watters' Yerba Buena Jazz Band Good Times Recordings are all recorded at KYA in August 1942... but those are all San Francisco call letters. They cannot be the home of the Jazz Man radio show.

So who was airing jazz in LA?  The DJ Alex 'Sleepy' Stein, worked at 1250 KFOX in LA, then he started 97.9 KNOB, reputedly the first all-jazz radio station in the world. But KLON didn't debut until 1950, and KNOB not until 1957. Options in 1940 included: 780 KECA-AM, 1360 KGER-AM, 1300 KFAC-AM, 1120 KFSG-AM, 1000 KFVD-AM, 640 KFI-AM, 950 KFWB-AM, 1200 KGFJ-AM, 570 KMTR-AM, 900 KHJ-AM, 1050 KNX-AM, and in nearby Beverly Hills 710 KMPC-AM. But we can whittle that down. KFSG was all religious talk and the big outlets like KFI, KNX and etc. weren't big on leasing time. Then I found a solid reference. [SOURCE] The San Bernadino County Sun lists the program on KMTR in issues from roughly December 22nd, 1939 through February 28th, 1940.

• KMTR-Jazz Man, San Bernardino County Sun Dec 22 1939
• KMTR-Jazz Man, San Bernardino County Sun Jan 6, 1940
• KMTR-Jazz Man, San Bernardino County Sun Jan 12, 1940
• KMTR-Jazz Man, San Bernardino County Sun Feb 8, 1940
• KMTR-Jazz Man, San Bernardino County Sun Feb 27, 1940

Once I found a reference, I found it everywhere. The program even appears in Volume 11, issue number 33 of the Movie Radio Guide, published for the week of May 23-29 1942. But there is a problem, it's also on a different station... this time in San Francisco.

• KSFO-Jazz Man, Oakland Tribune May 12, 1942 
• KSFO Jazz Man, Santa Cruz Sentinel May 19, 1942
• KSFO-Jazz Man, Oakland Tribune June 1, 1942

In 1940 the transmitter and Blaw-Knox tower for 560 KSFO-AM was located on an 11-acre complex at Islais Creek on the Bay Shore. (This was also the site of the KWID shortwave transmitter in WWII) The station's studios were in the Palace Hotel at 2 New Montgomery St. in downtown San Francisco. Clearly this must be an unrelated program. But here's the weird thing, it aired at the same time of day as the KMTR program. That mystery, I have not solved.

The Spy Who Loved Radio

This is one of those stories in radio that seems a bit too strange. But on the face of it, numerous other public figures, and even politicians have owned media outlets. So maybe it's not that improbable that once, in the 70-year history of the CIA, a known spook happened to also buy WINS-AM in New York City in 1953.

Let's start before he was in the CIA. Lt. Col. John Elroy McCaw was from from Aberdeen, WA.  He founded the first radio station in Centralia, WA: 1440 KELA-AM, in 1937 and owned the Lewis and Clark Hotel where it was originally housed. Years later McCaw also bought station 1260 KYA-AM (with John D. Keating) in San Francisco, 630 KPOA-AM in Hawaii [SOURCE] and 1010 WINS in New York.
 In 1953 In FCC docket 9041 in an Aladdin radio and Television application the bureau listed off a long series of McCaw's facility ownerships and their relative percentages over the prior 20 years:

Call Letters	Frequency	City	State	Percentage
KRSC-AM	1150	Seattle	WA	100%
KORC-AM	1140	Mineral Wells	YX	100%
KELA-AM	1440	Centralia	WA	50%
KYA-AM	1260	San Francisco	CA	50%
KYAK-AM	930	Yakima	WA	33⅓%
KALE-AM	960	Richland	WA	33⅓%
KALE-FM	106.1	Richland	WA	33⅓%
KPOA-AM	630	Honolulu	HI	50%

It appears that most of his large acquisitions involved Keating and/or Charles Skouras. His company in that acquisition was Gotham Broadcasting Corporation. In the book Big Deal: Mergers and Acquisitions in the Digital Age author Bruce Wasserstein praises McCaw's work but not his paperwork, calling him a "freewheeling entrepreneur." One of his wife's obituaries refers to his "his handshake deals."  But he was very successful despite that undercurrent of chaos. I'll quote Wasserstein:

"He converted New York station WINS to the country's first rock station in the middle 1950s, and within 9 years flipped the station for twenty times more than he had paid. At his height, Elroy McCaw owned interests in dozens of radio, television and cable television companies."

His wife Marion was no slouch either. After the end of WWII she started her own radio station KAPA-AM in Raymond, WA. None of this mentions that he had another job. It's not the kind of job you put on your resume, and not the kind of job where you can always tell people what you did at work today. Information is scant. But we know that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed at least officially in 1942 by President Roosevelt. Lacking cooperation from existing U.S. agencies, early agents were trained by the British. President Truman dissolved the department in 1945, but it's functions were divided between the War Department and the State Department. By the end of the year the term "Central Intelligence Agency" was appearing on documents to describe the collection of intelligence groups, and by 1947 it was official. He has no entry in Wikipedia except in the biographies of his now wealthy heirs. But one of his wife's obituaries get's into the details. [SOURCE].

Throughout the war, she [Marion] commuted from Washington D.C. when necessary while Elroy served at Army Air Forces Headquarters in the Pentagon as Executive Officer and Special Assistant to General McClelland, head of USAAF communications. He was also McClelland’s liaison to OSS.

His exact involvement as you expect, is unknown. I've never filed a FOIA request and I don't intend to. But I have to admit I'm curious. Many businessmen served in the military during wartime— notably Robert S. McNamara who left Harvard to serve in WWI, then left Ford to serve as Secretary of Defense under Kennedy. Very few figures would be so high profile. An issue of the The O.S.S. Society seems to bear a note from son Bruce McCaw looking for more information from retired OSS members about his fathers life. (The operations referred to involve radio controlled ships.)

"My father, Lt. Col. John Elroy McCaw, worked on OSS Special Projects known as operations Aphrodite, Simmons, and Javaman. He worked with OSSers John Shaheen and Jim Rand and is particularly interested in Javaman, which called for blowing up the tunnel connecting Kyushu and Honshu prior to the invasion of Japan.”

Another obituary notes that the family moved to Seattle in 1953. Several sources note that he died in 1969 suddenly, after a brief illness. [Nothing suspicious here, moving along] The cause is never listed but it's clear that his finances were in disarray due to his informal business practices. When his estate was cleaned up, all that remained was a single cable company with fewer than 30,00 subscribers. His sons built that up and bought heavily into cell networks as Cellular One, then sold out to AT&T. It was renamed renamed AT&T Wireless. Today most of them are listed by Forbes. More here.

Professor Schnitzel Live On Air!

Some coincidences in radioland are just utterly baffling.  There have been two different men who played a character named "Professor Schnitzel" on the radio at different times and places. Both milked a faux Dutch-German accent and behaved like a rural yokel. They have no connection whatsoever and their careers were separated by about 2,800 miles and two decades. There is no reason to think that either was ever aware of the other. One played the character in the late 1920s, on the west coast. The other in the mid-1950s through early 60s in central Pennsylvania. (One could argue that Larry the Cable guy does his own updated version today.)


The first man to portray the character on air was Clarence Coleman. He was a realtor in San Francisco before the great depression.  He created the character "Professor Herman Schnitzel" in 1927 for a bit on the program "Blue Monday Jamboree" which aired  on KFRC-AM. You can see a group photo from the program here.  The program debuted on January 10th 1927 as a 15 minute short and continued to run weekly. It popularity was such that by February it was 2 hours long. They were scrambling for content to fill the time. 

By June of 1930, the program was syndicated across the entire Don Lee Network, and by the end of the year, it was syndicated nationally on CBS. It's emcee was Harrison Holliway. But Clarence Coleman never worked the character into a regular on the Blue Monday Jamboree. Around 1929 he performed the same character on KYA-AM and even the ABC Western Network. More here

The second Professor Schnitzel was played by Theodore L. Rickenbach. He was a Pennsylvania native and grew up in Reading, PA. He did mostly live comedy and is best known for a series of five 45-rpm comedy discs that were recorded for Butch Records from 1961 to 1968. He also did an LP in 1964 that recycles some of that material. You can see his discography here.

Rickenbach started a radio career in 1932 with the program "Schnitz and Earl." Earl was Earl Shappel on WEEU-AM.  In 1950 he changed co-hosts, needing a classic straight-man and the program became "Professor Schnitzel and Al," with co-host Allen Lane on WHUM-AM Radio. They worked 6 days a week, Monday through Saturday starting at 6:00 AM. He died in July of 1969 in his hotel room. More here and here.

The Bartell Family Radio scam

Sometimes it's the unwritten history that's the most interesting. We lionize people, we demonize them. We exaggerate and summarize for both entertainment and convenience. The story of KYA for example is interesting on it's own. But the Bartell Family who owned them from 1958 to1958. No really, that's the part that takes explaining. The ownership of KYA was often tumultuous. But the period in the late 1950s was especially so. Rather than rehash it I'm going to quote the Bay Area Radio Museum.

"Over a period of almost twenty years, KYA was operated by no less than eight different owners! The Palo Alto group sold the station to Dorothy Schiff of the New York Post. In the mid-fifties, the station was purchased by Elroy McCaw and John Keating, doing business as KYA, Inc. They in turn sold the station to the Bartell Family Group in 1958, who subsequently sold to Golden State Broadcasters..."

I was having trouble working out the time line when I turned to Whites radio log. On May 1st 1958 Golden State Broadcasters bought the station from the Bartell family. That means the Bartell family owned the station for less than 5 months. What the hell was going on in there?

Total chaos it turns out. This quick turn around was the M.O. of Bartell Family Radio. They bought stations in trouble on the cheap and turned them around and sold them off as fast as possible. Like the people flipping houses two years ago. They came in slapped down some new carpet and a coat of paint and raised the price by 50 grand. The bartells brought in their own sales guys, and programmers and just ran a a razzle-dazzle campaign for a few months selling ads with whatever promo it took to get the job done. It was an investment, not a property.

The Bartell family began their incursion into radio land in 1947. They built WEXT, a 1,000-watt, daytimer in in Milwaukee. The Bartell brothers: David, Melvin, Gerald and Lee flipped the switch at WEXT on August 31, 1947. They followed that up by building 920 WOKY-AM which was licensed to run 24 hours a day. They shut down WEXT in 1950 when WOKY went on air.

Gerald had worked at WHA-AM and probably brought whatever industry knowledge they had to the table. When they shut off WEXT they sold off the hardware. I have no way to know where the idea came from but that little switcheroo taught them something. They went on a buying and building frenzy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They built stations in Appleton, Sturgeon Bay, and Stevens Point, WI, Miami, FL, Charles City, IA. KYA had been their seventh property. Strangely it appears that Bartell ran KYA for another 2 years. It may have been an LMA type of arrangement. White Log clearly shows they sold it May 1st. But in 1960 they are also clearly auditioning tapes for new talent at KYA still under Bartell. The arrangement is unclear.

Then as fast as they bought these small market stations they sold them. They bought and then quickly sold KYA in San Francisco, KRUX in Phoenix, KCBQ in San Diego, WAKE in Atlanta, WYDE ' in Birmingham, Alabama, WADO in New York City, and WILD in Boston. More here.

In the December 1958 issue of Billboard Gerald explained his holistic approach to programming:

"The motive which compels most commercial organizations is that of profit. The company should make money for it's investors. How does commercial radio achieve profits? By sale of it's facilities and talent... but mostly the size of it's audiences. When it's audience is large the station prospers; when it shrinks the station's fortunes tumble. So that commercial programs are created to reach the largest buying audience."

The Full Linden

Adolph Frederik Linden (aka prisoner #14851) did it all. He owned a bank, a hotel, a record label and a radio network. But a lot of it was luck. He married well and inherited most of it. He was born in 1889 in Iowa but moved to Seattle as a youth. In high school he worked at a lumber camp, at a deli, and eventually Puget Sound Savings & Loan bank. He married the bank presidents daughter and the rest is history.

It's a great leap from banking into media. He began in 1927 with two moves, the purchase of KJR from Vincent Craft and the founding of the Northwest radio Network. At KJR he expanded the station with a full orchestra and a load of live talent. It was good for ratings, but not at all profitable. In 1929 he'd taken on so many loans form his own bank it became unseemly. He stepped down as president of the bank and focused on radio. In quick succession he bought KEX in Portland, KYA in San Francisco, and KGA in Spokane. Around this time he also began calling the network ABC, the American Broadcasting Network. Strangely, this is of no relation to the ABC network of today. More here.

By the Fall of 1929 it was in free-fall. Linden owed almost 100 grand just to the phone company for the networked programming. At the last second Twentieth Century Fox sent him a note that they'd like to buy up the beleaguered ABC network. Linden piled the family in the car and headed off to New York City to do the deal. It was the rescue he desperately needed. If you remember your history, you know what's coming next. While he was literally in transit to NYC on Tuesday, October 29th the stock market collapsed. It was Black Tuesday. The bank he just left went bankrupt. By the time he got to Manhattan the deal was dead.

Linden was broke. He sold his car, and borrowed money from a friend to open a small restaurant. It flopped. His wife took a floor job at Macy's. He was arrested on a grand jury warrant on charges relating to the bankruptcy of the Puget Sound Savings & Loan bank. There woudl be three messy dramatic trials. In 1932 he was convicted of grand larceny. [I wish we still arrested bankers] He served 5 years at Walla Walla State Penitentiary making acetate recording discs on an assembly line. More here.He was paroled in 1938 whereupon he started a business in vanity and short-run recordings. This time the honest business took off. By 1943 he opened Western Recording studios to supplement the field recording he'd been doing. By 1946 they were issuing commercial recordings on 78s. He had a few hits and worked his way back into radio from the programming side. His label put out over 200 albums even lasting long enough to see vinyl pressings in the 1950s before he sold it off. More here.

Damn you Bill Gavin!

My major complaint of radio is it's increasingly homogeneous content. Brands are trademarked and xeroxed coast to coast, programs are syndicated, playlists centralized and tightened, DJs are voice-tracked and sat-cast. I have examined the history of radio and I have arbitrarily selected a precipice and a guilty party.Bill Gavin was in San Francisco when he took the Billboard list of the top 30 selling records and turned it into a radio show at KNBC. Then he started writing to DJs across the country and asking them to send him their top 10 lists. Many complied. Radio stations reached out to Bill and asked him to consult for them with this "top 10" data. KYA went for it as did KCBQ in San Diego. This collated list became known as the Bill Gavin Record report. For anyone that actually enjoyed regional diversity this was the beginning of the end.

Before the Gavin report the most important sources for information on hits were juke boxes and Dick Clark's American Bandstand. Bill took those concepts and went big and homogeneous. His sheet was serviced weekly by mail. Bill was looking at it as a radio programmer. His tip sheet was to improve listenership by playing the right music. There were other charts out there, Bill's were just better.His tip sheet was not like the trade magazines like Billboard Magazine and George Albert's Cash Box.

Cash Box had been running since 1942 and collated jukebox play. It was focused on vending machine owners. Billboard was much older, starting in 1894 but was initially marketed to the bill posting industry. It branched out into media as they were billboard buyers. Only in 1961 did they re-focus on the record industry. Their first music chart launched in 1940, Btu it mixed sales AND airplay. Bill got into programming with the playlist for the show Lucky Lager Dance Time. In 1941 Lucky Lager sponsored their teen-targeted program on KFAC. It was very similar to the Lucky Strike Hit Parade running since 1935. But Bill had a hand up on the competition. Bill had a Top 1o countdown. Lucky Strike just followed the Billboard Chart. Bill didn't want to ape Billboard.

The program was carried on 48 West Coast stations. What made the program odd was that it was scripted out of 1330 KFAC-AM but then hosted locally by announcers on the local stations. Bill was known to critique local hosts if he felt they weren't right for the program. It was carried by KMOD, KGO, KSEI, KTRB, KGW, KPOI,KVOA, KSFO. Bills tip sheet begot the end of local programming and the rapid expansion of both Top 40 radio, and radio consultants. In 1945 KFAC dropped the program to go all-classical but Bill wasn't ready to let go. His tip-sheet grew into a trade magazine.

Bill Gavin died in 1985 at the age of 77. His eponymous trade rag floundered in the late 90s as radio chains like Infinity and Clear Channel refused to participate in their conference and made their own centralized playlists. In February of 2002 it's British parent corporation pulled the plug. Lucky Lager is still bottled today and is at least available regionally on the West coast.

Dude Martin on KLX

The Dude Martin band was pretty popular in Northern California and the North West. In various incarnations he recorded several records for RCA-Victor. His biography, The Dude martin Story is well worth reading, there is also a documentary film. As you may know, much rockabilly originated not in Nashville, but the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin Valley in California. Dude Martin first was on air at 910 KLX-AM in 1932 with his first band, The Nevada Nite Herders. Martin’s show was called the “Round-up.”

KLX-AM shared a frequency, staff and equipment with KZM-AM in the 1920s. KZM had come up as experimental station 6XAJ getting the calls in 1921. The Tribune Newspaper was deeply involved with the station and through inexplicabel logic, was convinved to get it's own license for the share-time by KLX founder Preston Decker Allen in 1922.

In 1928 Allen wanted to sell his license and rather than sell to the Tribune, he sold out to a lcal buisnessman Leon P. Tenney. Tenney moved the station to 1300 as a share time with KRE-AM then 1370. By 1930 Tenneywas bored and sold out to Julius Brunton who already owned KJBS-AM. That last transfer was not authorized by the FRC (this is pre-FCC) and bang the FRC deleted the license. The void of KZM is what allowed KLX to flourish.

So in 1932 when Dude martin does his first mic break on KLX they have the new frequency of 880 to themselves and are running at 1000 watts from the 20th story of the Tribune building. For the era, this was a big stick.

The Nevada Nightherders were Martin's highschool band. The Nightherder name went away as the shows popularity grew. The band ballooned to 10 members and the band was known as 'Dude Martin's Roundup Gang.' Around then they At this point they moved over to 1260 KYA-AM in San Francisco where they stayed for a decade. On KYA his sponsor was Gene Compton's Restaurant. By 1939 he changed the name again to the Wild West Show Revue Gang.

In 1949 Martin took at stabe at television and hosted The Dude Martin Show on KGO-TV. It was popular enough that he eventually moved to Los Angeles to host the Hoffman Hayride taking over for the erratic and possibly manic Spade Cooley on KTTV-TV in that much larger market. That show ran into the 1950s. He died in 1991.

ALL TRIBUTE RADIO

It began on 02/02/2006, a new Low Power station 104.5 KCFL-LP in Fall City right outside Seattle, WA founded itself as a tribute to Chicago's WCFL. WCFL was a union owned radio station in Chicago with it's own rich history. So Rich I wrote it up last year in this post.

Only months ago this oddball archive format switched to become a tribute to KYA, complete with vintage KYA jingles. Their current site here. They snuck through in the very last LP FM window and now appear to be changing format to become a tribute to a new classic station every 6 months. I wish I knew more.If you look here you can see they intend to blanket NW Washington with repeaters...
They're already operating a number of these already.
KCFL 104.5 Fall City / Sammamish / Snoqualmie
KYAO 89.5 Ocean Shores / Westport
KATO 94.3 Aberdeen / Hoquiam
K233BU 94.5 Seattle/Bellevue/Kirkland (temporarily off the air)
K249DX 97.7 Redmond/Bellevue - coming August 2006

Those last two repeaters at least used to belong to Skagit Valley College radio station KSVR a bastion of weirdness in the valley. That is a tad sketchy. More here.

Sam Dickson gets blacklisted

Sam Dickson was one of San Francisco's best-known radio writers. He got his start in the early twenties at 1260 KYA-AM, (current calls KOIT-AM) writing shows that featured the station manager and the switchboard operator as principal characters. His program "Hawthorne House" was pretty popular. It was innocent enough, but it's not scripts that got him in trouble.

In 1929 Dickson conducted what ammounts to the first media penetration study. He did a survey for about radio advertising. Broadcast advertising was still very young and many who voiced objections to radio being put to such a use. It was still frequently argued that radio should be a subscription service.

Dickson's survey determined that 90% of the city's radio listeners didn't object to radio commercials. It also stated that almost all respondents claimed to patronized the few advertisers that were then on the air. The results got him blacklisted by every station in town.

Sam Dickson wrote under pseudonyms and for the national syndicators like NBC but in Frisco he was done. Eventually NBC discovered his true identity but his scripts for "Winning of the West" ,were so strong that he was allowed to remain as a staff writer. He continued with NBC as one of its most prominent writers up into the sixties, He also authored the book "SAN FRANCISCO IS YOUR HOME." available Here:

More here; http://users.adams.net/~jfs/nbc.htm

*Note KYA-AM is known for having had more owners than any other radio station in California. , most had the station for less 3 years and many of those less than one!

The Moose is on The Loose

It is generally written that before Tom Donahue hooked up with KMPX, there was nothing subversive about rock radio. But The Moose, your Captain of the all-night flight, was very real. When some radio people talk about the true beginnings of free-form radio, they talk about the Moose. 

He was a native of Rochester, N.Y. and after three years at WKBW he came to KYA in the Summer of 1962 The Moose worked at KYA on four different occasions, at KSFO three times, KFRC twice, and at KNBR during his career in San Francisco. You can listen to clips here: http://www.bayarearadio.org/audio/kya/index.shtml

When the owner of KYA asked him to be program director, he balked at the Promotion. Vindictively the boss put him on overnights. It went down more like letting a wild lion out of a cage. It was here on the Super Freak 1260 that he flew directly thru the great egress of the 1960s. He rallied the people for protests, for civil rights, and free speech. He praised long hairand drugs and railed against war; all with a timeless blend of silliness, surrealism and cynicism. Every night he played free-form rock 'n' roll and the youth listened.

If there was a record on he didn't like, he'd have his engineer hit a sound-effects cartridge of a bombing attack, and the record would soon grind to a pathetic halt. In a lilting, laughing voice, he got away with sayings like, "May the bird of paradise eat your face completely." He gleefully attacked sponsors. His biggest advertiser was Mayfair supermarkets, which used a jingle sung by "Bob and Penny Mayfair." One night, Syracuse bombed the bouncy couple.

He had an imaginary crew and offered in-flight movies. and at 5:15, he delivered a farm report, doing the voices of Barnyard Benny and Cy Lo. reportedly he did not mave multiple personality disorder.

But behind the Mic, he was a family man. He sold driftwood at a shop on the village fair. He didnt take drugs and did his show hopped up on hot cocoa. He claimed not to ingest anything stronger than a cheeseburger.

On March 27, 1994 the historic KYA call letters disappeared forever, as the call letters were changed to KYCY. [Now KZRZ] http://home.att.net/~musicmann/kya.htm