The station has retained the same call letters and frequency as when it broadcast out of the Capitol Theatre in 1946, according to The Oneida Dispatch.
New General Manager Ron Frisch brought the station back to Rome because it is “a really great city.”
“There hasn’t been any local radio for awhile; there were a lot of stations that just abandoned Rome,” Frisch said.
WKAL (1Kw F/T) was first started by Myron Kallet, who operated a chain of theaters, including the Capitol in Rome and the Kallet in Oneida. The station operated out of the Capitol until it was sold to a company in Ohio in 1980. When Frisch found the call letters, they were frozen by the Federal Communications Commission at a station in Michigan that had been defunct for nearly 10 years.
“Once our FCC lawyers found the call letters in Michigan, it was only about a two-hour process to get them back,” Frisch said.
The station will broadcast on 1450 AM, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The station will have a talk radio format, with morning show host Bob Cain from 6-9:30 a.m. On the station’s first day back, guests were Rome Mayor Joe Fusco and city Detective Tim Bates. Much of the other programming will be syndicated shows such as Marilu Henner, ABC News and a TMZ celebrity news segment.
“We are trying to stay away from the yelling and screaming politics and keep our programming more to general issues,” Frisch said. “We want to keep it very local and community focused, give the listeners a different kind of talk radio.”
There are currently only three on-air talents at the station. Cain, the morning personality, is happy to be back on the air. He was a former employee of WODZ 96.1 FM.
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