KKDJ

KKDJ was a 1980s-era Album Oriented Rock station in Fresno, California. They switched to Alternative Rock from 1991 to 1994. A series of short-lived formats followed including Classic Rock, Spanish, Talk, Variety Hits/JACK FM and even another shot as an AOR station. March, 2009 saw the latest flip, this time to News/Talk with KMJ as their call letters which they simulcast with their sister-station KMJ 580 AM

WKY

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma's WKY was the first radio station to be licensed west of the Mississippi River and the 28th overall. They began broadcasting in 1922 as "5XT" before being assigned the WKY call letters. Besides Contemporary Christian, they've gone through many formats over the years including Top-40, Adult Contemporary, Easy Listening, News/Talk, Sports Talk, Oldies and Country. In January, 2009 they flipped to a Regional Mexican station known as "La Indomable."

Newsman Walter Kronkite began his broadcasting career at WKY in 1935. He was an announcer for University of Oklahoma football games and later worked at the news desk. "The Most Trusted Man in America" died yesterday at the age of 92.

Disneyland opens

On this date back in 1955 Disneyland first opened to invited guests and the media for "Dedication Day." The park would open to the general public the next day. Grand opening events were carried live on ABC television and hosted by Art Linkletter and Ronald Reagan. The press preview did not go well and was later referred to as "Black Sunday" by Disney executives. Counterfeit tickets were rampant among the invitation-only guests. Shoes sunk into new asphalt which was growing soft in temperatures that reached 101 degrees. Many of the park's water fountains didn't work due to a plumbers strike. Some thought this was done on purpose to force people to buy Pepsi, one of the park's sponsors. Food ran out and a gas leak forced large sections of the park to be closed for the afternoon.

WCOG (Wonderful City Of Greensboro) runs a Children's Music format and is licensed to Greensboro, North Carolina. It is one of about 50 Radio Disney affiliates nationwide, mostly on the AM dial. WCOG started as a Top-40 station in the 1960s and has gone through a handful of formats and call letters over the years:
Beautiful Music, Oldies and Adult Standards as WGLD
Talk as WWWB
News/Talk and Sports Talk as WTCK
In 1999 the WCOG call letters returned along with a Christian Talk format before the switch to Disney in 2000.

KNLT

95.7 KNLT was an Oldies station licensed to Walla Walla, Washington. They flipped to Variety Hits as "Bob FM" in 2005 and currently run an Adult Contemporary format as "Star FM" KKSR.

CIKT

CIKT "Q99 FM" is a Hot Adult Contemporary station from Grande Prairie, Alberta and began broadcasting in April 2007.  

Radio Monte Carlo

A few French radio stickers in honor of Bastille Day.

Radio Monte Carlo was founded by the Nazis during World War II but taken over, with some American help, by the French government and the Principality of Monaco in 1944.

BFM is a sister station to Radio Monte Carlo and are both owned by NextRadioTV.

WGMA

WGMA was a Country music station in Hollywood, Florida from 1967 to 1979. They were known for their "play-the-hits," Top-40 approach to the Country format. 1320 AM, now with the call letters WLQY, currently runs time brokered Haitian Creole programming and was involved in some serious fraud a few years ago.

Disco Demolition Night

On this date in 1979 the city of Chicago witnessed the infamous Disco Demolition Night, one of the most memorable baseball promotions of all time.
On Christmas Eve 1978, popular morning jock Steve Dahl was fired from 94.7 WDAI when they switched from Rock to an all-Disco format.

Dahl was then hired by WLUP "The Loop" (named after the historical center of downtown Chicago) and mounted an aggresive “Disco Sucks” campaign bent on destroying WDAI.



Despite Dahl’s best efforts, “Disco DAI” performed well in the ratings. So the 24 year old DJ along with Mike Veeck (the son of the owner of the Chicago White Sox) and other station personnel came up with the idea of Disco Demolition.
Fans who brought a disco record to the ballpark would be admitted for 98 cents, a number which also matched WLUP’s dial position. The event took place at Comiskey Park between games of a White Sox/Tigers double-header. Early fears of embarrassingly low attendance were squashed when 90,000 disco-haters converged onto a stadium that held 52,000. After the Sox lost the first game 4-1, during which time the increasingly-rowdy fans got drunker and drunker, the real fun began. Steve Dahl wore a combat helmet and rode around the ballpark in a Jeep. In centerfield a giant box was packed full of disco LPs and blown up which left a hole in the playing surface. People who didn’t get their Village People, KC & the Sunshine Band and Sister Sledge records in the box used them as frisbees and began flinging them through the air. Thousands of fans then swarmed the field, lighting fires and starting small riots. The bases were stolen, the batting cage was destroyed and chaos ruled. Chicago police in riot gear finally cleared the field which was so badly damaged that the second game could not be played. It was later determined that the White Sox would have to forfeit the game to the Tigers because they failed to provide acceptable playing conditions.

Steve Dahl's brainchild really did signal the death of disco. Around the time shards of vinyl were littering the Comiskey Park outfield, most of the Top 10 records on the chart would have been considered disco. By October there would be none. Billboard magazine even changed the name of their Disco Chart to the Dance Chart. An era was over.

Actual sticker sighting #2 - WBCL

I saw this sticker on a blue minivan going south on I-75 near Middletown, Ohio. WBCL is a Contemporary Christian station licensed to Fort Wayne, Indiana. WBCL is owned by Taylor University and simulcasts on three repeaters and two translators in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan.

Happy Birthday Nikola Tesla / WGRQ

Nikola Tesla was born on this date in 1856. He and Guglielmo Marconi are often both credited with discovering radio but in 1943 the United States Supreme Court reinstated one of his patents effectively crediting Tesla as the actual inventor.

Here's son #2 on Tesla's lap in Niagara Falls, New York wearing a vintage 97 Rock t-shirt.

WGRQ/WGR-FM/WGRF has been a Rock station in Buffalo, New York since 1975 (except for a three year period in the mid-1980s.) They are also the flagship station for the Buffalo Bills Radio Network.
GO BILLS!!!

Cow Appreciation Day

Cow Appreciation Day is listed variously as July 10th, 15th or 25th. Today's C.A.D. seems to be spearheaded by the Chick-fil-A chain of chicken restaurants who are giving out free meals to anyone who enters any of their establishments dressed like a cow.

WCOW is a Country music station licensed to Sparta, Wisconsin. For many years they simulcast on their AM sister station which also had the WCOW calls (it's now WKLJ, an ESPN Radio affiliate.)

Cows are delicious. Appreciate them by eating their yummy bits today.

WMTT

WMTT is a Classic Rock station in Elmira/Corning, New York and licensed to Tioga, Pennsylvania. Anybody know what the meaning (if any) of "The Met" is?

Aliens Captured!

On this date back in 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field said they had recovered a crashed "flying disc" from a nearby ranch. Later that day a general at the base stated that the debris was actually from a weather balloon and not a flying saucer. The aliens and their spacecraft were supposedly then flown to Hangar 18 at Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) right here in Dayton, Ohio. The Roswell incident has kept 60 years of skeptics and conspiracy theorists busy with ideas of a massive cover-up.

KSFX is a Classic Hits station licensed to Roswell, New Mexico.

KVCI

KVCI was a Country music station licensed to Canton, Texas. In 2007 they became KRDH, playing a mixture of Classic Country with current artists that have a more traditional sound like George Strait and Randy Travis.

WBNQ

WBNQ (We're Bloomington Normal Quality) is a Contemporary Hit Music station licensed to Bloomington, Illinois. They began as an Oldies station in the 1970s using the automated Draper-Blore Olde Golde format and later the Drake-Chenault Solid Gold and XT-40 formats. They switched to CHR in the early 80s and remain so today.

WQCK

Yesterday we spent about 5 hours hiking various trails in and around Natural Bridge State Park in Kentucky. The trail we took leading to Natural Bridge gave us a bit of a workout because it was so humid. Before we knew it we were standing on a wide, flat rock that I didn't even realize was the Natural Bridge itself. You can't really appreciate it until you take another short hike and look at it from the other side.

92.7 The Bridge was a Contemporary Christian station from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They originally went on the air in 1981 playing Rock but switched to Country two years later. In 1986 they flipped to Contemporary Christian and in 2005 became one of over 400 K-Love simulcasters retaining their CCM format and switching calls to WBKL. WQCK was licensed to Clinton, Louisiana.

Happy 4th of July!

WWTC is a conservative Talk station licensed to Minneapolis, Minnesota and is one of that city's oldest, dating back to 1925. In the 1990s WWTC had a format aimed at children with a sticker that can be seen here.

Red River Radio Network

Took a nice, relaxing canoe trip down the Red River in eastern Kentucky today. We used a hybrid canoe/kayak with very comfortable lowbacked seats. Along the way we passed a gigantic, house-sized boulder that people were jumping off and into the river. I didn't bring my camera for fear that I'd lose it or get it wet if we tipped the boat but that never happened. In fact, I ended up pushing the canoe more than once after we bottomed out in the shallow river.

The Red River Radio Network is member supported and affiliated with National Public Radio. It consists of four stations and one translator:
KDAQ 89.9 FM - Shreveport, Lousiana
KLSA 90.7 FM - Alexandria, Louisiana
KBSA 90.9 FM - El Dorado, Arkansas
KLDN 88.9 FM - Lufkin, Texas
and
K214CE 90.7 FM - Grambling, Louisiana

There are multiple Red Rivers in the United States and the RRRN is referring to the one that forms the border between Texas and Oklahoma, flows briefly into Arkansas and then into Louisiana before heading into the Mississippi River.

Get Your Kicks

There are dozens of stations out there using "Kicks" "Kix" and "Kixx" as their branding, almost every one of them with a Country format. It might have something to do with the fact that "kick" is a four letter word starting with K which fits the parameters for call letters west of the Mississippi. Plus you can play with different call letter spellings to make it look and sound like "kicks" as evidenced by the first two stickers. The station that actually has KICK as its calls is a Country station (natch) from Palmyra, Missouri. Sadly, I don't have a decal from them.

KHKX - Odessa, Texas circa 2001.

KYYX - Minot, North Dakota.

WKWS - Charleston, West Virginia. They are now known as "96.1 The Wolf," still with a Country format but with some Southern Rock mixed in.

It's Canada Day, eh!

Canada Day marks the July 1st, 1867 joining of the British North American colonies of Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick and the Province of Canada (which was later divided into Ontario and Quebec.) This day also allows idiot Americans to add "eh" to the end of everything they say in order to help fulfill a secret wish that they were actually Canadian (or maybe that's just me.)

CBC Radio is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio division which operates three main networks. CBC Radio One is primarily news and information. CBC Radio 2 is music, arts and culture programming while CBC Radio 3 runs an Indie Rock format. There are also three French language divisions which run roughly the same type of programming as their English counterparts. Première Chaîne is news and information. Espace musique broadcasts music, arts and culture and Bande à part carries youth-oriented music programming.

While living in Celina, Ohio I managed to listen to the "CBC Stereo" (now CBC Radio 2) affiliate from Windsor, Ontario most Friday nights for "Brave New Waves." BNW exposed me to all kinds of great alternative music in the mid 80s and heavily influenced my musical tastes. It was quite a feat to pick up this FM station (look on a map) but I had a huge rooftop FM antenna at the time. If only I had airchecked some of those shows....