In the summer months, you came to town after a day of irrigating, stacking hay, mowing lawns, building fence, or chasing cows. You drove in during the late afternoon with the windows down, with an 8-track tape of your favorite group screeching and dragging in a player you installed yourself under the center dash.
A few laps up and down the street dragging main, waving and honking at friends with a stop at a local hangout, or more likely the A&W that once dotted every town from Lander to Powell. Just after sunset, you tuned it in on your AM radio. It was filled with static. You missed a few words from the DJ, and the song faded in and out until it was dark. Then the call letters broke the silence in sing-song fashion, “K O M A… Oklahoma City…”
At home on weeknights, a generation waited patiently for the DJ to stop talking before hitting the play and record button on their portable cassette player. It was long before the days of CDs, MP3s, XM, or even FM across most of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West.
“I used to sit with my cassette recorder getting all that music,” Karla Borders wrote in a social media post.
Teenagers had one option that came onto their radio dial every night, soon after the sun dropped behind the western horizon. Two generations, that stretched from 1958 to 1980, made KOMA 1520 not just the most popular AM radio station that ever existed but an icon.
This icon is an anchor to a generation. Liberal, conservative, rich, poor, or any other label you can pigeonhole someone into, it doesn’t matter. Everyone listened to KOMA in the western half of the United States into the southern provinces of Canada.
What was the magic of KOMA?
It’s simple, it was the music. You couldn’t find it anywhere else. Local radio, with news, weather, and playlists carefully crafted to meet advertisers’ demands, couldn’t compete with a station that played music, no news, no weather, just the best in Top 40 Rock and Roll.
Someone like Karla recorded KOMA on a cassette recorder back in 1974. Here is a taste of what once was.
“My memories of the radio station were that on those hot, hot summer nights on the third floor of our farmhouse, when I was trying to go to sleep. I could get KOMA on my transistor radio, and I listened to it for hours. My favorite song was ‘Day Dream Believer,’ and I’m a homecoming queen or something like that, I really don’t know the name of it, but I love that song and they played it almost every night,” Linda Valenti, who grew up between Kinnear and Pavillion said. “ I also remember we could only get it at night time. When Linda Jaques got her car, she and I would go to town and drag main, and of course, we always had that radio playing that station, as all we had was a.m. radio anyway. We often were singing along of course we thought we were great singers.”
Didn’t everyone?
KOMA began as low-powered KFJF in Oklahoma City in July 1923, one of the first radio stations in the state.
The National Radio Manufacturing Company in Oklahoma City owned the station. It was difficult to sell radios if you didn’t have a station to tune into, so the company created its own station. It was a model copied for over a century, with a modern equivalent to Disney figurines and toys sold in Happy Meals at McDonald’s.
In 1932, Dudley Shaw, the man behind the National Radio Manufacturing Company, retired and sold the station. The call letters changed from KFJF to KOMA. Call letters have a meaning to the owner and must be approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). K-O-M-A was registered as Oklahoma’s Magazine of the Air. Not too exciting.
They were a CBS affiliate, broadcasting big band music in the 1930s and 40s, and then shifted to popular comedies and dramas. Gunsmoke, the Jack Benny Show and Suspense were fan favorites in what was known as the “Golden Age of Radio.”
The FCC licenses frequencies. They don’t allow the same frequency within a specific range of another station based on broadcast power.
KOMA broadcast at KFJF’s original frequency of 1190 until March 1941, when it moved to 1520.
They paid extra for “Clear Channel” status, meaning they could broadcast at the maximum power without interference from other stations and reach listeners thousands of miles away, especially after dark.
In 1947, KOMA went all in, broadcasting at 50,000 watts, the highest allowable in the United States.
In May 1958, magic began. KOMA changed from traditional entertainment radio to the American top 40 market. The station’s popularity spread across the prairie and into the far reaches of the west and northwest like a proverbial range fire.
KOMA had competition in the 60s and early 70s from across the border in Mexico.
American radio station call signs east of the Mississippi begin with a W, those west of the big river, a K. The station battling KOMA for domination in the youth market had an X, meaning it was from Mexico.
XERF, 1570 AM broadcasting from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, about a dozen miles south of Del Rio, Texas, had the top radio personality of the rock and roll era in Wolfman Jack.
Robert Weston Smith was Wolfman Jack. His beard and pompadour hairstyle resembled the Wolfman of horror movie fame. His gravely voice was iconic, as was his humor. The man was a hit.
If you watched the classic tribute film to the 1960s, ‘American Graffiti,’ the Wolfman’s dialogue brings the era back to life.
XERF was a “blaster station.” These were 150,000-to-250,000-watt stations set up along the border with the United States. They were operated out of southern Texas. XERF packed 150,000 watts, three times the legal limit in the USA.
Though they were over 500 miles south of Oklahoma City, the powerful signal of 1570 am had a farther reach than KOMA could muster.
It didn’t matter. XERF had its fans, and the Wolfman was incredibly popular, but KOMA was “THE STATION” for the generations that grew up from 1958 to 1980.
KOMA had its own popular DJs, including Charlie Tuna, J. Michael Wilson, Don McGregor, and the hilarious Johnny Dark, who accompanied the best music of the 1960s and 70s.
Teenagers waited for the “KOMA Kissing Tone” to sound as they drove around. When the tone hit, the DJ told you it was time to kiss your partner. Many teenage boys and girls smooched a bit on command from their favorite radio station.
AM signals, in certain atmospheric conditions, create a phenomenon known as skywave propagation. When conditions were right, it allowed soldiers in Vietnam to listen to KOMA. It was a taste of home and greatly appreciated by Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen locked in combat in that horrible war.
KOMA scored a coup d’état when Wolfman Jack was syndicated. The Wolfman signed with over 2,000 stations across the USA; KOMA was one of them.
“Rusty Havens and I just spoke about KOMA a day or so back. He and I didn’t meet until the early 80’s but we both remember listening on transistor radios by our beds, he in Shoshoni and me in Riverton, as we drifted off to sleep,” Linda Kobel Moench said. “I can’t count the times my dad would call downstairs to my bedroom, ‘Linda, turn that radio off and get to sleep!’ I had it on so low, I know he couldn’t hear it upstairs, but he knew that I hadn’t turned it off. And, of course, we listened on our car radios at night while dragging main, even when there was so much static that the words and music were almost obliterated. I think everyone l knew of similar age listened to KOMA in the 60’s. Wolf-Man Jack was my favorite DJ.”
In Lander, kids dragged the main from the Dairyland Drive In next to the original high school to the top of the hill where the road branched to either Riverton or South Pass.
In Riverton, the Dash In Drive-In and accompanying West Drive-In movie theater marked the west end of the loop. The owners of the Dash In put in a convenient drive-through lane that paralleled Main Street so the kids could turn around easily. It made it just as easy to stop.
On the other end of Main Street, kids could take a right on Federal, then loop around City Park and head back up the hill, or turn left, swing by the Covered Wagon, and turn around there.
The Dash In, A&W, Arctic Circle, and Covered Wagon all did great business with teenagers from around Fremont County coming to town just to drag main. As they drove, sometimes for hours on end, they listened to KOMA.
“I racked up 200+ miles in the family car one night, just dragging main. We ran from the Dash to Chopping’s and back. Dad was furious,” Mike Wingert commented on a social media post.
The sentiment was the same everywhere the powerful signal reached.
In Powell, the kids drove an endless “L” on Friday and Saturday nights. They took Highway 114 East, turned left on Main to Buttons Pool Hall, and turned around.
Casper had epic weekend drives either up Second Street to downtown or out on CY Avenue.
Even tiny Shoshoni had kids dragging Main. Sometimes teenagers from Thermopolis, Riverton, or Pavillion met in Shoshoni, dragged Main, stopped for a malt at the Yellowstone Drug, had a burger at the A&W, or stopped for a while and went bowling.
It was popular in New Mexico.
“We used to listen to KOMA also while cruising around town. It was the only station we got in the very small town I grew up in,” Peter Bilt wrote. “We couldn’t even get any of the stations out of Clovis. To watch TV, the antenna had to be about 50 feet in the air.”
Charles Faulker, who moved from West Texas to California, took KOMA with him.
“In my teens (late 50s), I could get KOMA all the way down Route 66 to my relatives in California,” he said.
Colorado and Wyoming both had strong signals after dark emanating from the big tower that dominated the Oklahoma City skyline.
“I remember cruising Main with my older sisters in Las Animas, Colorado. Snowflakes were drifting down, and KOMA was on the radio,” Kathy Cubmie said.
In Fremont County in the 1970s, you could get KOVE from Lander, KVOW from Riverton, KTHE from Thermopolis, or KTWO, another clear channel 50,000-watt station from Casper.
Kids didn’t listen to them.
In the early 70s, KVOW began broadcasting “easy/light” rock, but it didn’t have the punch of KOMA.
Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Doors, Linda Ronstadt, Tommy James and Shondells, and all the glorious Motown tunes by the 4 Tops, Temptations, Supremes, and Marvin Gaye all came after the sky went dark.
A fan from Colorado wrote this:
“In the sixties, we listened to KOMA from Eastern Colorado. I didn’t start coming in until after sundown, but we’d groove on it all night. It didn’t have weather or news, just music. Call in and request your favorite. When the song ‘I’m Your Handyman’ by Jimmie Jones was released in 1960, KOMA played it non-stop for 24 hours because of the opening line. The singer was saying ‘A-coma, coma, coma, coma’ in the opening. So, it sounded like he was promoting KOMA! Crazy stuff!”
More memories came from teenagers in the 70s.
“It was the best radio station ever. I grew up with KOMA. The best and the most beautiful things cannot be seen or touched. They must be felt with the heart,” Jeannie St. John Portlock said.
Tammy Schuster West grew up working at the A&W that her parents owned on West Main. She remembers the magic of KOMA as well.
“KOMA Oklahoma City was the only rock radio station we could get and then it didn’t come in good until after dark,” she said.
In isolated Lusk on the eastern edge of Wyoming near the Nebraska border, the teenagers of the 70s dragged the short mile-long main street from north to south.
“We listened to KOMA, it was the only station with good music,” Susan Hahn said.
Disco took over the classic rock of 1965 to 1973, beginning with what many consider to be the first Disco song to reach #1 on the charts, The Four Seasons’ ‘Oh What a Night.’
Ironically, it was a tribute to the music of the 60s.
KOMA began to lose its listener base, yet millions of fans remained.
In September 1980, they made one of the worst marketing decisions in broadcast radio history, moving the format to contemporary country music.
Listeners left in droves, market revenue plummeted, and the station that once said, “Yours truly, KOMA,” now said it for good as the station moved to an adult format audience in 1985.
That too, didn’t sell. Gone were the days of millions of listeners, iconic DJs, and contracts with music studios begging management to play their latest creations.
In 1992, the oldies format returned with KOMA switching to 92.5 FM, but FM has only a narrow line of sight audience, and simulcasting didn’t produce what they expected. They’d lost their audience and largely their livelihood with the switch to country 12 years before.
In 2004, the AM 1520 channel switched to KOKC and entered the talk radio/news market. Not a teenager in America bothered to listen.
A tornado destroyed two KOKC transmitting towers on March 25, 2015. Revenue was so limited that it took nine years to rebuild the 50,000-watt towers.
You can still hear, ‘Oklahoma’s Greatest Hits,” an oldies station on their FM affiliate.
That might work for aging teenagers living within 50 miles of Oklahoma City, but the audience driving 1965 Ford Galaxies, 68’ Camaros, 62’ Novas or 64’ Ford pickups across the vastness of the west won’t get the signal.
Time has aged those teenagers to social security status, and the “Soundtrack of a Generation” doesn’t exist anymore, thanks to individual playlists created by each teenager and played only through ear buds or head phones. There isn’t shared music as there once was.
Just one more time, “KOMA…Oklahoma City!!”