Koresh is on the Radio

David Koresh, leader of an apocalyptic Christian sect, was dying to be on the radio. We all heard his CNN interview, but his broadcast on KRLD-AM was first. [I first read of this event in a VOX JOX column written by Phillis Stark in an issue of Billboard from March of 1993.] Most of the news media attention happened in the first 72 hours, and the siege lasted for 51 days. But if you look at Waco as the center of a media event and not just it's topic, other stories emerge...

Sunday, February 28th

• 9:30 AM - Failed ATF assault on Branch Davidian Compound
• 11:00 AM - FBI is belatedly notified
• 11:30 AM - Texas Rangers Arrive
• 4:00 PM - Koresh broadcast over KRLD.  (Repeated 12x).
• 5:00 PM - Gunfight
• 8:00 PM - CNN carries live telephone interview with Koresh.
• 10:00 PM - Koresh talks for about 20 minutes on KRLD

Monday, March 1st

• 3:00 PM - Koresh promises to exit if his taped message is played nationwide.
• 6:00 PM - Armored vehicles arrive
• 6:30 PM - 10 children are released

Tuesday, March 2nd

• 1:30 AM - Two children are released
• 8:00 AM - Two adults and two children are released
• 1:30 PM - Koresh's taped message played on KRLD and the CBN Network
• 6:00 PM - Koresh states that he is waiting for a sign from God

Let's go back to KRLD. Today KRLD-AM is only a 2.1 share in Dallas today. Back in the 90s they still pulled in double-digit numbers. The station sat on 1080 Mhz for most of it's existence but it didn't get there until 1941. Prior to 1934 it was on 1040, 890, 840 and 650. The 50,000 watt station was chosen by Koresh and the FBI not just for it's ratings book, but also for it's reach. CBN is a christian radio network, but KRLD is a powerhouse commercial talk radio station. At night the signal is clear from Oklahoma City to Austin. Between February 28th and March 1st KRLD aired Koresh's statement 12 times. In exchange for those broadcasts he released children in pairs for several days. You can hear the taped Koresh statement here.

Wednesday, March 3nd

• 4:30 AM - One child released with puppies
• 8:00 AM - Two adults and two children are released

Thursday, March 4th

• 7:30 AM - One child released 

Friday, March 5th

• 8:30 AM - One child released

You can credit all those saved lives to KRLD. The FBI reached out to the station, and possibly others but KRLD gave away their airtime to a civic cause and historically they get little credit. It's worth nothing that Koresh also agreed to KRLD because of Phillip Arnold. Arnold was from the Reunion Institute of Houston. he was a religious scholar who has been on KRLD and discussed the seven seals. (He also did an interview on the topic over KGBS-AM during the siege.) Some credit also goes to CBN. Some sources claim local affiliate KBBW aired the tape at locally. Billboard claims that CBN aired it on 41 affiliates on the Craig Smith program. Smith had invited Koresh to speak on his program if he would end the ordeal. It was perhaps a poor choice of words.

Before the negotiations degenerated into incoherent preaching and idle threats, there was one last radio event. On March 2nd Koresh had said he was waiting for a message from God. The FBI tried their hardest to give him one. On March 11th, radio personality Paul Harvey happened to describe a comet called the “Guitar Nebula" due to the odd shape of it's wake. The FBI called Paul Harvey and asked him to repeat and expound on the stellar event on his next show. He obliged. In Waco, TX his program was carried on WACO-AM. It was for naught. Almost everyone left in the building was killed by federal agents on April 19th. Harvey didn't admit his involvement until he wrote about it for the Los Angles times on April 26th. You can read a complete timeline here.

W-A-C-O broadcasting from Waco Texas

WACO is the only radio station in the world with call letters identical to the name of the town in which it broadcasts. http://www.waco100.com/main.html

When you think about it, only a handful of American towns could even support this call-to-town connection. The town would need to have a name beginning with a K or a W and consist of only four (or fewer) letters. They also must be on the correct side of the Missisippi in order to get the corresponding K or W assignment or else have been grandfathers decades ago. The list is short. The following is a list of all possibilities:

Way OH, Wawa PA, Keel MS, Kola MS, Kegg CA, Kewa WA, Kaka AZ, Keys OK, Kusa OK, and Keo AR. What kills me is that some of these are actually still available calls! Of course this only makes Waco and WACO more unique.

The first radio station in Waco was WJAD, it was founded by radio pinoeer Frank P. Jackson in 1922. He applied for and got a permit to broadcast with a power of 15 watts. He only broadcast three hours a day.

In January, 1923, he got permission to incrase his power to 150 watts on 850 AM. In the fall of 1924, he was granted permission to increase power to 500 watts power. Jackson offered prizes for the listeners reporting reception of the broadcast at the farthest distance from Waco . The farthest response was Wyoming . Telegrams poured in from every State in the nation. WJAD was reaching out there with 500 watts.

The archives at radio station WACO, successor to WJAD, are full of yellowed fan mail from North Dakota, Michigan, Mexico, the South Sea Islands, Illinois, New York, Indiana, Arkansas, Nebraska, Denver, California, Florida, and virtually everywhere else. The cards and letters came from radio listeners who picked up WJAD out of Waco .

In 1928, Jackson again upped his power from 500 to 1,000 watts, and he moved his studio to the Amicable Life Building. He was beginning to sell radio time, but it still was largely a one-man station. that ended in 1929 when Orville Bullington and J. M. Gilliam became partners with Jackson . In December they changed the call letters to WACO , buying out Jackson 's interest. Still the station did not become a full-time station with 17 hours of daily programs until November, 1934.

Today the WJAD calls live on in Leesburg, Georgia on a rock outlet. WACO is still in Waco and still a country station though it hasn't been on the AM dial in some time.