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| St. Louis Post-Dispatch photo |
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.
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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