I used to live at the KEIN transmitter site back about 1970-71 when I was music director and morning jock at what was then KKGF. There was an old house on the site and Program Director Jack Bell rented that. I rented a double-wide mobile home that was attached to the transmitter building. In fact, in the winter we opened the door between our kitchen and the transmitter room so some of the transmitter heat would help warm up the home.
At one time KKGF had been KFBB and was co-owned with KFBB-TV. KFBB-TV was located at the Vaughn Road site and in 1964 a flood nearly wiped them out, then a fire burned down the studios. The mobile home was brought in to serve as TV studios while they built new studios near Black Eagle. Because it had been a TV a studio we had a rather large parking lot and every so often someone would come walking in the front door ready for a scheduled tour of the studios. We'd direct them to the right location and eventually learned to lock the front door, something we'd never done living in the country. It was not a great place to live: the water had to be trucked in and during the winter the pump would often freeze. They had drilled some rather large holes in various parts of the mobile home to route cables for the TV studios and the mice used to come and go at will (mostly they came). I have to say I didn't feel too bad when I packed up the uHaul to move the family back to southern California.
Back in those days the idea of a radio station going dark was inconceivable. FM radio was pretty much a non-entity in Great Falls then and AM 1310 made good money for the owner Bill Holter (of course he helped that he paid jocks what we used to describe as "a dollar sixty-five an hour and all the records you can steal").
I left KKGF when Holter sold it to he company that turned it into KEIN. I can't recall you they were but they brought in a bunch of hotshots from elsewhere who were going to turn the market on its ear
They didn't offer jobs to anyone on the KKGF staff so off we went.
The Great Falls Tribune quoted someone as saying this station is the oldest in Montana. I clearly recall that back in the 70's we were told that it was the oldest station in continuous operation west of the Mississippi. AM stations are going dark all over the country when, but it's kind of sad to hear of this pioneer signal's demise. If what's happened elsewhere happens here, this shutdown will be for good. When you think that this is a radio signal that is just a dozen years shy of broadcasting for a century, it's maybe not surprising that it's no longer a viable technology, but what a run it had!
