Yikes WKBW-FM ?

[fybush]

Fascinating indeed!

Fascinating how the counterfactual sometimes ends up paralleling reality - if you posit, as Chas does, that "KB-FM" would have evolved into today's Kiss, well...they ended up as sister stations pretty quickly anyway, didn't they?

It's quite true that few top-40 AMs successfully migrated to FM. The small roster includes not only WHOT and WPRO but also WJET in Erie and KDWB in Minneapolis. It's remarkable how many stations that had an FM in house and could have made the move easily never did so. How different would things have been in Rochester if LIN had shifted "95BBF" to "92BBF" in 1981-82 and cut WPXY off at the pass?

(Two more answers for chas: yes, 92.9 in Pittsburgh was KDKA-FM originally; and yes, WHEN's FM sister didn't come along until much later. I believe it wasn't until 1980 or so that Roy Park bought the former classical WONO-FM 107.9, which went through phases as country WRRB, beautiful music WRHP and country WHEN-FM before arriving at top-40 as WWHT.)

 

[chas108]

Thanks Scott. Good point about 'KB-Kiss. In fact I originally thought it was KB's FM from the early 70's as their request lines were the same. Didn't know until just recently, thanks to these boards, that it wasn't the case until...the mid-80's and the sale to Price?

Also I forgot WHEN's FM was WRRB...and honestly when up there nowadays I get my hit music fix from 93Q rather than CC's WWHT.

 

[Element9]

Well, here we are, standing at the KB grave again, no doubt pissing off those who hate it whenever we exhume the body. This time wondering about an FM that never was. BTW, what if some Chicago precinct votes didn't get counted twice and Nixon had won the 1960 election? If the Supremes hadn't stopped the Florida vote count in 2000 and Al Gore had won his home state? What if there was security at the Portland, Maine airport in September 2001?

 

[chas108]

It's all part of the fun, Element.

 

[Philip_Airtime]

Wouldn't you rather have us writing about KB, Niner, than about W**K?

 

[John C]

Wouldn't you rather have us writing about KB, Niner, than about W**K?

I couldn't agree more with this post! If only GK would stick to "the official W**K" thread I wouldn't have to go to page 3 to resurrect "The Stiffs"! ;D

 

[Element9]

Wouldn't you rather have us writing about KB, Niner, than about W**K?

Can't dispute that, Phil.Point made.

 

[chas108]

This is more fun than humans should be allowed to have...

 

[fybush]

Well, here we are, standing at the KB grave again, no doubt pissing off those who hate it whenever we exhume the body. This time wondering about an FM that never was. BTW, what if some Chicago precinct votes didn't get counted twice and Nixon had won the 1960 election? If the Supremes hadn't stopped the Florida vote count in 2000 and Al Gore had won his home state? What if there was security at the Portland, Maine airport in September 2001?

What's remarkable to me is how many big top-40 AMs had FMs, but didn't transition the top-40 programming over to them as listening habits and preferences shifted. There were all sorts of reasons, of course - some of them had already found success on FM with different formats (WYSL/WPhD in Buffalo, WBBF/WMJQ in Rochester), some stubbornly hung on to a fading AM format to the point where it was already too far gone to transplant to FM (KB, arguably, at the end, and maybe WABC too), some found that the top-40 space on FM had already been filled by a competitor (again, arguably, KB, though it ended up co-owned with Kiss in the end).

If it had been easy to transplant a big top-40 AM to FM, we'd have more examples than KDWB, WHOT, WJET and WAPE to point to.

 

[Penrod Rightout]

Correct me if I'm wrong about the Big Tree site, the trasmission lines out to the towers were not burried until sometime in the 1970's. Before that I remember seeing the transmission lines on what looked like short telephone poles.

That's correct, the proposal to bury the lines was dated August 17, 1976 - at a price of $1 per foot to bury them 3'-6', that was a $2400 job back then.

 

[Bob1370]

"What's remarkable to me is how many big top-40 AMs had FMs, but didn't transition the top-40 programming over to them as listening habits and preferences shifted."

Top 40 in a lot of markets seemed to hang on longer on AM than other music formats because they were the one kind of mass appeal programming that cut across demographic lines through the start of the 80s, when most people still had just AM in their cars and in their workplaces. Classical and jazz bailed to FM, or simulcast on it, even before stereo came along in 1961 because FM is the radio that real audiophiles adopted early and they tended to be classical or jazz fans. Full-service adult contemporary, which first started popping up in the 70s on stations like WGR, WHEN, WBEN, WGAR and WNBC, had barely gotten warmed up on the AM band before FM operators started moving in in the late 1970s (credit Jack Palvino and Bud Wertheimer with being pacesetters there at WVOR). And of course, album rock was an exclusively FM format, while talk, sports, news and other spoken-word formats that don't need stereo sound at max fidelity have always been AM formats until very recently. Bottom line--the FM stations which survived the 1950s had found alternative formats, for the most part, during the post-1967 period when simulcasts were discouraged--and there wasn't much of anywhere for top 40 to go by the time heritage CHRs on the AM band started seriously losing altitude. It took another generation of format flips on FMs in the 80s and 90s, when old formats from beautiful music to jazz to classical started aging out, before CHR became a prominent feature on FM--and it has never been as dominant on FM as it once was on AM.

That's why, coming back to the start of this thread, if there had been a WKBW-FM in the 1960s, CapCities probably would have replaced its simulcasting in 1967 with an album rock format, beating 97 Rock to the punch

 

[Play Freebird]

I was told that WRUN -FM (Utica) moved to 104.3 in the early 50's was because on most receivers, when you switched back & forth between AM & FM 104.3 lined up with 1150 -WRUN AM.
And it did. It was a different world.

Same deal with WHCU AM 870 and WHCU-FM 97.3 in Ithaca, at least on the dial of the Stromberg-Carlson console receiver that introduced me to radio in the early '60s as a pre-schooler. When the sun set in New Orleans, we would simply turn the center rotary switch one click to the right! (Or two clicks for FM-AFC if it began drifting.)

Now, I'm trying to remember why we didn't leave it on FM all the time, but under Cornell's ownership, WHCU may have run some specialized programming on 97.3 earlier in the day. Maybe "The Empire State FM School of the Air"?

 

[Savage]

I like the tale about how WKOP-FM wound up on 99.1 in Binghamton. Apparently Charlie Hallinan was turned down flat by owner Andy Jarema when he proposed putting a new full Class B FM on the air, being told "nobody has FM radios, so nobody will listen." Charlie quietly persisted and got the CP issued in his name, which in the early 1950s was free for the asking.

Behind the scenes Charlie began accumulating the necessary hardware to actually build the station and stumbled on what would become WKOP-FM's first transmitter, a Federal. In his conversations with the FCC Mass Media Bureau engineer, Charlie was asked, "what frequency would you like? There are several available."

Charlie answered, "well, the Federal transmitter already has a crystal in its exciter on 99.1."

The engineer consulted the allocations table and responded, "well, that will work. 99.1 it is."

(Talk about a different world.....)

 

[Jim Santella]

"What's remarkable to me is how many big top-40 AMs had FMs, didn't transition the top-40 programming over to them as listening habits and preferences shifted. There were all sorts of reasons, of course - some of them had already found success on FM with different formats (WYSL/WPhD in Buffalo, WBBF/WMJQ in Rochester)."

Scott reminds me that in 1970 while I was working nights at the McClendon owned WYSL/WPHD in Buffalo, two events happened that convinced me that the "old Scotsman's" gut instincts about the viability of underground music were operating at full tilt. Instinct seemed to be the operative word in early FM programming.

The previous year (1969) while we were still operating out of the Hotel Statler studios, rumors were rampant that the druggy FM format was going "Easy Listening".

Late one night when the production closet was "ajar" I happened to notice a new jingle package of what used to be called elevator music. However, it never was implemented. Gorden McClendon Sr. himself championed the "Little FM Format that could." He just had a feeling. Yes, back then legendary radio men trusted their instincts . They were their own best consultants.

A second event spoke even more to me about music and radio instincts. Why didn't big top 40 stations transition to FM music? My guess is that cocky radio programmers believed that album rock would never replace the indomitable three minute single. Like Zen, picking the hits was transcendental. "Vote For Me and I'll Set You Free."

One day I was called into the station early in the morning. Someone must have complained about something I said or played. Nope. I was being asked if I wanted to take my edgy music schticke on late Sunday night to try to introduce a generation of burgeoning hippies to the new rock. There was one caveat. Fifty percent of the music had to come from the AM play list.

The experiment lasted two months. I followed my instincts. I played nothing but albums cuts. I knew the music, I knew the audience and I frequently operated on pure instinct - a quality not allowed in today's tracking programs.

 

[Element9]

Instincts, guts and a connection with the listeners. Bravo to you, Mr. Santella! Bravo!

 

[Mike Sheridan]

Buffalo was an AM radio market much longer than anywhere else thanks to great stations like WGR, WBEN and WKBW. That wasn't the case in a lot of other markets. Miami was early to embrace FM Top 40. WMYQ came on around 1970 and blew everyone away, then Y-100 came on in 1974 and it was all over for top 40 on AM. WQAM struggled for awhile but gave up in 1980.

In Most places the AM Full Service A/C stations lasted a bit longer before switching to talk. Stations like WBEN, WBT, and WIOD all seem to be doing pretty much the same thing now. Even the people who don't like Rush listen because these stations have a history of solid news reporting. I don't think news gets enough credit for ratings.

Even though I'm really not a news junkie it would be great to have something like WCBS-AM where I live.

 

[Bob1370]

Mike Sheridan commented, "Even though I'm really not a news junkie it would be great to have something like WCBS-AM where I live."

Buffalo actually had such a station for a while, with the old WEBR NewsRadio 970 in its early days as a newser under WNED's ownership. At WBEN we saw it as a genuine competitor for us and we took it seriously. It had two big problems...as a public radio outlet it struggled to raise enough revenue from underwriting and membership to cover the cost of such an expensive service (it was live and local 19 hours a day, doing locally originated news WCBS-style from sign-on to evenings followed by Al Wallach's evening jazz show), and the highly directional signal made it unlistenable in some of the eastern 'burbs where a lot of its target audience lived. They couldn't get 970...but they sure did get the full service outlet just a few clicks down the dial at 930, and came to depend on it.

WNED-AM runs a lot more outsourced national content than WEBR did in the late 1970s. That's fine, every station outside the top 10 markets needs to do some of that because of the costs today and the difficulty of raising revenue to cover them. WBEN, while a majority of its offerings are local, runs a lot more outsourced content these days as well. But back in the day, when the market was relatively bigger and the ad dollars relatively easier to come by, everyone tried to do miore...

 

[Mike Sheridan]

I knew about WEBR's days as a news station but never got the chance to hear it Bob. That was quite an undertaking!

Some of the stations that had affiliated with NBC's NIS did a good job for awhile. A shame that NBC pulled the plug on NIS so quickly, I liked it. WINZ Miami and WSOC Charlotte tried to go it alone after NIS folded but as you said Bob all news when done properly is expensive.

 

[JustPastBuffalo]

Classic Threads: brought this back to life because a radio friend asked me about 99.5 WDCX, insisting he was sure it went on the air first in Batavia. I recalled reading that 99.5 and 94.5 were first assigned to Batavia, but never went on the air from that city and where re-assigned to Buffalo. The search ensued. Maybe you'll enjoy reading, too.

 

[Bob1370]

There were lots of FMs that popped up quickly and died in the 1940s and 1950s. WLVL-AM 1340 started out in the late 40s as WUSJ-FM, I believe on 99.3. The Union-Sun-Journal newspaper started it up to provide a first local service to that part of central Niagara County that wasn't reached by any local station and depended only on WKBW, WBEN and WHAM for radio service back then. Trouble was, hardly anyone had an FM radio then. So as soon as WEBR bailed out on its class IV signal on 1340 back around 1947-48 and moved to 970, the newspaper swooped 1340 up and got a CP to occupy the channel WEBR vacated. That's when WUSJ, the predecessor of WLVL, really started getting someone to listen to it. They turned in the FM license, and no one else ever picked it up. It freed the whole territory between 99.3 and 99.7 in Western NY for a new station, which eventually allowed WDCX to build its blowtorch on 99.5 years later.

Again, getting back to the origin of the thread, if WKBW-FM had ever been built on 105.7 either by the Churchills or CapCities in the late 50s or early 60s, it would have started life as a simulcast of KB which got a bare mention at the top-of-the-hour ID. And then when the FCC mandated separate programming it would probably have morphed in the late 1960s into an early WCMF/WNEW-FM-style album rocker and beaten 97 Rock to the punch. It probably would have done well enough, and made enough money, that by the time KB started running out of gas in the middle of the 80s, moving the KB format over to FM would have been out of the question until the ownership rules were finally relaxed and some other signal (like Kiss 98.5) could take it up.