Media

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Entry Category: Media - Starting with K

KAAY

KAAY (AM 1090) has been one of Arkansas’s most influential radio stations since it came into being on September 3, 1962. The station incorporated a successful mixed format of music, religion, farm reports, and news that was innovative for the time. Shortly after it had come on the air, KAAY was also utilized by the U.S. government to broadcast propaganda to Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1966, KAAY also successfully brought a new musical format to mid-America on the program Beaker Street. KAAY was born out of KTHS, the state’s first 50,000-watt AM broadcast station. KTHS (which stood for “Kum To Hot Springs”) officially came on the air in 1924 and was granted its new increased-power operating privileges …

KABF

The KABF radio station (FM 88.3) in Little Rock (Pulaski County) began broadcasting an eclectic mix of music, news, and community driven content in 1984. “The Voice of the People” has exposed Arkansans to genres rarely heard on commercial radio, given local artists radio airplay, and provided organizations and citizens with a means to reach a wide audience with their messages. The broadcast signal carries to most of Arkansas’s seventy-five counties, as well as some neighboring states, and reaches an estimated 50,000 listeners every week. KABF is one of only twelve non-commercial radio stations in the United States with the maximum allowed signal of 100,000 watts. KABF was conceived as a project of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now …

KAIT

KAIT is a regional television station licensed in Jonesboro (Craighead County). Its broadcast area covers northeastern Arkansas and southeastern Missouri. The station’s studios are located in the northern section of Jonesboro, with a transmitter in Egypt (Craighead County). KAIT calls itself “Virtual and VHF digital channel 8, an ABC/NBC/CW+-affiliated television station.”  KAIT began on July 15, 1963, as a venture of George Hernreich, a businessman from Fort Smith (Sebastian County) who founded the first television stations in both Fort Smith and Jonesboro. At first, KAIT was an independent station, but in 1965, it became affiliated with the ABC-TV nationwide television network. KAIT began carrying programming from the NBC television network in 2015, and in 2018, KAIT also brought programming from …

KASU [Radio Station]

KASU, broadcasting at 91.9 FM, is a public radio station that was licensed in 1957 to Arkansas State University (ASU) in Jonesboro (Craighead County). Transmitting at 100,000 watts, the station features a format consisting primarily of music, news, talk, sports, and public affairs. As a source of information from the Emergency Alert System, it broadcasts messages regarding severe weather. Serving northeastern Arkansas, southeastern Missouri, and western Tennessee, KASU is the oldest non-commercial radio station in Arkansas. The call sign “KASU” reflects the university where it is housed. When Dr. Carl Reng became president of what was then Arkansas State College (ASC) in 1951, one of his priorities was to establish an on-campus radio station. Since its inception, the mission of …

KATV Tower

The KATV tower was a 2,000-foot-tall (609.6 meters) television antenna that stood just north of Redfield (Jefferson County), about one-quarter mile east of Interstate 530. Before its collapse in 2008, the tower ranked among the tallest manmade structures in the world and stood as a prominent local landmark, marking the approximate halfway point for drivers traveling between Little Rock (Pulaski County) and Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). Upon its completion on the late summer of 1965, the KATV tower was the third-tallest manmade structure in the world, surpassed only by the KVLY-TV and KXJB-TV television masts in North Dakota. By 2008, it shared the rank of fifth-tallest manmade structure in the world, as it was the first of many other 2,000-foot-tall …

KBTA

KBTA-AM is a radio station in Batesville (Independence County) broadcasting a sports radio format. The station is owned by WRD Entertainment and features programming from ABC Radio and CBS Sports Radio. KBTA (1340 AM) was Batesville’s first radio station. Located on the banks of the White River near Riverside Park, the station was launched as a joint venture by Batesville mayor Jared Trevathan, Jim F. Higginbottom of Oklahoma Tire and Supply, and Albert West of Arkansas Power and Light (AP&L). The first broadcast took place on June 30, 1950, and was a gala event. Higginbottom, who was president and general manager of the station, eventually bought out his two partners to become sole owner of the station. He received the …

KBTM [Radio Station]

KBTM was among Arkansas’s early radio stations, with the AM frequency (1230) officially hitting the air in Paragould (Greene County) in March 1930, though the family that operated it had begun making periodic broadcasts six years earlier. The station proved to be extremely popular and, within a few years, moved to the larger city of Jonesboro (Craighead County). In 1947, an FM sister station (101.9) was put on the air with the same call letters, making it what is believed to be the first licensed FM station in the state. Generations of broadcasting students at Arkansas State University (ASU) received their first professional experience at the stations, with many going on to have long careers in the industry. The birth …

Kearney, Janis

Janis Kearney was the publisher of the historic Arkansas State Press and later served as presidential diarist to U.S. president Bill Clinton from 1995 to 2001, the first such appointment in presidential history. After leaving Washington DC, she wrote several books and founded a publishing company. Janis Faye Kearney was born on September 29, 1953, in the small rural town of Gould (Lincoln County). She was the fourteenth of nineteen children born to sharecropper Thomas James Kearney and homemaker Ethel Curry Kearney, who also worked in the fields. By the time she was nine years old, Kearney was helping to care for her younger brothers and sisters as well as cooking for the large family. She spent evenings learning to …

Kennedy, Jon

Jon Kennedy served as a political cartoonist for the Arkansas Democrat from 1941 to 1943 and again from 1946 to 1988, totaling nearly fifty years, one of the longest employments with a single newspaper in the nation. Kennedy was Arkansas’s first full-time professional newspaper artist, and his cartoons highlighted Arkansas and world topics, won numerous awards, and were featured in national newspapers including the New York Times. Jon Kennedy was born on August 19, 1918, in Springfield, Missouri, to Brownlow Kennedy, who was a telegraph operator for the railroad, and Ida Kennedy, who was a homemaker. At age seventeen, and while still in high school, he began working as an artist for the Springfield Leader Press, where he was employed …

Kettles in the Ozarks, The

The Kettles in the Ozarks (1956), directed by Charles Lamont, was the ninth in a series of ten comedies made by Universal International Pictures. The characters of Ma and Pa Kettle were introduced in supporting roles in The Egg and I (1947), starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. Marjorie Main, as Ma Kettle, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for The Egg and I, and the first feature starring the Kettles, Ma and Pa Kettle, followed in 1949. The Kettle series began after the years 1937–1945, which Anthony Harkins in his book Hillbilly identifies as the period of “the hillbilly stereotype at high tide.” During that time, Judy Canova and the Weaver Brothers and Elviry made films …

KFSM-TV

The second Arkansas television station to join the airwaves, KFSM-TV signed on in 1953 with a signal limited to twenty-five miles. In the twenty-first century, the state’s oldest still-operating TV broadcaster reaches a half million viewers spread across nine counties in northwestern Arkansas, the Arkansas River Valley, and eastern Oklahoma. Media mogul Donald W. Reynolds established KFSA-TV (with the call letters standing for Know Fort Smith, Arkansas) in 1952 to complement his Fort Smith (Sebastian County) newspapers and radio station. Broadcasting on UHF channel 22, KFSA-TV signed on at 4:22 p.m. on July 19, 1953. The first broadcast was a ceremony at the station celebrating the station’s debut. The receptionist logged 200 phone calls from viewers during the initial broadcast, …

King Biscuit Time

In November 1941, KFFA, 1360 AM, the first local radio station in Helena (Phillips County), went on the air. Soon after its first broadcast, blues musicians Robert Lockwood Jr. and Sonny Boy Williamson approached owner Sam Anderson with a proposal to air a local blues radio show. Anderson liked the idea, but he knew the show would have to have a sponsor. He directed Lockwood and Williamson to Max Moore, the owner of Interstate Grocery Company, as a possible sponsor. Moore, who recognized the possibilities of marketing to African Americans, agreed to sponsor the show if the musicians would endorse his product. With a corporate sponsor, the King Biscuit Time radio program went on the air on November 21, 1941. …

King, Bertha Hale

aka: Bertha Hale White
Bertha Hale King was a socialist activist in the first part of the twentieth century. Although born in Illinois, she received most of her early education in Arkansas before leaving the state to serve as a high-ranking official in the national Socialist Party. Bertha Hale was born in Nashville, Illinois, in 1878. Her father was a farmer, but little else is known about her parents. She attended primary school in Golden City, Missouri, just over the state line from Illinois. The family then moved to Arkansas. Following graduation from high school in Fort Smith (Sebastian County), she attended Buckner College, a small Baptist school just a few miles north of Huntington (Sebastian County). In preparation for a teaching career, she …

KMJX [Radio Station]

aka: Magic 105
aka: The Wolf 105.1
KMJX is one of Arkansas’s longest-running radio stations. KMJX started its life as KKLF-FM in Conway (Faulkner County). From August 1980 until February 2008, KMJX was known as “Magic 105,” an independent classic rock station with popular DJs such as Tom Wood, “The Outlaw” Tommy Smith, Sandy O’Connor, Sharpe Dunaway, David Allen Ross, Danny Joe Crofford, Jeff Allen, Carole Kramer, Casey Jones, Trent “Treetop” Tyler, and Clyde Clifford. In February 2008, KMJX changed its format from “Arkansas’s classic rock,” under Magic 105, to “All Things Country,” as The Wolf 105.1 FM. In 1973, radiomen Richard “Dick” Booth and Gordon Heiges were fired from a station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A week later, Heiges suggested that he and Booth start their own …

KOKY

Called the “Greater Little Rock Ebony Station” at its inception in 1956, KOKY was the first radio station in Arkansas to be staffed by African Americans and to feature programming directed toward a black audience. Founded in Little Rock (Pulaski County), the station has featured on-air talent like Leo “Jocko” Carter and Al Bell. John M. McLendon was a thirty-three-year-old broadcaster from Jackson, Mississippi, who owned three radio stations in Mississippi, including WOKJ in Jackson; like KOKY, WOKJ’s target audience was African Americans. During the summer of 1956, McLendon was granted a license by the Federal Communications Commission to operate a station in Little Rock called “Ebony Radio” until call letters could be established. At 9:00 a.m., October 8, 1956, …

KTHS

KTHS, which became KAAY in 1962, is thought to be Arkansas’s third-oldest continuously licensed broadcast radio station. The station survived the turbulent years of broadcasting’s infancy, government regulations, and changes in location and frequencies to become Arkansas’s first 50,000-watt clear-channel station. KTHS was also known for its role in launching the career of the comedy team Lum and Abner. Radio station KTHS was built in 1924 on the upper floor of the new Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs (Garland County). Facilities included studios and ballrooms wired for broadcast. Two steel towers were installed on the roof between the hotel building’s towers, one 150 feet tall, the other 125 feet, to support the transmitting antenna. Test broadcasts began on December 11, …

KUAF

KUAF began broadcasting as a ten-watt station in January 1973 from a renovated clapboard house on Duncan Street in Fayetteville (Washington County). Owned by the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville, the station began as a student-run operation with a staff of twenty-five students and a faculty advisor, Dennis O’Neal, from the Department of Journalism. The station served as a training ground for students. Planning for the station began the year before its debut. The initial finances were provided by the Associated Student Government and Student Services Allocations. A transmitter was installed on the top of Yocum Hall, and a survey was conducted during registration in fall 1972 to determine what type of music the students most preferred. The most …

KUOA

Radio station KUOA started at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) and later belonged to John Brown University (JBU) in Siloam Springs (Benton County). These schools used the station to broadcast programs such as educational talks, religious programs, music, local information, and sports. In the twenty-first century, KUOA is an all-sports station nicknamed “Hog Sportsradio.” It is generally considered to be the oldest radio station in Arkansas that is still broadcasting. According to Ray Poindexter in his book Arkansas Airwaves, the UA Department of Engineering began experiments with a wireless telegraph in 1897 and had a wireless station in 1916 licensed with the call letters 5YM. A license for the school’s first commercial AM radio station, KFMQ, …

KWEM

The landscape of American music was on the brink of change when KWEM began its first broadcast on February 23, 1947. The KXLR-Razorback Network brought its new station and a unique listening experience to West Memphis (Crittenden County), featuring local musicians who played live on the air. The success of live broadcasts on KFFA in nearby Helena (Phillips County) inspired KWEM to incorporate a “pay-to-play” revenue model, in which the opportunity to perform live on its daytime broadcasts was available to anyone able to secure a sponsor or pay a $15 fee. For emerging artists, appearances on KWEM provided exposure within the vibrant West Memphis music scene and ignited the rise to greatness for numerous musical legends, including Ike Turner, …