Pittsburgh Radio: Family-Owned KQV-AM Shutting Down

No more imploring to “Give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world.” No more looking ahead to “traffic and weather on the 8’s.”

KQV 1410 AM — with a broadcasting history that dates back nearly 100 years, the last 42 of them with a rare all-news format — is preparing to go off the air at year’s end.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports Robert W. Dickey Jr., the station manager whose family has owned or co-owned the station since 1982, delivered that news Friday morning to most of his 20 employees gathered in the KQV office at Centre City Tower Downtown.

KQV 1410 AM (5 Kw, DA2)

The station made no immediate on-air announcement and doesn’t plan any until Dec. 31, Mr. Dickey said. He calls the plan a “suspension” of broadcasting, allowing for the possibility some investor or buyer may come along in the interim, though he’s made no active efforts to sell KQV.

“Candidly, I think it’s a sad day for broadcasting,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s fair to say we’ve been trying to provide a community service. The bottom line is I just can’t sustain the business model. We’re an independent, labor-intensive format, and we were happy to take it on as long as we could financially do it.”

Mr. Dickey, 61, whose sister and business partner, Cheryl Scott, died last month, said KQV would continue all of its existing programming until the end of the year. After that, he’s not sure what, if anything, anyone will hear when tuning in the future to 1410.

“If you tune to us on Jan. 1, you probably won’t hear anything,” he said.

That will be a switch for many Pittsburghers, whether they are news junkies or baby boomers who grew up in the 1960s and early ‘70s using KQV as their source to first hear rock music.

As FM became the primary format to hear music on the radio, KQV switched to an all-news-all-the-time format in 1975. Mr. Dickey’s father, the late Robert W. Dickey Sr., was a station manager who got financial backing from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to form Calvary Inc. and purchase the station from Taft Broadcasting in 1982.

The senior Mr. Dickey died in 2011, and before Mr. Scaife’s own death, he sold his shares to the Dickey family in 2013. Mr. Dickey Jr. and his sister ran it, with her as president and business manager, and Mr. Dickey said it became clear it would be increasingly difficult after her recent passing to continue.

The news format, due to the salary costs of the necessary number of reporters, editors and announcers involved, is much more costly than music programming on radio, Mr. Dickey said. But he did not consider a format change at the station, he said, because of his family’s longtime focus on delivering news as a mission.

“We perceived the world of reporting on the news as a sacred one,” he said. “What made this worthwhile is not that we were making money, but that we were doing something important.”

Courtesy of  Jeff Roteman's Tribute Website

The FCC has traditionally listed KQV's establishment date as January 9, 1922.  However, station management has generally traced its history to predecessor activities beginning on November 19, 1919, although documentation for this earlier period is limited. In addition, station co-founder F. C. Potts maintained that the station should only be considered to date to late 1921, when the first license with the KQV call letters was issued.

According to Wikipedia, KQV's original owner was the Doubleday-Hill Electric Company. Doubleday-Hill was a well established seller of electrical equipment, whose offerings included radio equipment (then also called "wireless").

During World War One the U.S. government had prohibited the operation of radio transmitters by civilians, and the ban wasn't lifted until October 1, 1919. Shortly thereafter, Doubleday-Hill's radio department manager, Francis C. Potts, announced that the company was in the process of installing a De Forest radiotelephone transmitter, to be used for communication with a second station to be located at the company's branch store in Washington, D.C.   A month later, in late November, Potts reported that the company had been unable to obtain the commercial license needed to operate the business plan, however, "a special amateur license has been applied for, to cover the wireless telephone demonstration station which the company has ordered installed and which is expected to be opened in the near future".

In late January 1920 it was announced that "The latest type of radiophone, developed and produced in the laboratory of Dr. Lee De Forest at New York, has just been installed in the downtown store of the Doubleday-Hill Electric Company.   A week later it was reported that "On last Tuesday evening [January 27, 1920], the Doubleday-Hill Electric Company made a preliminary test of their new radiophone equipment, by rendering a short concert of about 15 selections, including many popular numbers, as well as operatic and classical pieces."  Two weeks later saw the announcement that "The radiophone musical concerts promised the local amateurs by Doubleday-Hill Co. will start this week and be given regularly hereafter on a schedule which is, for the present, Tuesday and Thursday evening, from 7 to 10 p. m. All the latest popular music will be played and records changed for each concert. Messrs. Williams and Devinney will operate the radiophone for these concerts."

In late 1920 the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company in East Pittsburgh launched an ambitious broadcasting service, and its efforts soon overshadowed Doubleday-Hill's earlier broadcasts. Westinghouse's first station debuted on November 2, 1920 as 8ZZ, soon becoming KDKA. In 1946, a KDKA promotional pamphlet claimed that it had conducted "the world's first regularly scheduled broadcast".   KQV, and a number of other stations, countered that they had broadcasting histories that predated KDKA. Based on their heritages, both KQV and KDKA have claimed to being the oldest broadcasting station in Pennsylvania. (A local Westinghouse engineer, Frank Conrad in nearby Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, preceded both efforts, conducting a series of semi-regular entertainment broadcasts at his experimental station, 8XK, that began on October 17, 1919. He suspended his broadcasts shortly after KDKA debuted.)

KQV's initial license in the fall of 1921 was the first one issued in the name of Doubleday-Hill, and the first to receive the KQV call letters. Moreover, in the same September 1934 newspaper article in which the KQV staff dated the station's founding to the predecessor 1919 activities, F. C. Potts was quoted as stating that in his opinion KQV's founding shouldn't be considered to have occurred until two years years later, when the first KQV license was issued, endorsing an earlier slogan that the station was "On the Air since 1921".

On November 11, 1928, a major reallocation resulting from the Federal Radio Commission's General Order 40 assigned KQV to a "regional" frequency, 1380 kHz. In 1932 the station was sold to H. J. Brennan. On March 29, 1941, under the provisions of the North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement, all the stations on 1380 kHz were shifted to 1410 kHz, which has been KQV's dial position ever since.

In 1944 the station was sold to Allegheny Broadcasting — the sale was necessary because both KQV and WJAS were under common ownership, and the FCC no longer permitted multiple AM station ownership within a community.   A 1947 station advertisement, promoting its power increase to 5,000 watts, described KQV as "Pittsburgh's Aggressive Station".





In 1957 the station was once again sold, this time to the American Broadcasting Company-Paramount (ABC). During the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s KQV was quite successful as a top 40 station, with Count John K. Chapel a popular radio personality during most of this period. Known over the years as "Colorful KQV," "Audio 14," "Groovy QV," and "The Big 14", KQV premiered its top 40 format on January 13, 1958, and is remembered for its high-profile, high-energy personalities, such as Robert Wolfson a.k.a. Bob Wilson,  Chuck Brinkman, Hal Murray, Dave Scott, Steve Rizen, Dex Allen, Jim Quinn, future game show announcer Rod Roddy, and their large-scale promotion of a Beatles concert at Pittsburgh's Civic Arena in 1964.

During this time KQV broadcast from its showcase studios on the ground floor of the Chamber of Commerce Building ("on the corner of Walk and Don't Walk," as the DJs would say) in downtown Pittsburgh, where the disk jockeys could be watched through a large window.

'Jeff Christie' - 1974

The station was dominant among young listeners throughout the 1960s, and was a major force introducing Pittsburgh to new music and artists such as Sonny & Cher, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes, the Beach Boys, the Dave Clark Five and others.

KQV ratings began to slowly decline after 1970, with the rise of FM radio (including its then-sister station WDVE, which had begun operation in 1948 as KQV-FM). One of KQV's top-40 personalities in the 1970s, with the on-air name of "Jeff Christie," later became famous as a talk-show host under his real name, Rush Limbaugh.

In 1974, another upstart competitor — AM station "13Q" WKTQ, the former (and current) WJAS — also made serious inroads competing against KQV, which briefly turned to the "14K" brand. At the end of the year, ABC Radio sold both KQV and WDVE to Cincinnati-based Taft Broadcasting.  Taft made another attempt at Top 40 on KQV, this time with a far more radical presentation, with Joey Reynolds as program director, before dropping the format altogether. Its final night as a top 40 station was October 14, 1975, with Neil Diamond's "Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show" played as the final song.

The next morning, October 15, 1975, KQV switched to its present all-news format, carrying NBC Radio's 24-hour News and Information Service. Even though NBC cancelled this service two years later, KQV continued as an all-news station with local elements.

In 1982 Taft executives told KQV's general manager, Robert W. Dickey (no relation to the Dickey family that founded the Cumulus Media conglomerate), that it intended to sell the station.  Hoping to avoid a potential format change that often results from an ownership shift, Dickey decided to make a bid to buy the station. He received financial backing from newspaper publisher Richard Mellon Scaife and together they formed Calvary, Inc., purchasing the station from Taft that same year.

Dickey died on December 24, 2011,  his estate remained a partner in the station's ownership, with Robert W. Dickey Jr. succeeding his father as general manager. Dickey Jr.'s sister and station co-owner, Cheryl Scott, died in November 2017 at age 65.

On May 14, 2013, it was announced that Richard Mellon Scaife was selling his shares in KQV to the Dickey family, giving the Dickeys full ownership.  Scaife died a year later.

Click Here For Jeff Rotemans's KQV Tribute Website