February 28 Radio History

➦In 1922...KHQ-AM, Spokane, Washington, signed-on in Seattle. Louis Wasmer founded the pioneer radio station as part of a motorcyle shop he owned. He later re-established the station in Spokane in 1925.

Although the KHQ calls are no longer used on the AM band, they still exist on TV.

The long time frequency of 590 kHz which KHQ used until 1985 is now occupied by KQNT.

The picture to the right is a view of the KHQ's tower on top of the Davenport Building probably from the 1940's based on the age of the automobiles pictured. KHQ was not using the tower at this time.

The KHQ and KGA signs are attached to the Radio Central Building which was being used by those station at that time.

➦In 1966...This is the 54th anniversary of KFRC 610 AM San Francisco flipping from MOR to Top 40.

KFRC - Circa mid '60s

In 1949, RKO-General acquired KFRC. Like most radio stations during the 1950s, KFRC lost ratings and share to television. In February 1966, KFRC flipped to a Top 40 rock and roll music format, and quickly became the dominant station in the region with that format through the 1970s, featuring the tight, carefully programmed sound developed by RKO General's national program director, Bill Drake, formerly of cross-town rival KYA, and program directors Tom Rounds and, later, Les Turpin.

It entered its second "golden era," which coincided with San Francisco’s Summer of Love, and featured legendary disc jockeys Mike Phillips, Ed Mitchell (Who later changed his name to Ed Hepp) , Bobby Dale, Jay Stevens, Sebastian Stone, K.O. Bayley (real name Bob Elliott), Dave Diamond, Charlie Van Dyke, Howard Clark, Dale Dorman, Mark Elliott, Frank Terry, Joe Conrad, Jim Carson, J.J. Johnson, and Bob Foster.



During the Drake era, KFRC was responsible for two memorable concerts.

The station presented several prominent acts at the “The Beach Boys Summer Spectacular” at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in June 1966. On June 10 and 11, 1967, KFRC organized and hosted the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival at the summit of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California. Occurring one week before the more famous Monterey Pop Festival, the well-attended event is regarded as the first rock festival in history.

For several years, KFRC had extended local newscasts on its AM station, under the leadership of news director Bob Safford; however, management decided to curtail news coverage, so Safford and other news staff moved to other news broadcast departments in San Francisco, including KCBS Radio and KGO-TV.



➦In 1969...WABC 95.5 FM starts the  “Love” format.  The station originally went on the air on May 4, 1948 under the call sign WJZ-FM  and in March 1953, the station's call letters were changed to WABC-FM following the merger of the American Broadcasting Company with United Paramount Theatres.

As most FM stations did during the medium's formative years, 95.5 FM simulcast the programming of its AM sister station.

In the early 1960s, however, WABC-FM began to program itself separately from 77 WABC-AM. During the 1962–63 New York City newspaper strike, the station carried an news format for 17 hours daily. Two-and-a-half years before WINS launched its own around-the-clock, all-news format in April 1965, it was the first attempt at an all-news format in the New York market.

WABC's AM personalities, notably Dan Ingram, Chuck Leonard, and Bob Lewis, hosted programs on the FM side which were the total opposites of the Top 40-powered sound for which they were better known on AM. WABC-FM did continue to simulcast its AM sister station during Herb Oscar Anderson's morning drive program.

At the start of 1968, ABC split its radio network into four distinct components targeting specific demographics, one of which was dedicated to FM radio. The following year, WABC-FM and its sister stations: KABC-FM in Los Angeles, WLS-FM in Chicago, KGO-FM in San Francisco, WXYZ-FM in Detroit, KQV-FM in Pittsburg and newly acquired KXYZ-FM in Houston–began carrying an automated, youth-oriented, progressive rock format known as Love.  Click Here for aircheck. Click Here for Part Two.

➦In 1977....Edmund Lincoln Anderson died at age 71 (Born: September 18, 1905).  He was best known to a generation of early radio and television comedy he was known as "Rochester."

Anderson got his start in show business as a teenager on the vaudeville circuit. In the early 1930s, he transitioned into films and radio. In 1937, he began his most famous role of Rochester van Jones, usually known simply as "Rochester", the valet of Jack Benny, on his NBC radio show The Jack Benny Program. Anderson became the first Black American to have a regular role on a nationwide radio program. When the series moved to CBS television in 1950, Anderson continued in the role until the series' end in 1965.

➦In 1983...the CBS-TV series M*A*S*H ended after 11 seasons.  M*A*S*H (an acronym for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) is an American war comedy-drama television series that started aired on CBS in 1972.

It was developed by Larry Gelbart, adapted from the 1970 feature film M*A*S*H, which, in turn, was based on Richard Hooker's 1968 novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors. The series, which was produced with 20th Century Fox Television for CBS, follows a team of doctors and support staff stationed at the "4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital" in Uijeongbu, South Korea, during the Korean War (1950–53).

The television series was one of the highest-rated shows in U.S. television history.

"Goodbye, Farewell and Amen" was the final episode of M*A*S*H. The episode aired on February 28, 1983, and was 2½ hours long. The episode got a Nielsen rating of 60.2 and 77 share and according to a New York Times article from 1983, the final episode of M*A*S*H had 125 million viewers.

"Goodbye, Farewell and Amen" broke the record for the highest percentage of homes with television sets to watch a television series.

➦In 2003...FCC aproved the sale of WEVD 1050 AM to ABC.   The 1050 frequency has a long history prior to this format. Starting in the 1920s as WHN, it played a diversified format. It was renamed WMGM in the late 1940s, continuing the same format until a switch to Top40 in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As WHN again, it played adult standards in the 1960s and country music in the 1970s and 1980s (the format it was best known for). In the late 1980s as WFAN it was the original frequency for the very successful first of its kind all-sports station. Then began a truly convoluted set of ownership, call letter, and format changes from the Spanish language WUKQ to WEVD, a low-rated brokered station in the 1990s, to today's incarnation as WEPN airing ESPN DePortes.

Hubcap Carter

➦In 2004...longtime Dallas radio personality Ken "Hubcap" Carter died at age 60.

Carter, who billed himself as the "semi-legendary almost king of rock 'n' roll," had been suffering from congestive heart disease and diabetes.

Carter, who was inducted into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame in 2002, began his career in Lufkin. He had been working in radio 43 years.

He got his nickname early in his career for spinning records "real records, like spinning hubcaps."

Carter had worked at several Texas stations and had been news director at WWUN in Jackson, Miss., and the Texas State Network.

He also taught broadcast journalism classes at Texas Christian University and Texas Wesleyan, both in Fort Worth, and was a teacher and coach at North Dallas High School for seven years.

On December 31, 1985, singer Rick Nelson and his band were en route to KLUV's New Year's Eve Sock Hop, hosted by Ken "Hubcap" Carter. The plane crashed near DeKalb, Texas, killing Nelson and his entourage.

➦In 2006...CBS Radio sued Howard Stern and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. with a $218-million lawsuit that alleged Stern misused the company's airtime in a scheme to boost the payment he received when he moved to Sirius in January. CBS contended that while it employed Stern, the host spent more than a year hyping his upcoming switch to Sirius and, as a result, improperly enriched himself, "pocketing over $200 million for his personal benefit" by driving up Sirius' subscriber numbers.

The subscription increase allowed Stern to trigger an early grant of more than 34 million shares of Sirius stock, valued at about $220 million, the suit alleged. That compensation was disclosed by Sirius this year after Stern had signed off CBS' airwaves.

Stern had a financial incentive "to do all that he could to help Sirius reach the subscriber targets by the end of 2005 so that he could receive his Sirius stock payment as soon as possible while Sirius' stock was extremely valuable," according to the lawsuit filed in New York Supreme Court.

Also named in the breach-of-contract and fraud suit were Stern's production company and his agent, Don Buchwald. In addition to the $218 million in restitution, CBS was seeking unspecified punitive damages.

Stern began broadcasting with Sirius in January under a five-year contract worth more than $600 million. The satellite broadcaster hoped that millions of Stern's fans will subscribe to its service, enticed by ribald material that conventional broadcasters were reluctant to air because of federal decency standards.

"There were no secret negotiations; I spoke about it on the radio," Stern said at a hastily called news conference in New York after rumors of the suit appeared in the New York Post. CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves "has had it in for me for a long time."

Stern's move to Sirius attracted more than 1 million new subscribers, boosting their listeners to 3.3 million. But costs associated with Stern and other content deals have proved high, and the company's losses grew to $311.4 million in the quarter ended Dec. 31.

The contentious lawsuit was settle a few month later when Stern's new employer, Sirius Satellite Radio Inc, agreed to pay $2 million to CBS Radio in return for the rights to the classic recordings.

➦In 2008...NYC Personality John R. Gambling aired his last show on 77 WABC

➦In 2009...ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey died at the age of 90 (Born - September 4, 1918).

Medal of Freedom 2005

He broadcast News and Comment on weekday mornings and mid-days and at noon on Saturdays, as well as his famous The Rest of the Story segments. From 1952 through 2008, his programs reached as many as 24 million people a week. Paul Harvey News was carried on 1,200 radio stations, 400 American Forces Network stations, and 300 newspapers

Harvey was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The son of a policeman killed in 1921, Harvey made radio receivers as a young boy. He attended Tulsa Central High School where a teacher, Isabelle Ronan, was "impressed by his voice." On her recommendation, he started working at KVOO in Tulsa in 1933, when he was 14. His first job was helping clean up. Eventually he was allowed to fill in on the air, reading commercials and the news.

While attending the University of Tulsa, he continued working at KVOO, first as an announcer, and later as a program director. Harvey, at age nineteen spent three years as a station manager for KFBI AM, now known as KFDI, a radio station that once had studios in Salina, Kansas. From there, he moved to a newscasting job at KOMA in Oklahoma City, and then to KXOK, in St. Louis in 1938, where he was Director of Special Events and a roving reporter.

Harvey then moved to Hawaii to cover the United States Navy as it concentrated its fleet in the Pacific. He was returning to the mainland from assignment when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He eventually enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces but served only from December 1943 to March 1944.

Harvey then moved to Chicago, where in June 1944, he began broadcasting from the ABC affiliate WENR. In 1945, he began hosting the postwar employment program Jobs for G.I. Joe on WENR. Harvey added The Rest of the Story as a tagline to in-depth feature stories in 1946.

On April 1, 1951, the ABC Radio Network debuted Paul Harvey News and Comment "Commentary and analysis of Paul Harvey each weekday at 12 Noon". Paul Harvey was also heard originally on Sundays; the first Sunday program was Harvey's introduction. Later, the Sunday program would move to Saturdays. The program continued until his death.

➦In 2015…Former Toronto personality Pete Nordheimer  died at the age of 93. He did a split shift on CHUM's original lineup, not unusual for radio in those days, with shows in afternoon drive and late night. Nordheimer was the only original CHUM jock still on the station's lineup into the 1960s. He was doing 1-4 p.m. when he was replaced by Bob McAdorey in August 1961.  Nordheimer was the last of the living original CHUM jocks.

🎂HAPPY BIRTHDAY:

• Actor Gavin MacLeod is 90. 
• Singer Sam the Sham is 84. 
• Actor-director-dancer Tommy Tune is 82. 
• Actor Frank Bonner (“WKRP in Cincinnati”) is 79. 
• Actor Kelly Bishop (“Gilmore Girls”) is 77. 
• Actor Stephanie Beacham (“Beverly Hills, 90210,” ″SeaQuest DSV”) is 74. 
• Writer-director Mike Figgis is 73. 

• 

  Madison Beaty is 26

  Actor Mercedes Ruehl is 73. 
• Actor Bernadette Peters is 73. 
• Actor Ilene Graff (“Mr. Belvedere”) is 72. 
• Comedian Gilbert Gottfried is 66. 
• Actor John Turturro is 64. 
• Singer Cindy Wilson of The B-52′s is 64. 
• Actor Rae Dawn Chong (“The Color Purple”) is 60. 
• Actor Maxine Bahns (“The Brothers McMullen”) is 52. 
• Actor Robert Sean Leonard (“House, M.D.”) is 52. 
• Singer Pat Monahan of Train is 52. 
• Author Lemony Snicket (AKA Daniel Handler) is 51. 
• Actor Tasha Smith (“Empire”) is 50. 
• Actor Rory Cochrane (“24,” ″CSI: Miami”) is 49. 
• Actor Ali Larter is 45. 
• Country singer Jason Aldean is 44. 
• Actor Geoffrey Arend (“Madam Secretary”) is 43. 
• Actor Melanie Chandra (“Code Black”) is 37. 
• Actor Michelle Horn (“Family Law,” ″Strong Medicine”) is 34. 
• Actor True O’Brien (“Days of Our Lives”) is 27. 
• Actor Madisen Beaty (“The Fosters”) is 26. 
• Actor Quinn Shephard (“Hostages”) is 26. 
• Actor Bobb’e J. Thompson (“The Tracy Morgan Show”) is 25.