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Broadcast History

C

Colonel 10

Looking for St. Louis radio history

Am looking for a copy of the FCC History Card for the old KWK-AM (1380 kHz) in St. Louis, Missouri. Apparently, the FCC records prior to 1972 were eliminated due to the station losing its license. However, KWK resumed under new ownership five years later when the History Card also resumed. The current call sign is KXFN. The station is now operated as a non-profit with a religious format. KWK was a legacy station beginning in 1925.
 
I still have the OLDRADIO database of transcribed history cards that Barry Mishkind put together in the 1990s, and have an MS-DOS VM in which I can run it. Alas, it doesn't say much more than what you see in the history cards.

The license revocation occurred February 26, 1966, stemming from a treasure hunt contest in 1960 that the FCC ultimately determined was fraudulent. An interim operator brought the station back on the air in 1969; that operator received the permanent license but then went off the air September 21, 1973 with almost $3 million in debt. A bankruptcy court awarded the station to Doubleday early in 1974 but this was contested, particularly by a black-owned group (which a few years later bought KIRL in St. Charles). Doubleday was able to put the station back on the air November 16, 1978.

You may have to engage in some radio archaeology through the pages of Broadcasting magazine available at worldradiohistory.com. If you have a subscription to newspapers.com, that site has a complete set of issues of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which gave quite a bit of coverage to KWK's travails.

The St. Louis Media History Foundation has a good article on KWK's history: St. Louis' Jinxed Frequency - St Louis Media History Foundation

There's also a tribute page which is mostly about the FM operation but may also be of use: The History of KWK - the Rockin' Best!

And some guy (me) wrote this and then turned it over to another site when he moved away from Kansas City and didn't feel he could reasonably maintain a site on Missouri radio history any more: History of KWK
 
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