WMGS in Bowling Green, "The Country King"

[Goldilocks94941]

Anyone here remember WMGS AM-730 from Bowling Green Ohio? Guess it was never a big enough deal to become 'legendary,' tho' it was the only Toledo area AM station that reached very far, tho' not into most of Toledo, with a signal aimed toward Dayton and Decatur Indiana. Had potential, but was aimed at the farms, and away from the city, so it never could get a decent signal into population centers bigger than Findlay or Lima.

I got my start there in 1974 as a kid just out of high school babysitting the transmitter at 6am sign on, 'til the station went bankrupt a few months later and they threw me on the air without any coaching or training. I was told by friends that they had to twist the dial a bit to one side to understand what I was saying, since the mic and my voice apparently didn't match up too well!

There were some good role models back then for being an air-personality, there, and on many other stations, especially those out of Detroit and the big nighttime 50kw ones from Boston, New York, Philly, Chicago, St Louis, Nashvile, etc. Any of the guys from WOHO or WTTO who also gigged at WMGS in 1972-73 out there? I can still hear Murray McLaughlin's "The Farmer's Song," and Barbara Fairchild's sappy "The Teddy Bear Song," providing the soundtrack on the flat back roads thru the sweet freshly cut hay fields of NW Ohio.

Would love to hear an aircheck from one of the station's incarnations before Jimmy Swaggart got the frequency and turned it into all-Jimmy all-the time (kinda weird, huh?)

Last time I went by the old studio site (it had been in a former train depot in scenic downtown Lime City, Ohio), there was no evidence of any local anything happening on that frequency anymore. Wonder where they keep their public file?? Hard to believe the FCC would let them just run a signal from Baton Rouge, Louisiana without any local anything on the station anymore, but, then again, who's listening to it anymore?

If anyone who's got any of the old jingle packages from the pop and country versions of WMGS could post a link, it would be a hoot to listen to! Anyone there remember the 22 second ID that ran for awhile om 1973-74, "From Detroit to Columbus to Cincinnati to INDIANAPOLIS! This is MidAmerican's Music Giant, Super 73!!"

I think I still have reel to reel tapes of the old easy listening jingles from the station (guess it was a short lived format in the late 60s), but no reel player anymore, and afraid the tapes will self destruct after being left in cardboardboxes in the attic for years.

Really wish I could hear an hour from the old Bob Daney show - the old timer who worked for the City of Toledo, I think, and hosted a slow-paced weekend shift of honkey tonk and really old country singles - station folks didn't really appreciate what an original slice of Americana that show actually was. I recall him telling me once he thought he ought to have "a bottle in a paper bag" playing all that sad music about "lost love and cheatin'." Didn't seem he was playing his personal favorites, just the old country standards he knew and thought he was supposed to play. with a 3-second pause between everything.

Would love to hear if any of you share any of these memories of WMGS "The Country King."

Goldilocks

 

[gr8oldies]

My Dad was a listener to WMGS, quite a distance away in the Celina, OH area. I can remember riding in the car with him on a trip back from Indiana and him having it on (what a signal to the south). When I was trying to get my "big (any) break" into broadcasting in 1975, I went to Bowling Green and visited the former WAWR (now WRQN) and also walked a short distance as I recall to WMGS. You needed a First Phone to work there but they thought they might have been able to use me in some capacity with my brand-spankin' new Third. Never heard back from them.

After Jimmy bought the station, they actually had local programming and staffing for quite some time. They tended to still program it as if it was located south of the Mason-Dixon line. They brokered out time (a local screamer from Lima comes to mind as one of the featured preacher shows, also a local preacher in Celina bought time there). At one point not real long ago, everything that did not originate with Jimmy Swaggart was dropped (someone on one of the R-I boards said it was because everyone else was preaching "false doctrine" as though apparently the Swaggarts are officially designated by God to be the keepers of the "true doctrine"). I don't know if WJYM now has a main studio waiver as KLove does; I suspect they do, and that apparently means the public file can be in Baton Rouge.

 

[Limp73]

I grew up on a farm in rural Shelby County when I got a transistor AM radio for Christmas ( I received several radios for Christmas over the years...I wore then out!) and the first station I tuned in was WMGS. Great daytime signal! As a teenager I was into some country...mostly Johnny Cssh,Bobbie Gentry, Buck Owens and a few others that were not aimed at the "good 'ol boy" audience...but I do remember the top of the hour ID which made a segway into an electronic moog synte=hesizer sounder with a deep voiced cowboy-like voice going..."W-M-G-S....NEWSZZZZZ!"

I think their studios was still located in Bowling Green from what I was told by another radio person I knew in the late 70s...supposedly in a former railroad depot before it became WJYM with the studios moved to the Lime City/Perrysburg tower site.

 

[redneckriviera]

There were some good role models back then for being an air-personality, there, and on many other stations, especially those out of Detroit and the big nighttime 50kw ones from Boston, New York, Philly, Chicago, St Louis, Nashvile, etc. Any of the guys from WOHO or WTTO who also gigged at WMGS in 1972-73 out there? I can still hear Murray McLaughlin's "The Farmer's Song," and Barbara Fairchild's sappy "The Teddy Bear Song," providing the soundtrack on the flat back roads thru the sweet freshly cut hay fields of NW Ohio.

I'll admit to being one of those guys with WTTO on the resume, but I made ends meet with PT at Findlay's WHMQ (was it 100Q or Q100?). But, yeah, I listened to the Big 73 a lot in those days--a few years before Country became cool and the big sticks converted. Had a girlfriend down in Dayton and 'MGS was one of the stations listenable all the way up and down I-75. Mostly 730 was one of those great "if only" stations, as in "if only I could get my hands on that bad boy"...

The stuff dreams were made of when AM was king!

 

[Rick Allen]

Hi,
I was PD at WMGS in 72 -73 as well as acting chief engineer until I hired Dennis Rutherford as chief. I had replaced my old pal Jerry Kiefer as PD, when he went to Florida. Jerry had been listening to me at 6:05 A.M. and was about 200 miles south of Atlanta, he said, when he phoned to say he was listening and I was as clear on low power as if he had been sitting outside the studio. We were coming in like gangbusters, on skip of course. We had Ken Roberts, who left to go in the service. He had worked at WOHO before making his dent in the WMGS logs. I had worked for years at WTOD and would return there after the General Manager, who's last name I won't mention here because he was a toad....a fat toad at that, but his first name was Richard or Dick for short and his last name matched his color.... He decided he was going to try to program a radio station and switched formats.

Now remember Jim Bonnett (Big Jim) had formatted WMGS to Country in the early 60's and they were a big success in the market as the "Sound of the Country" There was Pistol Pete (Roger Price) as the program director in the early to mid 60's. Lonesome John (Johnny Dauro) Tiny Tim (George Lubgate)
Ron The Dude (Ron Kitchen) Cousin Roy (Roy Blair) Bob Daney and others over the years.

BIG JIM Bonnett left WMGS and Johnny Dauro (Lonesome John) had left earlier, came back as GM. He didn't get along with Roger Price (Pistol Pete) and ended up showing his true colors and let Roger go. Roger went to Illinois, where I last talked to him. WMGS became "The Country King" with the likes of Dave Olsen and Bingo Bear from happiness square, Johnny, and others who's names I can not recall off hand.

Anyhow, I digress there, Jerry and I had programmed WMGS as SUPER 73 and and were just getting our footing when DICK decided he didn't like Rock & Roll Oldies so he wants to go big band, playing Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller etc. WOW that was fun....don't get me wrong, I like all music even big band. BUT WMGS had been Country for years and had quite a good following. NOW WMGS goes Oldies R&R so they lose most all of their audience and we are trying to build up a new audience. The bright GM -Richard knows all decides to go big band, so lets add this up....we lost most if not all of our contry audience, just start to get a good foot holding audience with R &R and now we throw them out the door along with what country audience we had left. Let's see, GEE, we have no one listening at all now.....Dicky boy decides about a month into this format that GEE RICK, we don't have any listeners....Boy is he smart....So he say's let's go back to country.....SOMEONE pick me up here......So I transformed the station back into country, and then I left and returned to WTOD and later worked WTOD and WOHO both. Lew Dickey (CUMULUS), my boss at WOHO was comfortable with me working both stations and thought it was great I was at WTOD also. Likewise, Bob Martz who was a long time friend, and boss at WTOD was comfortable with me working both stations. I guess Lew was comfortable because he knew he would be owning WTOD in the future....LOL
Some of the other guys I had hired at WMGS was John Paul (JP) Jones aka Klaus Helfers. Actually he and I worked together at the old WGLN Home of the Jones boys. I was one of the original Jones Boys as well as Klaus.
Then we had Ken Roberts, Ed Mitchel aka Tom Cook, Bob Daney weekends, and Troy Young aka Troy Young....huh? He would replace me as PD, when I left to go back to WTOD. Thats when WMGS fell apart (pat myself on the back..LOL) No, really, WMGS had some real problems and they were called Dick (you know who)!


I tried to buy WMGS because Max Goode was beginning to lose grip of things and the station was headed towards bankruptcy, but I couldn't get the financing, I wasn't as good at that as Lew Dickey was...LOL and didn't have the money Jimmy Swaggert had. Dick "you know who" was trying to buy WMGS as well and I would call him up and tell him I had secured financing and I was going to be his boss before long, and he would get all frustrated and slam the phone down....LOL, I loved doing that to him...I was a devil weren't I? As I said he was a real jerk and would fight with his wife all the time and she would actually give him black eyes...great stuff....The sheriff would fly out to their house and keep them apart, today they would just haul him off to jail. Sorry about hanging all the dirty laundry out here about the station....But it was apart of the history of the station.

I remember working at WOHO and we had formats geared to the amount of commercials in the hour. The format with the least commercials got more oldies. So I just snuck that format and used it all the time...No one caught on, except one day I was just playng the music I loved and Lew walks in the studio with a stern look on his face and says EARL (my name was Earl Richards on the air at WOHO) what are you doing??? I, thinking I had been had by the high boss looked at him and said, I am just playing the music Lew!
He stood there a moment and got a big grin on his face. He said the girls and I were just sitting in the outer office and listening to you, and you sound so darned good.....Keep up the good work! Whew! I was relieved, and chuckled about that one....I followed Craig Edwards in the morning 10-2, then Buddy Carr was 2-6. I would sit in for Buddy when he went on vacation at Buddy's request, and would kid about Buddy taking a much needed vacaton to Beautiful BONO, a small burg East of Toledo on the curve on St Rt. 2.

WMGS was a powerhouse station to the south of Bowling Green toward Cincinnatti and beyond. Wish I could have bought it. Oh well!

 

[kirkiefan]

Am curious when its stopped being WMGS and became WJYM. Used to listen to it in the evenings before sign off when a spanish language station came in overnight. Was there ever a WMGS-FM?

 

[Howard Dean]

I dont think so. I think Swaggert bought the station in the late 70's?? before I was born anyway I think!

 

[genemccoy]

I worked at WMGS after the bankruptcy when it was in receivership. That was from sometime in the summer of 1974 until it was sold to Jimmy Swaggart in October of 1976. I even worked for Brother Jimmy for a short while. I started out part-time on the air and then went to sales in Fall of 1974 and became sales manager in June of 1975, at the age of 19 (promoted 3 days before my 20th birthday) We were successful in increasing the sales by nearly 3 fold in the time I was in the sales department. Because I was still a full-time student at BGSU, I later cut back to doing mornings from 6 to 9 am and doing part-time sales, this allowed me to take afternoon and evening classes. I was lucky to squeak by with barely a C average in school, but felt I actually learned a lot more working all different positions at the station. My titles during my employment there included: part-time on-air, account executive (still have a business card), sales manager, morning man, farm news director and program director. As program director, in the last few months before Jimmy Swaggart, I started a format clock based on the WABC rotation concept. This proved to be a success with the listeners. Later when I was hired for weekends at WTOD, Bill Manders found out I was the one behind the format clock change and said that he was started to get worried because he felt it was eating in to the listenership in the southern part of their coverage area. He said he was glad it was sold to Jimmy Swaggart before we did anymore damage. We resurrected the Country King jingles. My experience at WMGS and especially learning what you could do with the leanest of operations including old equipment and just a few people gave me a vision for owning my own station which then became a reality for the first time in 1982.

 

[Goldilocks94941]

Gene - I recall our paths overlapped then at "The Country King." It was my first job out of high school (January graduate), and I used to be a "groupie" of the station (weird kid, I know) prior to that. Maybe because it was one of the few places where you could talk to the DJ on the phone while they were on the air. You must have been there when they replaced old timer Bob Daney with Spanish-language time brokered programming on weekend afternoons. I recall how the guy who DJ'd loved that hourly ID "WMGS, in Bowling Green. . .From Detroit to Columbus to Cincinnati to Indianapolis. . .you're in all Heart Country, Mid-America's Music Giant, Super 73!!" Or something like that, wasn't it?

There was a definite "romance" to working in the quiet of the morning in the old train depot, and having a signal that went more than a hundred miles (in the wrong direction from everyone you knew). The rumble of the AP teletype in the old phone booth just added to the atmosphere. And I'll never forget the vinyl-and-dust smell of the place - or maybe it was leftover pot smoke from whoever did signoff. I left WMGS late summer 1974 to work for the Ryder family at their Port Clinton station, where Mrs Anne W Ryder humiliated me for questioning having to read her three minute "news" piece about a fundraiser she gave for the local Democratic party. For that matter, the manager at WMGS (Carl Cook?) temporarily fired me for mentioning to someone at WTUU that it looked like someone had taken a bunch of 45s from WMGS for their new country format, when I drove there each Sunday to pick up a tape of Billy Graham's weekly show. Of course they never paid me mileage, and something as minor as that probably netted them all of $45 a week!

As much as I fondly recall my days (guess it was all of 8 months) at WMGS, I soon realized I needed to get to university (BGSU and OU), instead of slogging around little failing radio stations where the copy machine was treated with more respect than the employees. I also never received any real training or feedback on my probably awkward, yet confident, on air delivery. The work culture of a lot of radio stations really wasn't very professional, or healthy, in retrospect. Glad you were able to improve that a bit before Bro Jimmy took over.

Glad to report I've ended up doing a lot more than DJing over the years, including station management - tho' I've never bought my own station.

If you have any tapes of the old station, jingles, or the like, I'd sure love to hear any of it again. I doubt anyone ever recorded old Bob Daney when he did his weekend slow-paced honkey-tonk spin, (which used to make us young whippersnappers cringe) but, my God, woudlnt' that be wonderful to hear again?