December 19 Radio History

➦In 1932...The British Broadcasting Corp. began transmitting "Empire Service" to Australia and New Zealand, the BBC's first overseas service.

➦In 1944...ABC took over ownership of WJZ 770 AM



➦In 1956...Elvis Presley had 10 singles on the Billboard chart, a record high number for an individual act, which stood until 1964 when the Beatles had 14 simultaneous chart hits.

➦In 1958...the first radio broadcast from space occured when President Dwight D. Eisenhower said "To all mankind, America's wish for Peace on Earth & Good Will to Men Everywhere".

Les Tremayne

➦In 1985...ABC Sports announced that it was parting company with Howard Cosell and released him from all TV commitments. He continued on ABC Radio for another five years.

➦In 1997...the founder of Sony Corp., Masaru Ibuka died at the age of 89 from heart failure. Ibuka, one of the leading engineer-entrepreneurs of post-World War II Japan, helped transform modern culture with the world’s first pocket transistor radio.


➦In 2003...radio & TV actor Les Tremayne died of heart failure at age 90. He was a leading man during Radio’s Golden Era on shows such as The Thin Man, The Falcon, Betty and Bob and The Romance of Helen Trent.  It is estimated that Les worked on more than 30,000 broadcasts, with as many as 45 radio shows a week in the 30s and 40s. Later he played scores of character roles over the first 45 years of commercial TV.

➦In 2004...a single-engine Cessna 182 crashed into the KFI 640 AM radio tower knocking the station off-the-air for an hour and killing the two people in the plane.

On December 19, 2004 at 9:45 am Pacific Standard Time, Jim and Mary Ghosoph were killed when their rented Cessna 182P single engine airplane, travelling from the El Monte Airport to Fullerton Municipal Airport, struck KFI's transmission tower, located in the City of La Mirada.

The solid steel truss, originally built in 1948, collapsed upon itself, mostly landing in a parking lot to the north of the site (KFI was relatively late to convert from a horizontal to a vertical antenna—same-market Class A KNX converted to a vertical in 1938, and same-state Class As KGO and KPO (now KNBR) converted to verticals in 1941 and 1949, respectively). KFI's signal was knocked off the air for approximately one hour.

Pilots had complained for years to KFI management that it needed to put strobe lights on the tower and highly reflective balls on the guy wire. KFI and Clear Channel Communications management responded by saying the tower was in compliance with Federal Communications Commission and Federal Aviation Administration regulations and that it did not need to make any changes. Until a replacement was successfully erected, the station transmitted from a 200-foot auxiliary tower at a power of 25,000 watts.

On Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 2:30 pm Pacific Standard Time the replacement tower collapsed while under construction.  The tower was about 300 feet tall (the final height was to be 684 feet) when a guy wire support failed, causing the tower to tip over the opposite direction. There were no major injuries, and only limited collateral damage.

A new tower began construction at the end of July 2008 and was completed on August 14, 2008. The station returned to full power (50,000 watts) on September 25, 2008 at 17:00 PT.

The new tower has a 50-foot-wide (15 m) top-loading "capacitance hat", which electrically extends the tower's height another seventy-five feet, effectively, without actually needing more tower sections (the local regulation authorities in apparent defiance of electrical engineering principles, and communications law, demanded "a 10 percent reduction in overall height", otherwise the necessary permits would be refused, not withstanding the federal government's primary authority over radio communications, and KFI's strategic role as an Emergency Alert System station for the western U.S. region).

The new tower is also equipped with high intensity strobe lights due to its proximity to the Fullerton Municipal Airport, and additional safety upgrades because of the previous plane crash. The new tower has torque arms which limit the twisting of the tower in high winds. The tower has been dedicated to the memory of John Paoli, KFI Chief Engineer from 2000 to 2008, who died suddenly from a previously unknown genetic heart condition soon after overseeing the construction of the new tower.