A detailed account of the events leading up to the station going on the air (excerpts below).

Congressman Jones died in 1981 so the interview above had to have been recorded prior to that date. My best guess would be in conjunction with the station’s 30th anniversary in 1977. The precise date of the interview by Jeff Wheeler is unknown.

“It was in the summer and early fall of 1945 when a committee from the Chamber of Commerce was meeting one night to discuss various projects to help promote Kennett and Dunklin County. I had been making some inquiries throughout the country and reading up on what it would take to get a radio station here in Kennett.

Our original application was for a 250 watt daylight station and there were three different applications for the same frequency we were applying for. The next thing I knew I had word from the FCC that they had changed our application to a clear channel station at 830 kilocycles. We came up with a 1,000 watt station, daytime only and there was only one other station that had that same frequency and that was WCCO (Minneapolis), which was a monitoring station for the Columbia Broadcasting Service.

No one here in Kennett who had had any actual experience with radio and we begun talking it up among the members of the Chamber of Commerce to see if there was enough interest to get enough capital to put in a station. At that time it appeared that it was going to take at least fifty thousand dollars ($50,000) to put in a radio station and we found later that it cost a little more than that.

We advertised in the paper that anyone could apply for stock in this new station. We wound up with about thirty members of the Chamber of Commerce who had agreed to put in stock. But everybody in Kennett at that time had an opportunity to file an application if they would like to become a stockholder in this thing. I arranged to buy the stock from several of those original subscribers. We finally wound up with about thirty-two (32) people who felt that they would like to go ahead and make this thing go.

One of the first people employed was Ray Van Hooser who had worked at Blytheville, Arkansas, and who had decided that he would like to get in with this new station starting. He recommended Bob Conner as an engineer. Johnny Mack Reeder came along with Bob Conner as an assistant engineer and chief announcer.”

(The original studios were) two old army barracks from the old Malden Air Base. We put the pieces of the barracks together and came up with a four-winged wooden building so poorly constructed that when the wind would blow the sand would come between the cracks in that building and we actually had to shovel the sand out of that building at the night.

We also got a big boost with the Cardinal baseball games but we couldn’t be on the air at night. So what we would amplify the signal that came in over the telephone lines and “broadcast” the games to more than a thousand people gathered in front of the station on the nights the Cardinals were playing. We put Kennett on the map that year and then the next year the FM permitted us to carry the ball games at night.

There were a number of groups that would come in and perform live. We would give them the (air)time and they had the privilege of announcing their personal appearances at other stations. We were doing well enough and appreciated the work that they were doing, so I think this was the first country station that actually started paying the performers a small fee to take care of some of their expenses.

We used to meet at the Palace Café and people would come in for coffee early in the morning and Old Camp Meetin’ Time would be on. Then we’d follow up with some classical music and you could almost hear the radios being turned off because they just didn’t want that kind of music. We could take our polls down at the Palace Café and get a pretty good idea of what type of music they wanted.”