A couple WRKA questions

[rjc]

John this is a great (what I have looked at so far), but are you going to add anything from WRKA? And can anyone give me the history of this station?

[John Quincy]

Yes, WRKA items will be added when they're contributed -- if WRKA was before 1990. The same goes for WSTM, which is what the original calls were for 103.1...and WNUU which came after WSTM and before WRKA.

According to Francis Nash's "Towers Over Kentucky" WSTM hit the air in 1966, owned by J.W. "Woody" Dunavent (who also owned WSTL in Eminence, Kentucky.) The station was licensed to St. Matthews and located on Linn Station Road. Dunavent started on the station in 1962, but ran into problems in the suburbs, where people didn't care much about having a tower as a neighbor in the Woodlawn Park area.

As in the case with many stations, there were many ownership and management changes between its 1966 sign-on and today, where the station is owned by Cox Broadcasting.

[davereichel]

Glenn Beck was the morning man on RKA in the mid 80's. I think Gil has an aircheck.

[billelliott]

If memory serves me correct, I think one of the studio locations when WSTM was in a small office complex along the Waterson somewhere behind "The Mall". I was still new to Louisville in late 1973/early 1974, but I remember the call letters mounted on this building and were lit at night. I also want to say you could see the control room from the expressway. Can anyone confirm this?

[rjc]

admin said:

According to Francis Nash's "Towers Over Kentucky" WSTM hit the air in 1966, owned by J.W. "Woody" Dunavent (who also owned WSTL in Eminence, Kentucky.) The station was licensed to St. Matthews and located on Linn Station Road. Dunavent started on the station in 1962, but ran into problems in the suburbs, where people didn't care much about having a tower as a neighbor in the Woodlawn Park area.

As in the case with many stations, there were many ownership and management changes between its 1966 sign-on and today, where the station is owned by Cox Broadcasting.

Would you happen to know what the formats were before the station became WRKA?

[rjc]

davereichel said:

Glenn Beck was the morning man on RKA in the mid 80's. I think Gil has an aircheck.

Is this the same Glenn Beck, that is now a national talk radio host?

[John Quincy]

Yes, it's the same Glenn Beck.

I don't know that much about previous formats on the 103.1 frequency before its current oldies format. Perhaps someone else can clue us in.

[radiorob]

Before oldies 103RKA was an AC station. I don't remember when they debuted but I seem to remember they did have at least one book when they were number one.

[hotpatrick2004]

I remember they said they were between rock and rocking.
They flipped to oldies on dec 25 1989.
I remember when they played little respect by erasure in 1989.

[rjc]

hotpatrick2004 said:

They flipped to oldies on dec 25 1989.

I started listening to WRKA in the late 80's mostly for the "Wayback weekends", but before the switch to oldies, they started throwing in current songs on their "wayback weekends", and called them, "future oldies".

Since you have the date, for their switch to oldies, did they do anything special between their AC fromat and oldies format?

[Matt Sorrell]

I think WRKA was also a mixture of country and rock in the early to mid 80's. I can remember a few country tunes being played at some point.

[1240winn]

I don't think WRKA was ever a true mixture of country and rock. In the early to mid 80s, there were several crossover artists like Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Eddie Rabbitt, and some others (Juice Newton) that scored fairly high on the pop charts. It may have seemed like a heavy country influence, but it was probably more of a reflection of the times. There have been several eras when country hits found heavy play on rock stations. The early 80's, which was the "Urban Cowboy" era, was definitely one of them. I doubt if you ever heard George Jones or Reba McIntire played on WRKA.

[hotpatrick2004]

Wrka went straight to oldies no stunting.

[greghahn]

hotpatrick2004 said:

Wrka went straight to oldies no stunting.

That's not really true. RKA was a hot AC station in 1987, my first year there. Kevin Kenny had been the PD at DJX and came over to RKA in the spring as PD, replacing Tom Graye.

Kevin, incidentally was the PD when Glenn Beck left, though it was all Beck's fault. Glenn made a demand and said if he didn't get it, he would walk. He didn't get it. LOL.

Kevin introduced oldies on RKA just on the weekends that summer, and it was promoted as a "way back weekend."

This was really an expansion of the Saturday night oldies show done by King Midas for quite some time before that. King Midas must have left around the end of 86 or early 87, because I only vaguely remember him.

Kenny was the PD until September 87, when he left for KBEQ in Kansas City. Michael W. Kay was his replacement, and the "Way Back Weekends" continued into the summer of 88.

We were talking about going oldies full time after VEZ switched from Format 41 to live jocks with a format that was more of a direct competitor to ours.

I remember the exact spot that Michael Kay looked me in the eye and said, "I don't know what the new format is going to be, but it d**n sure won't be oldies." I think he lasted about 2 weeks after that.

So the fact is, RKA played oldies and flirted with oldies for a very long time before actually adopting the oldies format. It's true there was no stunting, but it definitely didn't just come out of the blue.