I thought Overcomer Ministry was ending it's radio broadcasts on both shortwave and the brokered AM's. Birach probably offered real rock bottom rates to keep Brother Stair around. Congrats to being 105, but I will be amazed if they are still around to see their 106th...
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
WEW's 105th anniversary
- Thread starter Mark Roberts
- Start date
WEW is a thousand watt daytimer on 770, which it shares with clear channel WABC. If you look at the stations early history, they bounced around from frequency to frequency more often than Aimee Semple McPherson! They were obviously looking for a warm place to settle, and this is where they placed their flag. Bad idea.
Prior to the Brother Stair programming WEW carries now, the station had a brokered format of Regional Mexican the morning, and Bosnian programming through the afternoon before sign-off.
A few years ago, I had a conversation with the chief engineer with WEW after the Brother Stair format change. The engineer said (according to Sima Birach) that the brokered ethnic programming was not billing enough to keep the station operating, and Stair's programming did. Birach also owns Regional Mexican formatted WIJR Highland, IL (880 kHz) in the metro area.
Regardless of the snark posts by the peanut gallery here, I think a 105 year old station in our city is worth celebrating. Both KTRS (the former KSD on 550 kHz), and KFUO (850 kHz) get to ring in their 105th anniversary in 2027--both KSD and KFUO spent their early years sharing the same frequency.
Thank you for mentioning that. I didn't know about it, so I did a little research.
The format switch to country happened when "Bruce Barrington", who had been a news commentator at KXOK, bought WEW from St. Louis University in 1955. The switch was effective June 1 of that year; that's also when the flip to country happened.
Two days later, the Post-Dispatch described the station's new programming policy:
(quote)
The usual dulcet tones of classical music emanating seven hours a day from Radio Station WEW were jangled by the jingle of steel guitars and country fiddles today, treating faithful listeners to country and western tunes, not to be confused with "hillbilly" music.
And so it has been since Wednesday when the station reverted from a four-year policy of presenting classical music to a schedule of country music five and one-half days a week. Other regular programs will be retained, including some religious broadcasts, a jazz record show on Saturday afternoons and standard popular and light classical music programs on Sundays.
(end quote)
I put Barrington's name in quotes because his real name was Aubrey Reid.
The Post-Dispatch printed letters to the editor protesting the move away from classical music. Some things never change: classical music listeners tend to be a pain in the you-know-what, never happy with what's being played and then complaining loudly when the format goes away.
The country music went away after Barrington sold the station in 1961, when it went to a "good music" format. A little bit of irony: Barrington took his money to the west to Columbia a couple of months later, bought top-40 KBIA (no relation to the present-day KBIA), and changed the call letters to KCGM: "Columbia's Good Music". Barrington sold that station almost six years later, after not really succeeding in what was then a two-station market, and it went back to top-40 as KTGR.
Back to WEW: the station's new program director in 1961, Charley Hale, explained the station's programming philosophy to the Globe-Democrat's Pete Rahn:
(quote)
"The truth of the matter is we don't intend to play any rock 'n' roll, nor will WEW go to a 'heavy classical' format. By good, listenable music, I mean that our programming schedule will have an abundant supply of music by people like Montavani, Gordon Jenkins, David Rose, and Fred Waring.
"I would appreciate if you would identify our new programming as an FM sound on AM radio," continues Mr. Hale. "We're calling it 'The Wonderful World of Music' and we hope to attract people who appreciate a little bit more in the way of sound than the noises made by two guitars in an echo chamber."
(end quote)
One thing that's a little startling in reading these descriptions is the vitrol directed at rock music, often called rock-and-roll at the time. In his newspaper columns, Rahn made his disdain for rock-and-roll very clear. He wasn't the only writer to do that.
But 18 months later, a new program director made adjustments. Again, from Pete Rahn's Globe column, where Rahn first expressed some fears that an announced format shift would lead to rock-and-roll being broadcast on WEW, a quote from that new program director:
(quote)
"Still good music but we are playing a lot more vocals now -- songs by artists like Frank Sinatra and Andy Williams -- in fact, we've heard from some listeners who aren't exactly happy. The people who had been using us as a free background service say they prefer the old schedule that contained more straight orchestral pieces."
(end quote)
That new program director? Lee Coffee.
So Pete Rahn could thenceforth sleep more easily at night, knowing that WEW wasn't going to play any of that rock-and-roll music.
For one thing, I'm pretty sure they don't have a radio-TV editor any more. Starting in the early 1990s, the Post's radio coverage started to decline, though there was still plenty of coverage of local and national TV.
Those frequency changes really don't mean all that much. There were major FRC-initiated shifts in 1927 and again in 1928. A lot of stations were bounced around. Especially considering that it was associated with a university, with such stations getting relegated to lesser status, WEW may have had no choice in the matter. It was put on 760 in the November, 1928 reallocation, and stayed there until the NARBA move in 1941 to 770. As it was, WEW was lucky that it wasn't forced to share time with one or more other stations. Though SLU did have WEW-FM for a while, the fact that they gave up the FM to help put an educational TV station on the air and sold the AM in 1955 indicates that they weren't all that interested in sinking money into WEW. If I'm reading the FCC history cards for WEW correctly, the station didn't move off a longwire antenna until after Barrington took over. That's kind of late.
Last edited:
The story of WEW reminds me a lot of KQV in Pittsburgh, a station that is actually older than WEW, going back to 1919. It's also a Class D, but with 5000 watts in the day, 75 watts at night. The license was almost turned in at one point. There were many discussions about why they didn't increase power (they actually did) or get a translator (no room). The current status of the station is it's owned by a non-commercial group in town.
There's a CP outstanding for WEW to install a two-tower DA, 10 kw daytime, 200 w nighttime. It appears to have expired six months ago, but the CP was amended in February 2025. I don't know if that amendment would have extended the life of the CP. Even if the CP had expired, a new CP application could always be filed.
How much money would you spend to air Brother Stair repeats? Perhaps the CP would be something the estate would sell with the license. But the question remains: How much would you spend?
The way to do that would be for someone local to buy it and return it to life. Maybe this is a project for the Double Helix folks.
Last edited:
Overcomer dropped all shortwave, only to eventually return only on WTWW which airs it on 9930 kHz days and 5920 kHz nights.
That’s what WTWW apparently did in order to keep the station alive. WTWW was at death’s door otherwise.
If you are a station reduced to broadcasting the dead Brother Stair’s idiotic rantings as your only program offering, you deserve snark and ridicule. By broadcasting Stair you are not scraping the bottom of the barrel, you are digging underneath it. That goes for both WEW and WTWW.
WEW is long past its shelf life. Businesses have a life cycle. Time to pull the plug.
I'm inclined to agree with you. Stair is awful.
That nonsense is paying the owner's bills, and possibly other emplolyees at the moment. I'm sure if you offered programming to Birach Broadcasting and paid more to air it, they'd listen to your idea.
I wouldn’t spend a cent on a broadcast property of any kind, but I’m not the one making the decisions here.
I also wouldn’t assume that Birach is ready to sell. The stations are in a trust that originated as a revocable (living) trust. That trust can keep going as long as the current trustee…Birach, Jr… is willing to do so. Only he knows what his plans are.
That’s not my call to make; that’s not your call to make. As long as Birach is a qualified licensee, that’s who’s going to be making the call.
Just to make clear: I’m not defending WEW’s programming. I think it’s an awful choice. But a business will do whatever it needs to do to survive. And that’s not what this thread was originally about.
One thing that most of us who grew up with R&R music don't realize now is how much many (though not all) of our parents and grandparents *really* hated it. This was especially true in the old South where R&R was seen as an extension of race (R&B) music. For many years, outside of the stuff John Hammond was doing, Columbia Records wouldn't sign or support any R&R acts until Paul Revere & the Raiders and Bob Dylan in the 1960s. And there were some stations, including St. Louis' own KWK if memory serves, that after playing the genre for a bit burned their R&R recordings. I view much of this reaction to R&R as being similar to people of my generation's reaction to rap music during the 1990s except that the antipathy towards R&R took on perhaps stronger forms.
This is not the first time that CP has existed.. and expired
Broadcasting has its share of what are essentially slumlords who will cater to the absolute bottom tier of clients on stations that should probably turn in their licenses, just like building slumlords will rent out properties that should have met the wrecking ball years ago. They’re all bottom feeders.
Oh, believe me, we Boomers knew very well that our parents and grandparents hated R&R. A lot of people in those generational cohorts had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the 1940s; they lived in a world that was forever frozen in 1945.
Much of that was due to Columbia Records A&R director Mitch Miller (yes, that Mitch Miller) who famously hated R&R and made no secret of it. However Columbia Records had its butt handed to it by competitors who were quick to sign new Rock artists, and Columbia management pushed Miller out of his role.
They also had The Byrds.
Led by its new president Clive Davis. Clive attended the Monterey Pop in 1967 where he saw a number of artists he signed, including Janis Joplin.
Columbia Records actually had Aretha Franklin under contract in her early days, and tried to market her as a jazz artist. Quite fascinating to listen to those recordings as her sound and voice were completely different from her later days as the Queen of Soul.
Correct, she was signed by John Hammond in 1960, who also signed Dylan and later Springsteen. He had worked with Billie Holiday, and thought Aretha could fill that void after Billie died. Her move to Atlantic brought her to Muscle Shoals where her music changed forever.
The music industry in the early 60s was still under the control of people from the 40s. They didn't know rock music. Dylan and The Byrds were seen as folk acts similar to the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul & Mary.
In many ways, radio at that time was very similar. It took a lot to get corporate radio owned by Westinghouse or ABC to play rock music. Westinghouse owned WINS and actually gave up a successful Top 40 format for news because of the payola scandal.
What is interesting is that of the three major radio network owners (ABC, CBS, and NBC), only ABC was able to run successful top-40 formatted outlets over a long period of time (think WLS in Chicago, KQV in Pittsburgh, and WABC in New York). NBC did dabble in the format in Cleveland with WKYC but was really unable to make it successful (though the network did have later success with an "adult top 40" station, WNBC in New York). As far as I can tell, with the possible exception of KDKA during part of the 1960s (and I'm not sure the network owned that station then), CBS never placed the top-40 format on any of the radio stations that it owned.
What's even more interesting is that the three major radio networks also owned major record labels. But once again the major labels were not the driving force behind what was happening musically at the time. CBS was the last of the big 3 to get into "youth oriented radio." NBC had a lot of success in DC with the black-oriented WKYS.
It might have some value if you could afford to build out the Construction Permit. The real issue is do you have to build everything or is there a site you can duplex off of. The 2028 date could be an issue too.
Not worth it .... no one bid on stations when they came up for auction in STL after the felon lost them.... st louis has too many signals, as with every metro....
to make a go of this, and attract any kind of audience, youd have to have some kind of mainstream format during the week and load up weekends with paid programs.. and even then itd be a stretch and youd have to have a very lean operation....