Bud Kennedy
Thursday, Mar. 8, 2001
Ghost of radio past is on the air
Weekend AM radio is all pitches -- either baseball or sales.
AM radio is the outpost of cures for the sick, treatments for
your bug-infested azaleas and home loans for the hopelessly
credit-impaired.
So you can imagine my surprise last Saturday, when I went driving
near Lake Texoma and tried to tune in a station that wasn't
selling Body Solutions.
Instead, I wound up tuning back in time. It was an AM radio
version of the Twilight Zone.
First, I heard a radio commercial for Monnigs Department Store:
"Shop our five handy area locations."
Monnigs? What area locations? That was my mother's
favorite department store, but it's been gone 12 years.
Then an oldies jock named Bobbin' Bob Allen played an Aretha
song. Fine, I thought. Some small-town station.
Then he told me it was 78 degrees "in the All-America
City," and promised news headlines coming up with Roy Eaton.
Wait. Roy Eaton owns a newspaper in Decatur, He hasn't anchored
radio or TV news since -- `1973.'
I conducted a quick check. The car radio was set to 1500 AM. As
far as I could tell, the year was still 2001, unless I drove
through a time warp somewhere around the lake, maybe between
Pottsboro and Fink.
Yet the radio was tuned to 1960s Fort Worth.
I almost spun out when Bobbin' Bob said, "You're tuned to
the big one -- KXOL."
Maybe you've read about all the radio reunions lately. The old
guard from Fort Worth rock 'n' roll giant KFJZ got together to
reconstruct their 1970s memories.
The name of Dallas' KLIF -- the original at 1190 AM, not today's
generic talk-show rant soapbox -- holds a revered position in
radio history. Less remembered is KXOL, the upstart challenger
that was once the home of disc jockey George Carlin and news
anchor Bob Schieffer, broadcasting from the same Fort Worth
Cultural District studios that gave the world the hit songs Hey!
Baby and Hey Paula.
Bobbin' Bob finally explained the extended 1960s flashback. Now,
Allen owns and hosts on KJIM/1500 AM, a Sherman-area station. For
three nights last week, he played taped shows from 1960s KXOL,
new gifts from the collection of John Lewis Puff of Keller.
Puff, 35, once a teen-age KXOL country disc jockey [John Lewis],
is reviving the station for Internet eternity at a new Web
tribute site, www.KXOL1360.com.
"I don't think there's another radio station in this area
that produced more talent than KXOL," he said by phone
yesterday from his job at a Dallas communications company.
"It's a piece of radio history. The response so far has been
overwhelming. People from all over have written about how much
they remember Fort Worth and KXOL."
Carlin perfected his "hippy-dippy weatherman" jokes on
KXOL in the early 1960s, and late nights at The Cellar nightclub.
In an age when Dallas AM radio signals were weak at night, Fort
Worth and Arlington teen-agers grew up listening to rock on KFJZ
and KXOL. KXOL gave up rock for country music in 1976, and gave
up in 1985. The station is now Radio Unica, KAHZ/1360 AM; the FM
side was sold off to become KPLX/99.5 FM, "The Wolf."
Some radio historians say KXOL was the nation's first rock
station to choose certain songs for a set station
"playlist."
"It was a classic '60s station," Allen said by phone
from KJIM, between Sherman and Denison. He spun records at KXOL
from 1962 to 1968, including the day President Kennedy was killed
in Dallas. The station's "mobile unit" reporter Bruce
Neal was riding in the motorcade.
The tapes he played last week include a Neal mobile news report
from Fort Worth City Hall, along with commercials for long-gone
Dub Shaw Ford, Manor Bread and OJ's Beauty Lotion.
"I couldn't believe any KXOL tapes still existed,"
Allen said. "So I just divided them up and put them on the
air.
"The audience up here liked them. I never dreamed that
somebody from Fort Worth might be passing through and hear
them."
We're even.
I never dreamed I'd pick up decent AM radio on a Saturday
afternoon between Pottsboro and Fink.
Bud Kennedy's column appears
Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
(817) 390-7538
budk@star-telegram.com