Sunday, December 30, 2012

R.I.P.: St. Louis Broadcaster Richard J. Miller Was 81

KMOX AM is reporting St. Louis Radio Hall of Fame member Richard J. Miller has died at the age of 81 of an apparent heart attack.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch photo
Miller moved to St. Louis from Atlanta in 1958 and purchased KXLW 1320 M (now KSIV-AM), along with its rhythm and blues and gospel format.

He added progressive rock station KADI in 1969.

According to his bio at the St. Louis Radio HOF, his local stations provided a career springboard for talented people he hired like Gary "Records" Brown, Jim Doyle, Al "Scoop" Sanders, "Radio" Rich Dalton and Ed Goodman.

Miller established the concept of weekly oldies shows on Sunday nights, and the program spanned three decades. He was one of the first to promote his stations using posters, which have since become collectors' items.

KMOX Route 66 oldies show host Johnny Rabbitt worked for Miller as a vice president of programming in the 1970s. He says Miller was the first to have a station broadcast oldies on Sunday nights, “You talk about cutting-edge. He was always ahead of other people. He was a very shrewd, very sharp operator who also owned stations in Kansas City and Springfield, Massachusetts.”

Miller's St. Louis stations became regular stops for national talent, including Harry Chapin and Wolfman Jack, who would stop in to do DJ shows when they were in the area.

Former St. Louis radio and television broadcaster Gentry Trotter began his career as a 17-year-old radio talk show host on Saturday afternoons on one of Miller’s stations, “He was uninhibited in his appreciation of all types of people, all types of backgrounds, all types of religions, all types of sexuality. Richard Miller didn’t care anything about your personal life. He cared about you the person. I would call him the ‘evangelist for all mankind.’ If he believed in you, you believed in yourself. Part of my makeup all those years in the business was because of the spirit of Richard, a dynamic cheerleader.”

Miller sold his radio properties in the 1990s and founded Truman Bank.

1 comment:

  1. I'm glad he was nice to Gentry Trotter, but truthfully, he was one of the local radio owners who was primarily known as a crackpot. I worked for the man briefly, and found him to be unprofessional, crude, unethical, and just plain mean. This obit may have some chronological facts in it, but that's about it. When I worked for Mr. Miller he not only treated the on-air staff like garbage, he did not appear to know anything about programming a radio station. He was a well known joke to DJ's in this market. If you were desperate you could go work for RM, and then maybe be fired for wearing the wrong colored shirt. But I guess Gentry's experience was different!

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