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WKOR-Starkville

OK, here's an idea. Let's all move BACK to Starkpatch and recreate WKOR. Any takers???

Mark
 
markoni said:
;)

Golden Triangle Weatherrrrrr
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...."WKOR Street Level Temperature is.................."

"WKOR pays twenty-five dollars for the best news tip of the month. If you see news happening call 323-49-eighty or 327-eleven 83."
 
SkinnyJohnny said:
And Gary Burbank said...
"From the Voice of the Golden Triangle...Larry London Plays More Hit Music"
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What about......"SkinnyJohnnyFranklinstein"... A Chris Kingism.
 
Holy crap, I take an extended leave of absence from this board, and this thread explodes! Very cool.

Russ, congrats on getting the gig in Jackson. On the market less than a few weeks? I'm not surprised.

Mike G., it's hard to imagine it's been more than a year since we spoke at Hudson's funeral. I would kill for a copy of the "Geek on the Street", "Carl the engineer" stuff and anything else you've got from our morning days at KOR. Those are great memories. What are the odds of you burning me a cd? (boy, back in the day, "burning" anything had quite a different meaning) Shoot me an email if you can burn a cd. [email protected] I still laugh at one morning following a "Comedy Zone" night at Cheers. Mike, you spent most of the morning hunkered over the air conditioning unit outside the back door. Ralph and Earl were there too. Man, I know we absolutely murdered numerous brain cells at "Cheers". It was a blast though.

Happy to see you guys mention Zeke. I can't hear Freebird without thinking of Brad. No doubt, he loved working in radio. Whenever I get fed up with broadcasting, I think of Zeke and his passion for this industry. The boy had it.

I can't believe I don't have any ghost stories...I worked my fair share of late night and overnight shifts there. I always hated leaving at 2 a.m., setting the alarm and having to walk down that long hallway to the front door. Never saw or heard anything out of the ordinary though. I crawled back in the "dungeon" several times...the door to the dungeon was in the ap room. Nothing back there but old copies of AT 40 and a whole bunch of trade magazines. I think Gary Owen and I wrote a bunch of silly ass notes on some of the boxes, just so our names would live in the bowels of KOR.

Someone else in this thread mentioned several of us going back to Starkville and putting KOR back on the air. I'd be in in a heartbeat...if only it were that simple.

Good to hear from everyone, I'll check back soon.
 
Hey Guys!

While I never worked at WKOR (except to do a spot for The Club in Columbus once) I did work at WSSO from 78 till 82. I also visited The Italian Stallion, Bill Evans, when he was doing the afternoon shift KOR. For those that don't know, Bill has been doing the morning weather at WABC-TV in New York for almost 20 years.

I did work with a lot of the people who have replied here as Starkpatch was and is a small town.

Mike Grace, man I haven't heard that name in years......sounds like your are doing well.

I've been in Houston (Texas not Mississippi!) for 16 years: now as the Director of Engineering at Clear Channel.

The WKOR studios might not be the same, but the old WSSO studios looked very close to they did in 1978 when I visted Starkville about 3 years ago except the are using the old teletype closet as storage.

Bob Stroupe
 
After all we've talked about here. How does it make sense that WKOR is now an automated station. How could that be progress for the the people of the Golden Triangle?

I'm not trying to be negative, it's just an amazing thought isn't it?

Mark
WKOR, Class of '68
 
When they are on the air, WKOR-AM, WSSO-AM and WMBC-AM (Columbus), are all ESPN Sports Radio. All owned by Cumulus and originate out of their Columbus Studio.
Coverage of WKOR-AM is nothing like it was in the old days. On a good day your can hear it around and near Starkville.
 
usually they are off the air.i doubt they could pass a proof of performance.,along with 1050, they all sound like crap.bad antenna systems and transmitters.980 was a race horse back in it's time and had great coverage.like i said in a previous post, the golden triangle has had awesome radio talent pass thru
it. and you GJ are one of the best..Ray Fisher.......
 
Hey John, we're not as live as you might think.

I do want to point out a couple of things. AM signals ain't what they used to be. I have three AMs in Houston including a 50 kW and get signal compliants all the time. Mostly power line problems but had one listener who lived in an apartment. The apartment management replaced the outside lighting with florescent and he now has no AM reception. Home computers can be a big source of interference too.

As far as automation goes, when WKOR-FM when on the air (79?) it was automated and so was ex-WSMU (FM) when it split the simulcast from WSSO in 1980.

I would not doubt that the transmitters and antennas are in pretty bad shape though. If WSSO's MW-1 is still in decent shape it should sound good but the antenna most likely has problems.

Dr. Bob
 
When I worked mornings at WKOR I remember just before sign on a station out of McComb would come booming in on the air monitor which was the best sounding AM air monitor I had ever heard at that time. By the way, it was an old VW car radio that Grady Moates had modified. I still remember where he had racked it up. It was toward the bottom of an equipment rack upstairs in the production room.
And Bob I was speaking of YOU not being automated, not your stations. Just trying a little comic relief!
 
Speaking of sign-on(wonder how many people under 30 are wondering what the heck "sign on" means?), the only time I overslept and was late signing on WSSO , I remember the trip from University Village to the studios was the longest couple of miles I've ever driven, and to torture myself, I listened to Glen on KOR. I could swear he knew we weren't on the air yet and he had the listeners all to himself. I could feel him smirking when he talked. Small town radio at it's best!

Johnny, let's leave the comic relief to Tom Daniels.
 
Oh, O.K.
An interesting sign on story about Jack Da Wack....
He was sleeping like a baby when Joe called and said "Aren't you supposed to be at the station?"
Jack: Joe I'm having car trouble, I was downstairs trying to start it and can't get it to start.
Joe: Well, get there as soon as you can.
Later that day....
Joe: Tally, I know you weren't having car trouble this morning. Unless you're superman, I don't see how you c could be down in your apt parking lot trying to start your car and answer your phone on the FIRST ring!
Busted!
 
tzbarber said:
I listened to Glen on KOR. I could swear he knew we weren't on the air yet and he had the listeners all to himself. I could feel him smirking when he talked. Small town radio at it's best!
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When we would make copies of commercials on reel-to-reel tape to send over to your station, I would always label them "For W S.O.S." Chuck Courtney alwways thought that was funny.
 
Born and raised in the area in 1946, I never worked at WKOR but was in and out of the market from around the time it came on the air in 1968 up to about 1976. I worked for just about every other broadcaster around there at one time or another and remember clearly it was a verboten subject around Billy Furr, Bernie Iimes and Jimmy Eatherton. It was taking money out of their pockets, a very competitive situation to say the least. It sounded real good technically and this was due to several things including one fact that most of the others were using old 1950’s vintage processing such as Gates SA-39 and WKOR was using a modern CBS Audimax/Volumax pair. One time I had a discussion with a guy who worked there during the install and was also at State as an employee and student in the electrical engineering department (name escapes me) related that in his opinion, the complex load presented to the 4-400 PA tubes was symmetrical and this was due to inadvertent complementary nature of antenna impedance, antenna tuning unit phase shift, transmission line phase shift and transmitter output network phase shift. I know that sounds like a bunch of “tech-no-babble” and indeed it is; however, it is accurate and a consideration that went unconsidered in most of the installations of the time. At WKOR, all of those subsystems were in harmony. This complementary transmitter load condition is taken seriously now with the advent of AM IBOC (FWIW). Bob is 100% correct about the AM signal situation today. Lot of man-made and other ambient noise has served to degrade AM signals. WKOR was/is 1kw and located on some of the poorest soil conductivity in the country. In addition to this, AM radio quality has been compromised over and over again to favor the FM receiver. All these stations are now radio dial “place holders” and sad reminders of their former prominence. Aside from all the technical facilities and mostly attributable to the success of the station, seems to be a passion of the players and the quality of those players. I think listeners will endure a lot of technical issues if the talent and production product is superior and obviously, it was. In addition to this, and a fact many outsiders may not know, WKOR was a daytime only station.
Above all else and in summary: Good professional people are the most important product. WKOR had all of theirs and half of somebody else’s….

Watt Hairston
 
Hey Watt, great stuff. I asked first PD Bill Tanner and we both remember that first engineer as "Larry" it may have been Larry Hill. He had never worked at a radio station, but he knew his stuff. He WAS some sort of Electrical Engineering guy from Mississippi State. The studios were beautiful and new. I remember that the big technical breakthru on that Collins board was the photo cell faders on the pot switches. When you turned them off they would gently FADE the levels down, rather than an abrupt "off".

The signal was pretty good too... we would get calls from Memphis whenever some station up there would go off the air for whatever reason.

Mark Shands
 
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