I once visited KIBS. It was 1973, and there were actually 3 people in the building on the left side of the road driving in from the south... I believe one was the manager or owner or both, one was a jock and newsman and then there was the office lady who did logs, billing, accounting and mothering. I often thought that it would be very cool to own a station like that and forget the freeways and ratings and agencies. Particularly the agencies.
David:
Depending on when in 1973 and at what time of day, that jock may have been me. I was in high school until June of that year, and upon graduation, was promoted from Music Director/evening DJ to Program Director/midday DJ.
The GM was a fellow named John Hemler, who hired me at age 15 and brought me along each step of the way. A truly great guy and a local legend. He did the morning show and the long-form newscasts. The hourly 5-minutes were strictly rip and read from the UPI wire by the jocks.
The DJ might have been "Gentleman" Gene Dozier...and the receptionist/secretary/traffic person/bookkeeper was his wife, whose first name escapes me now, but you're right...she was pretty much the mom figure as well.
The owner was absentee...Frank Oxarart, father of Frank Oxarart, Junior, who would become General Manager of KFWB in Los Angeles. He was running the station as a tax write-off and it was allowed to fall into deplorable shape compared to how it had been under the original (1953-1969) ownership of Elwayne Clement, Bud Deming and Roy Downey, and the owner who followed, former KWOW, Pomona and KPOL, Los Angeles engineer John Young, who bought it in 1976 and brought it back from the brink.
How bad was it? One night in '72, the FCC made a surprise inspection while Hemler was ill and I was alone in the building. 106 written violations...miraculously, none affecting my license. When the inspector asked me to take the station down to night power, his mouth dropped open as I walked out of the studio to the lobby where the transmitter was the showpiece, went around it, took the back off it and jiggled the broom handle sticking out of the middle of the old RCA BTA1-R. The relay switch on the front of the transmitter had failed eight months before and Oxarart wouldn't approve the purchase of a replacement. There are 105 other stories, but you get the basic idea.
I also had dreams of someday coming back to town with a million dollars, running it right and providing jobs in my hometown. But it was a struggle even done right. Spots outside those longform newscasts were frequently literally a "dollar per holler". If anybody was paying five bucks a spot, they were paying the absolute top of the rate card. Most fell in the two-to-four dollar range.
We had no competition over-the-air during daylight hours until 1974. At night, strong AM signals from everywhere, especially San Diego, Los Angeles, Fresno and San Francisco, came in like locals. The typical Bishop High School student's car radio pushbuttons were KFRC, KHJ, XERB (for Wolfman Jack), KCBQ (good for half an hour before the pattern change at which point it was swamped by KLOK, San Jose) and KIBS.
Even adults were looking for alternatives, though. The take rate on factory and aftermarket car tape decks from 1966 on was way bigger in Bishop than it was in big cities with a choice in radio stations. Even if these people didn't commute for long periods of time (Bishop is so small, it's hard to get more than 5 minutes from anywhere), they did take road trips...and it was 120 miles to the south and 170 miles to the north before you'd find another signal on the radio.
Clement, Deming and Downey had put an FM on the air in 1967, but Oxarart took it dark as soon as he bought the station and turned the ticket back into the FCC.
Downey owned one of the local electronics stores (I think there were three) and promoted the daylights out of KIBS-FM to sell FM radios, especially big Zenith and Admiral console stereos with color TVs. There were two ways to watch TV...Channels 2, 4, 5 and 7 from Los Angeles and 8 from Reno were on UHF translators, but the signals tended to be weak and snowy...and there was cable...put in by Bell immediately after World War II. Spend 7 bucks a month, and you could get a cleaner picture with the four channels available on translator plus channels 9, 11 and 13 from L.A.
Once most people bought a nice, new color TV, they popped for cable. And that's when they discovered that the cable didn't just bring up TV stations from L.A., but every FM with a stick on Mt. Wilson. So, suddenly, Bishop residents tuning in to their new FM station found KNX-FM, KMET, KABC-FM, KJOI, KHJ-FM, KOST, KBIG and more. And when Frank Oxarart pulled the plug on KIBS-FM, those folks just kept listening to the L.A. FMs. You had to have cable, but it wasn't long before enterprising people (some legal, some not) put the more popular L.A. FMs on 10-watt translators, so you could drive around Bishop and listen to L.A. FM stations (the electronics shop did big business in FM converters shaped like 8-track cartridges that slid into your car's tape deck).
KIBS had been block-programmed for years. Country music from 6 to 7 a.m., an hour of news at 7, Country again from 8 to 9 a.m., a "women's program" called "Coffee With Virginia" from 9-10, playing middle-of-the-road (MOR---Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Patti Page, Doris Day) music, "Radio Bingo" (just what it sounds like, an hour of a DJ calling out bingo numbers as you played along at home with this week's cards offered free at the Ben Franklin store) from 10-11, more MOR from 11-noon, an hour of news at noon, more MOR from 1-5, an hour of news at 5, Classical music "for the dinner hour" at 6, and Top 40 from 7 p.m. until signoff at 10.
When I became PD in the summer of '73, it was clear we were getting our lunch eaten doing this. The MOR listeners were more and more really Beautiful Music listeners tuning to KJOI, KOST and KBIG. Classical fans always preferred KFAC to a single hour in mono AM. And that year, KKDJ went from automation to a live Top 40 with Jay Stevens, Rowdy Russ O'Hara, Billy Pearl, Kris Erik Stevens and T. Michael Jordan (with Charlie Tuna months away from taking over mornings). We needed to hit them where they weren't, so I kept the news and "Coffee With Virginia", but went Adult Contemporary...hipper than the MOR music, not as raucous as Top 40, for the music in all dayparts. And we started getting traction. KHJ-FM had become KRTH a few months before, going oldies and removing the closest thing to AC from the FM dial. Suddenly, we were offering something the audience couldn't get elsewhere. The other option was Country, and in hindsight, that's where I should have gone. But I was 17 and let my own tastes get in my way.
Still, KIBS did well and I went off to KSLY in San Luis Obispo.
In 1974, fellow former KIBS high school DJ Roy Mayhugh got the construction permit for what had been KIBS-FM, hired me as PD, I came back home and we put KIOQ-FM on the air. We went Adult Contemporary (stereo versus mono on KIBS and accessing those FM listeners) and KIBS went Country nine months later. The following year, after I left to program KUKI in Ukiah, they sold to John Young, who nursed it back to health, eventually (8 years later) buying KIOQ, putting the KIBS calls and the Country format on it and changing the AM to KBOV (Beautiful Owens Valley) as an automated oldies station). It's on its second set of owners post-John, but appears to be in good hands.
But I learned from my 11 years of living there and four years doing radio there that there are two ways you can approach what goes between the newscasts. One is to play loose, wide and eclectic. The other is to be as strong, solid and polished as the other things the audience is listening to. The second approach worked for me in Bishop, and especially in Ukiah, where I was sharing the dial with KFRC, KNBR and KSFO which all came in like locals 24/7.
