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Air Dates

L

Lopaka

Here we are only a few days from the 50th anniversary of the launch of Mighty 690, one of the truly legendary and influential stations in San Diego history. I was a little kid, but as I recall it was on a Saturday, June 1, 1957, and here is the tricky part. I think the US was having its first and only test alert on the Conelrad system that day, so XEAK had the only music programming available that day. Very advantageous for ratings! Any corrections or observations concerning that memory would truly be appreciated.

And XEAK was not the first rock station in San Diego. I think (but may be wrong) that KSON was, with TNT, Tunes, News, and Time, running from 6am to 6pm when The Navigator on Cloud 9 with what came to be called Elevator Music came on. Does anyone know the approximate air date for KSON's venture into rock? I think the station itself debuted in the late 1940's.

And it is possible that KCBQ even came before XEAK, at least as a rocker. Does anybody have any information on their air date debut as a rocker?

I do not remember what KBAB was playing, but KDEO debuted in 1959 or so. There was always the urban legend that KBAB and later KDAY DJ Sam Babcock had owned KBAB, but who knows?
 
I do recall a national EBS test in I think late 1960 when 690 was the only music station on in Los Angeles. The late Stan Evans was the jock on The MIGHTY690 at the time. XEAK was the first top 40 station for L.A. in 1957. The exciting XEAC 690 was partially top 40 in 1956 with "Robinson's" record rack and I believe Art Way as well, but from what I have read some Spanish programs still on at that time.
 
My mother had a 15-minute, sponsored weekly high school newscast as a senior on KSON, and she graduated from Grossmont High in 1949.
 
JON BRUCE said:
I do recall a national EBS test in I think late 1960 when 690 was the only music station on in Los Angeles. The late Stan Evans was the jock on The MIGHTY690 at the time. XEAK was the first top 40 station for L.A. in 1957. The exciting XEAC 690 was partially top 40 in 1956 with "Robinson's" record rack and I believe Art Way as well, but from what I have read some Spanish programs still on at that time.
Click to expand...

I recall it was "Ray Robinson's Record Rack" - I think Ray had a record store in San Diego and promoted his store on 690. While XEAC "The Mighty 690" was exciting, but "Xciting" was XEAK. Just like all the San Diego and LA kids of the time, I was enamored (as in "in love") with 690. They played the real rock, skipped the "whitewashed" versions of popular songs that were played on stations like "top forty a little later" KCBQ.
While XEAC, 690 had Art Way, Noel Confer, Stan Evans and other names I can no longer remember on the air. XEAK came about with the increase to 50,000 watts. The Record Rack went away when 690 became 24 hour english - we can't say 24 hour rock because there was the dreaded Catholic Hour at 7 PM on weekdays, forcing us to tune in the lesser top forty stations for a short time, and of course the sunday nght Mexican National Hour from Mexico City.

I wonder if any of you remember an overnight jazz show on 690 hosted by a guy named Chuck Courtney. A classy show that introduced me to jazz and sent me to the Thearle Music Company and Southern California Music Company record demo booths to listen to and buy jazz records.

On that day that 690 went all news me and my pals mourned the loss - at that time my family had moved from San Diego to San Bernardino (after the Convair 880 disaster) and tuned in on my friends folk's big Magnavox console and heard the dying notes of that lame song ending the Mighty 690 and the opening note of XTRA News Over Los Angeles. What a bummer. We couldn't believe what we were hearing ... NEWS!? Now we were stuck with KFWB and KFXM. Shortly thereafter our lives were saved by the birth of K/men 129. A truly classy and classic rock and roller with a really fresh sound. Life was good again, but still we missed 690 mightily - the one true rocker that could be heard all over the west.

As I recall it ...

Rickity
 
JON BRUCE said:
I do recall a national EBS test in I think late 1960 when 690 was the only music station on in Los Angeles. The late Stan Evans was the jock on The MIGHTY690 at the time. XEAK was the first top 40 station for L.A. in 1957. The exciting XEAC 690 was partially top 40 in 1956 with "Robinson's" record rack and I believe Art Way as well, but from what I have read some Spanish programs still on at that time.
Click to expand...

Back then it was CONELRAD, where designated stations moved to 640 or 1240 in time of emergency... and there were two or three national tests, all around the noon hour EST... where every station shut off for 30 minutes and the designated ones switched on and off on the two CONELRAD channels.
 
Yes, I remember a jazz show on 690, I think the host's name was Chuck d'Atillo or something like that; he might have done jazz shows at the Pour House in La Jolla around that time too.

It seems impossible that such a good signal can continue to be left to basically just languish. If it were doing something in the Spanish speaking market ratings it would make at least some sense but evidently 690 is irrelevant. I wonder how they did in the ratings doing the dreaded elevator music as XTRA Music during those golden years of Rock 'n Roll.
 
Lopaka said:
It seems impossible that such a good signal can continue to be left to basically just languish. If it were doing something in the Spanish speaking market ratings it would make at least some sense but evidently 690 is irrelevant. I wonder how they did in the ratings doing the dreaded elevator music as XTRA Music during those golden years of Rock 'n Roll.
Click to expand...

Those were also the golden years of Beautiful Music... often the Beautiful staiton beat the Top 40 station, in both the 60's and 70's. Remeber the hughe numbers on McLendon's KABL in San Francisco.
 
Yes, I remember that jazz show but I can't recall the guys name. I do remember in it's final few days on 690 an announcement being made that it would move to, I think the La Jolla 98.1. It might have had the calls KDIG at that time. It was a sad day for me when 690 kicked off it's all-news format. As top 40 I listened to XEAK from near Palmdale. My uncle in L.A. always had it on, as did my cousins in San Bernardino. It was a great day indeed when it returned to Top 40 in 1980. The consultant for it then, Frank Felix, told me he loved the old XEAK 690 and listened to it from Santa Barbara in the late 1950's when he was a kid.
 
A wealthy La Jolla matron owned KJLM, the precursor of KDIG, and KJLH which I think still has the same call, last owned by Stevie Wonder, I believe, in--what--Torrance? Like almost everybody who got involved with FM in those days, the matron got tired of feeding a losing business and sold out. The old joke, how to make a small fortune? Start with a big fortune and get in to FM!
 
XTRA in Stereo

Living in New York State, I first visited Los Angeles in February 1974. I'd read about this unusual station from Mexico broadcasting in AM Stereo, of all things. How could this be?

If you tuned one radio a nudge below 690 and another radio a scosh above 690, you'd hear stereo. Unbelievable!

I parked up on Mulholland and tried it, using the transistor radio I'd brought for the trip alongside the radio in my rental car. There it was - XTRA Music in Stereo - and the softly whispered "extra" under the 101 Strings, Mantovani, and Percy Faith.

Nick Gerard
 
I was actually involved in the second installation of the AM stereo system on XTRA. Xtra was the first AM stereo station in the world using a Kahn exciter. It had been removed from the air chain when I went to work there, and was reinstalled sometime around 1977 or 1978 with a newer version of the Kahn. The Kahn used the upper and lower sidebands for the right/left information and worked quite well. That's why you could tune 10 kHz above and below center and hear stereo. We had some interference issues from KMPC 710 on the right channel, which was not their fault, just the limitations of the laws of physics.

As to the ratings for beautiful music, XTRA had a 5.3 share 12+ when it was changed to The Mighty 690 top 40 format around 1979. It never saw a 5 share again.
 
Thank you very much Radio Engineer for that interesting response, I am all ears--it must have been a very interesting project and anything else you'd care to add would be...music to my ears.

Just a general question, as you mentioned, the ratings for Beautiful Music were rather successful--not my cup of tea, but successful, but the question is, what would motivate a business decision to drop a successful format like that?

And another, if you happen to know, was XTRA still part of the McClendon group at that time? Thanks again.
 
Ah, the decision to change formats. Easy. The high numbers were all 50+, which were staggering, but which advertisers didn't want to buy. At the time I recall that most of the advertising was bank institutions, high end auto dealers, and various other businesses that appealed to the elder generation of the time. (We regularly refused spots that were "offensive", such as hemmeroid creams and loud car stereo stores ((Mad Jacks)).

The business people believed they could achieve better numbers with a return to the legendary Might 690 and Top 40. In a way, they were right. The shares didn't come, but the numbers for the lower demographics made it easier to sell more spots at a higher rate even so. It's much easier to sell beer and pimple cream ads to teens than to gray hairs, and that's where the focus was at the time.

It was my honor to be involved with the station in those days, and we also built 91X during my time there. It was a lot of fun with plenty of challenges working a cross border station. This was under the Ed Noble regime run by John Lynch. I left in 1985 to become Chief Engineer of KSON AM/FM, which became the Jefferson-Pilot cluster of KSON AM/FM, KIFM, KBZT, KSOQ. All totaled, it was a wonderful 30 years.

Back to the engineering for XTRA for a bit, we worked closely with Leonard Kahn and Mike Dorrough to get a very high quality AM Stereo signal with exceptional audio quality. It was a 50 kilowatt transmitter into a six tower array with decent bandwidth. Two towers day and five at night. The operation was completely compliant and legal at all times. We took great pride, and were given the latitude, to do it right. I was mostly U.S. facilities support with the occasional helping hand down south. I learned a great deal from our Mexican Chief Engineer in assisting him when he needed a spare pair of hands. That site is now gone and the new site is a five tower array just south of Rosarito with a TPO of 77 kW, if I remember correctly. That move happened after I left.

We had a great group of people working very hard, as did many radio stations back then. If I hadn't been so young, I might have recognized how magical it all was at the time.
 
This is definitely interesting to me so I thank you for your information. When you were doing this project, did you live in the US and commute into Mexico, or live there? And if so, how did that work out for you? About how long would a project like this take, or about how long would it take to build an entire installation from scratch in Mexico? Is the process easier and quicker there or is it bogged down? Any corruption you were aware of? And how about the work crews, were they locals or Americans? Did equipment come straight across the border from San Diego or was it shipped from inside Mexico? Anyway, I do thank you for your insights. And yes, I bet it was hard work but real interesting.
 
I worked mostly in the U.S. from the downtown San Diego studios, then the building on Pacific Hwy. I would go down only for errands when something needed to be delivered or to assist with a maintenance or installation project on occasion. Tower crews were usually brought in from the U.S. but most of the engineering was done by a couple of Mexicans that lived down there. We also employed a number of announcers and operators per an agreement with the Mexican government.

Big equipment like transmitters had to be imported but I/we would occasionally just drive smaller stuff across the border. If we went in with expensive test gear there was a process of registering it before going so there would be no hassles coming back. I never experienced any corruption in the ten years I was involved, though you do hear stories. It wasn't so different working down there when I did, but it was also at most for one day at a time then back home in the afternoon. I used to enjoy going to the AM transmitter/offices in the daytime because it had an unobstructed view of the Pacific where you would see whales breaching and playing during their migratory months. The worst part of the whole thing was crossing back into the U.S. Sometimes it could take two or three hours crossing the border. You just never knew until you pulled up to the line.
 
There's a book in there. Or a screen play. A movie like American Graffiti or TV show like WKRP takes huge artistic license with reality but the reality is usually much more interesting than fiction. Thanks again, very much.
 
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