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In the years before rock and roll, radio was constructed in a very different way than it is today. American radio programming up through the late 1940’s and into the early 1950’s was built out of blocks. Radio stations would broadcast block segments of drama, mystery, soap opera, news, and music, both live and recorded. That so-called block programming stands in stark contrast to what emerged around 1950 and become known as formula radio programming.

In 1949 Todd Storz founded a company in Omaha. While visiting an Omaha bar, he reportedly noticed that jukebox selections would repeatedly be selected again and again. Deciding that since most jukeboxes of that time accommodated 40 single-play records, Storz instituted “Top 40 radio.” The City of New Orleans also was home to an early adopter of this format in the early 1950s, WTIX.

With Storz in that Omaha bar on that fabled night was Bill Stewart, whose recalled how he and Storz both noticed bar patrons kept selecting the same songs over and over on the jukebox. While Storz is credited with being “the father of Top 40 radio,” Gordon McLendon’s chain of radio stations in the early 1950s became nationally prominent because of using a formulated mixture of music, news, and spirited station promotion. In 1953 McLendon’s Dallas, Texas flagship station, KLIF-AM, became the highest rated metropolitan radio station in the United States through the use of McLendon’s radio format. All programming formats since the 1950’s owe a great deal to McLendon, who not only pushed the envelope of formula radio, he went on to pioneer all-news radio, which was the essential first step toward Ted Turner’s all-news television, CNN.

Ironically, why McLendon and others of the 1950’s had to pioneer at all is because of television. When radio broadcasters noticed their listeners forsaking radio dramas, big band shows, and so forth, for television programming, there came about an almost immediate sense of urgency to do something to save radio. The radio broadcasters of that time could not sit idly by as their vast financial investments were challenged by the emerging medium of television.

Others built upon the premise of formula radio, notably Lee Bartell, who together with his brothers, was a powerful influence at that same time. Bartell demonstrated how formula radio programming required “psychological aids” including specific “words and phrases--even predetermined inflections” by on-air talent.

Once the popularity of rock and roll music formats on the radio in the United States had been established in the 1950s, many stations around the nation chose one variation or another in attempt to win loyal audiences. AM stations using the formula radio approach to rock and roll blossomed in many markets in the early 1960s, such as WABC (New York City), KIMN (Denver), and KFWB (Los Angeles), just to name three. Bill Gavin, the legendary San Francisco-based syndicated radio and music industry columnist, told me that it was the need to keep formula radio “fresh” that prompted the initial programming policies of Bill Drake and Gene Chenault:

“The thing was that the Top 40 concept was beginning to meet competition when the opposition was beginning to sharpen in the middle 1960’s. Drake sensed the need to reform it and to tight up the Top 40 operations which had just been drifting along the path that McLendon and Storz had blazed ten or fifteen years earlier.”

Bill Drake, who previously had been on the air at WAKE in Atlanta, was working as program director in San Francisco at KYA-AM when Gene Chenault tried unsuccessfully to contact him. “Gene had been trying to get in touch with me for a year at KYA, but I don’t take calls from people I don’t know,” Drake said. “I didn’t know him, so I never talked to him.”

The pair finally met through mutual friends. Drake explained how the partnership which created the famous hyphenated name got started:

“He liked the things I’d been doing and he wanted me to do something with his station [KYNO in Fresno, California.] I said I could ‘dig it’ but no station in a market that small could afford to pay me what I’d have to have. He said, ‘Why don’t we have two stations? That way it could be done.’ We basically started out there...KYNO in Fresno and KSTN in Stockton, California. But he didn’t own KSTN.”

Drake and Chenault were selected by RKO to attempt to pull KHJ radio in Los Angeles out of its financial slump in 1965. When they succeeded in doing just that with a format named “Boss Radio,” they changed the way rock and roll radio stations were programmed as other stations in the late 1960s and early 1970s attempted to emulate what had succeeded so well in Los Angeles.

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