KIK'm was a fun place to learn and a popular stepping stone to Dallas. We had several come to KVIL.
It was an AM station with an amazing pattern for a 1000 watt station. It covered Dallas as well as a local and extended close to Wichita Falls, over to Paris, and past Durant. We got calls from Dallas often.
A lot of Dallas area radio people checked it out too. One day the KLIF PD (Jim Davis) walked in, and on another day I came in and had a message from the PD of Z-97 who offered me the overnight shift (I declined - I was actually making more in afternoons in Sherman!).
We kept the format tight (top 20 singles) and I can remember going across the street to the old SherDen Mall to buy some good oldies out of my pocket at Musicland so we'd have them. We had the same TM jingles as KILT. It was all held together by a shoestring budget but for what it was, it sounded pretty good.
96.7 FM was the 3000 watt FM sister-station but in those days not much of a factor. We simulcasted for a while, then seperated the FM to Drake automation tapes featuring Bob Kingsley's voice. The AM jocks had to keep an eye on the FM which was in a studio down the hall. Of course all the AM jocks could care less about the "step-sister" country FM. I remember one day all the tapes ran out and the automation system defaulted to the "PSA cart" over and over. A lady finally called the front desk and said "you might want to check on your DJ, he just keeps reading those announcements over and over"....pretty funny stuff, imagining this old lady thinking the DJ on the FM had flipped out or something....of course, the manager was less than amused when he found out!
Ken Barnett, myself, Don Miller (now in Austin), Paul Davis (now at KRLD sales), Al Forguson (later with KMGC and KLUV), Barry (Now in New York), ... I'm sure I'm fogetting some names...
I was up there a couple years ago and the mall was gone, the old KIKM building was falling down in very bad shape...was weird to walk thru it... I hear it is gone now, razed in the last year. A lot of fun times there!