John Reeder died on October 10, 2006. For an accurate picture of what Johnny “Mack” Reeder meant to KBOA and the communities it served, look no further than the photographs on this web site. Johnny took almost every one of them and nothing could better chronicle his role in building the radio station.

John Reeder (known on the air as “Johnny Mack”) attended Bob Conner’s retirement party at KBOA and spoke with Jeff Wheeler about the first days at KBOA. This is a brief segment (90 sec) of that interview.

“I came to KBOA from Capitol Radio Engineering Institute in Washington, DC. I had worked at Blytheville previously in 1941, prior to the war, at the Blytheville Air Base as a technician during the war years and after the war was over went to school and came here directly out of electronic school. Bob Conner and I started in putting the station on the air. It took Conner, Ray Van and I about two months to get everything together. We three were the only employees at the time. Originally, (getting records) was a very big problem and I believe at one point we bought a stock of records from a juke box operator who had a bunch of old records he wasn’t using.

We started with live bands in the testing period. After midnight you could go on the air with a station that was about to be licensed and test. We’d have live bands who’d been out on a date playing for a dance or something and they’d come by the station and play for a couple of hours and we’d actually be on the air. We got letters from all over the place… New Zealand and all over. There weren’t as many stations on the air for one thing, and 830 kilocycles is a very good frequency for long distance propagation.”