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What If?

travisl5678 said:
What if number 3
What if Dr. Don decided to be a Doctor instead
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...his patients would have been seriously disturbed by the cow bells ringing during their physical examination, not to mention the weird remarks from Nurse Jane Dornaker
 
Lkeller said:
...his patients would have been seriously disturbed by the cow bells ringing during their physical examination...
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Hmmmmmm.....Doc, I was having a physical exam when cow bells rang and a hockey game broke out!
 
radio dx said:
What if..KFRC came back as a low watt AM station that nobody listened to....oh wait they did!
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What if #4:

If What If #1" were true, then perhaps 1260/KYA would also still be Top 40. Then Tom Campbell (not the politician) would still be King of Commercials, and we'd still be buying our electronics at Matthew's TV and Stereo, and sleeping on Comfort Zone water beds.

By the way, if you travel to Southern California, you can still hear Tom shilling for Linder's Furniture. Can you say 'laminated sawdust'
 
Lkeller said:
radio dx said:
What if..KFRC came back as a low watt AM station that nobody listened to....oh wait they did!
Click to expand...

What if #4:

If What If #1" were true, then perhaps 1260/KYA would also still be Top 40. Then Tom Campbell (not the politician) would still be King of Commercials, and we'd still be buying our electronics at Matthew's TV and Stereo, and sleeping on Comfort Zone water beds.

By the way, if you travel to Southern California, you can still hear Tom shilling for Linder's Furniture. Can you say 'laminated sawdust'
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...and talking about radio in some bar over drinks instead of on this thing called Radio-Info on that newfangled communications vehicle called the internet.
 
1069_KIFR said:
But what if NBC stayed in the radio biz, would we still have 99.7 KYUU?
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Yes - and it would still have a similar adult contemporary format, but they would re-image in the mid 90s as "Star 99.7." Don Bleu would still be the Bay Area's longest running morning DJ - but his record would be uninterrupted, and it would also include longest running on the same station.

In the early 90s, Infinity would have purchased KIOI instead, and the station would have spent more than a decade as "Oldies K-101," flipping in 2006 to "MOViN 101-3."
 
What if? I go over this in my head all the time. So about KFRC. What if they never sold KFRC-FM, the one at 106.1 and just moved everyone, format and all to FM in 1986? Would KFRC still be an up to date, relevant CHR? Or would it have flipped to oldies eventually. I could ask the same question about KHJ and KRTH (Formerly KHJ-FM) had they done the same thing in 1980 when they flipped the AM to Country. The entire landscape of radio for LA and SF could have been different. Or... it might just be the same. After all, the real landscape changer here is the Communications Act of 1996. I have always loved KFRC. I'm still saddened every time I think of it's ultimate demise. As far as I'm concerned the call letters are merely "parked" high up on the AM dial for posterity and not much else. It's a terrible frequency, but it is a placeholder for what might someday return. I doubt it though as the image of those call-letters to the general listening public would seem to be damaged at this point. Oh crud, now I'm bummed out...
 
What if Tom Donohue hadn't become so frustrated with the playlists at KYA that he bolted for a foreign language FM, KMPX, and began the first progressive rock station? And then moved the concept to KSAN. San Francisco is the birthplace of progressive rock radio, thanks to Tom.
 
Bryan Simmons said:
After all, the real landscape changer here is the Communications Act of 1996.
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Not for KFRC. The station was sold to Viacom before the Act was passed. And they held on to it for almost ten years.

The landscape changer for KFRC to me was the forced divestiture of RKO General. What if RKO General was still in broadcasting?
 
Bryan Simmons said:
What if? I go over this in my head all the time. So about KFRC. What if they never sold KFRC-FM, the one at 106.1 and just moved everyone, format and all to FM in 1986? Would KFRC still be an up to date, relevant CHR? Or would it have flipped to oldies eventually. I could ask the same question about KHJ and KRTH (Formerly KHJ-FM) had they done the same thing in 1980 when they flipped the AM to Country. The entire landscape of radio for LA and SF could have been different. Or... it might just be the same. After all, the real landscape changer here is the Communications Act of 1996. I have always loved KFRC. I'm still saddened every time I think of it's ultimate demise. As far as I'm concerned the call letters are merely "parked" high up on the AM dial for posterity and not much else. It's a terrible frequency, but it is a placeholder for what might someday return. I doubt it though as the image of those call-letters to the general listening public would seem to be damaged at this point. Oh crud, now I'm bummed out...
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Bryan: They would have needed to make the move more like 1983, to avoid the FM penetration losses that Mike Phillips said were already underway when he replaced Gerry Cagle as PD in early '84.

But RKO was going to lose its licenses anyway...so KFRC was bound to end up in other, less historically inevested hands.

What if RKO had kept its licenses? Well, truth is, it had lost most of its mojo by the 80s. KFRC under Cagle was the exception. Most likely they would have ended up following trends without much of what you and I think of as KFRC still in the mix....just another FM CHR.

See, we think of DDR, Sholin, Ocean, John Mack Flanagan, Bill Lee and Don Sainte-Johnn. But odds are that by mid-decade it still would have been Willie Sancho and Jack Silver...maybe The Slim One, maybe Osh and maybe Sholin. But whether it would have been any good would have depended on the PD. Cagle was a goner for other reasons. Probably would have been Phillips...and that was so whitebread, stale and boring by KFRC standards. And DDR, God rest his soul, would have had his coronary at KFRC instead of K-101.

We would have been spared Walt Sabo and The Game Zone...that's about it.
 
The thing I found so interesting was that both KFRC and KYA were only 5K. Obviously KFRC had the better signal, but neither were going to cover the whole area once the population expanded to the suburbs. So I agree that it was inevitable that these stations would not survive past the 80s.
 
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