Gracious, here we go!! I'm not sure how I even came across this site and thread, but having lived through that era in RC radio, I guess I’ll throw my two cents worth in. That’s about what we earned back then BTW, two cents. That’s really not quite fair as I worked for some great owners/managers who were very good to me, often in ways other than just monetary.
Buzz Burnz ya old poot, how ya doing?? I’ll drop you a note off line.
Anyway, back to RC radio, and I’m going to group these mostly by call letters.
KOTA was RC’s first station, going on the air in the early to mid 30’s sometime. They were originally 500 Watts (and I think maybe 100 Watts before that) on 1400 kHz with a transmitter site along Rapid Creek very near to the Pennington County Fair Grounds. Someone else in this thread said that they were originally KOBH, which is correct. Very early in WW-II they received a CP for 5 kW ND-Daytime/D-Night on 1380. Due to severe shortages of all kinds of materials during the war, it was not until 1946 that they were finally able to get on the air from their current three tower transmitter site. The transmitter was an RCA BTA-5F using a single 892R in the PA and another pair of 892R’s in the class B modulator. Remember that transmitter as I’ll come back to it later. KOBH/KOTA (I forget when they changed calls) was owned primarily by the Dean family (Bob Dean) with some number of partners, one of them being Helen Duhamel. Sometime right after WW-II, Helen was able to quietly buy out enough of the other partners to gain control of the station and force the Dean family to also sell out. Helen has been dead for a number of years, but the Duhamel family still owns and operates the station with studios in the Duhamel building on Kansas City Street downtown.
Buzz mentioned South Dakota Tech, and few people know or remember that Tech used to have an AM station dating to sometime in the 1930’s. The call was WCAT-AM (Wildcat Radio) and they went black sometime in the mid-50’s, either losing their license, or giving it up, depending on who you talk to. Their self supporting tower was on the hill behind campus.
KOTA built what may have been the first FM station in South Dakota and put KOZY-FM on the air about 1950. FM was not too commercially viable anywhere back in those days, and certainly not in Rapid City, SD, and they went black at the end of their first license period two years later. Their transmitter and tower were on Skyline Drive at what later became and still remains the KOTA-TV transmitter site.
KRSD-AM came on the air as a Class IV on 1340 kHz about 1948. Built and owned by brothers Eli and Harry Daniels, who also owned KDSJ-AM in Deadwood. Someone mentioned their old Gates transmitter in the later KTOQ days. That was a 1959-60 vintage BC-1T using 833’s in both the PA and modulator. That transmitter remained in use until the late 1970’s when it was replaced with a Harris MW-1 by then owners Tom Brokaw and Tom Kerns (Tom Tom Communications). Interestingly, KRSD used a shunt fed tower, which a lot of engineers have never seen. I won’t do it here, but most of us who were around in those days could write a whole book of Eli Daniels stories!! KRSD was playing R&R at night at least as early as 1959 or 60, but they were never a full time rocker, and not really top 40.
Gene Taylor, Art Jones, Ab (Abner Hunter George) George, and another partner or two put KEZU-AM on the air on 920 kHz in 1959 with an easy listening format. (“K-EZ-U”) They built a cement block studio building on Jackson Blvd that remains today.
KIMM-AM was built and owned by John L (Jack) Breece and went on the air in 1962 with a VERY antique Western Electric 5 kW transmitter and a 150 foot tower. Studios were co-located with the transmitter on KIMM Street in Rapid Valley. The name of KIMM Street was later changed to Sweetbriar Lane and a short stub street off Sweetbriar was name KIMM street. Jack sold the station to Gene Taylor in 1966 or 67, and Gene operated it until selling out to Ingstad about 1983. Jack moved to Sioux Falls and put 10 kW country station KXRB-AM on the air in 1969. KIMM remained a top-40 station until August 1974 when they switched to country. Gene applied for an FM CP which was granted in early 1976, and KGGG-FM was put on the air later that year. In 1978 KIMM/KGGG’s studios were moved out of Rapid Valley and onto the sixth floor of the First Federal Building on Kansas City Street downtown. More on KIMM later.
Things got exciting in the RC radio market in the late 1960’s when KEZU was sold to become KKLS-AM and the owners built KKHJ-FM some years later.
Now on a more personal note, when I was a junior in HS my buddy John Soderquist (Johnny Earle – KEZU, KIMM, KKLS, and others) talked me into getting my Third Phone with Broadcast endorsement, which I did. I started in radio in September 1966 doing top 40 at night on KBFS-AM in Belle Fourche. Great place to learn as no one cared if you made mistakes. I was going to BH at the time and my dorm room mate was Gary Peterson, who’s remained my close friend ever since then, and who’s still doing broadcast engineering all over Western SD to this day. The summer of 67 I worked PT for KEZU, then bounced out of the business for a couple years before landing in Vermillion, SD at KVRA/KVRF-FM, where I stayed for a year and a half before enlisting in the Navy one step ahead of the draft board. Came home from the Navy in 1972 and went to work for KOTA-AM on the air and as radio chief engineer. Remember the RCA BTA-5F that I mentioned above, it was still in use as their main (Read that only!!) transmitter when I got there. We still had engineers at the transmitter during directional hours, and it always gave me a warm fuzzy feeling to leave the lights off when cranking up the old beast at 4:30 in the morning just to watch the purple glow from the big bank of RCA 8008 mercury vapor rectifiers. In 1974 I moved over to KIMM to be Gene Taylor’s chief engineer. In 1975 I went back to college full time at SD Tech and was really burning the candle at both ends being Gene’s full time engineer, pulling air shifts, going to school full time, and raising a young family, all at the same time. In 1976, Gene was issued a CP for an FM on 100.3, and I put 100 kW KGGG-FM on the air later that year, leasing tower space and building a transmitter building at the foot of Eli Daniel’s channel 7 TV tower on Skyline Drive. KEVN-TV (channel 7) was also under construction in 1976 after Eli had lost his TV license after a long history of numerous technical violations, and Gary Peterson and I contracted out to KEVN to build all of their audio system. In 1978 I built and moved KIMM/KGGG-FM into their all new studios in the First Federal bldg downtown. After graduating from SD Tech in 1980 I left RC for Texas and a job at Texas Instruments where I stayed for 19-1/2 years, and I’ve been with defense contractor Lockheed Martin for the last six years. Other than a couple years doing some part time engineering work for a broadcast automation house in the early 1980’s, I’ve been out of the business since 1980.
Of the original four RC radio stations (KOTA, KRSD, KIMM, KEZU) I worked for all of them except KRSD, although I did do a bit of contract engineering for both Eli Daniels and the later owners of KTOQ from time to time. Did I enjoy the business?? You bet!! Starting out in the mid-60’s was a great time to be in radio, especially on the air. The music was great and the talent was all over the place. Some of that talent that I worked with went on to much bigger and better markets and some stayed in the business to this day. Thanks for letting me share this with y’all. Some of the other poster’s in this thread were in RC radio in the same years that I was, but other than Buzz Burns, I can’t recognize any of the screen names. Who’s out there that I know?? Drop me a note at
[email protected].
Brad Bradfield
Fort Worth, TX
