By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
KFEQ might have featured farm markets from the beginning, but it also established itself as a music station from the start.
This is the fourth in our five-part series on the history of KFEQ.
John Scroggin recruited his wife, Artha, to play the piano and gathered local musicians from Nebraska and Kansas to play on KFEQ in Oak prior to records. KFEQ kept the tradition going in St. Joseph, employing between 35 and 40 entertainers, mostly musicians, a few for its soap operas.
Entertainers included The Bohemian Orchestra, the Prairie Serenaders, the West Siters, Kentucky Jess and His Gang, among others. There was the Little Jane Breakfast Food Team. KFEQ, in the early days, was called “The Hillbilly Station.”
Announcers included Dee D. Denver, Charles Niles, Rose Herzog, Harry Packard, Paul Roscoe, and Dward Moore.
Live entertainers would be featured on KFEQ until 1956 when the last of the live acts would leave the station.
Live would switch to records, music would continue to be featured.
Former Program Director Bob Orf came to KFEQ in 1975, retiring at the end of 2013.
“I think about playing music,” Orf recollects during an interview with KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “I think about 45 rpm records back in the day. We played a lot of music. We got a lot of results from that music. A lot of people listened to the station. I always think of the old days, the old times, and how good it was.”
Orf and his staff created the KFEQ play list, listening to country music, deciding what went on the air.
“We’d listen to anything that came in, any record we got; could be an independent label or could be a big label, RCA, Capitol, whatever it is, Decca Records,” Orf says. “We listened to the song and say, you know, it’s a good song, let’s play this song. Didn’t matter if it was a bigtime company or not.”
One of KFEQ’s former DJs, Bill Price, went by “The Roadmaster,” which came to him as he went to get into his 1950 Buick Roadmaster Special.
“I walked out the door and I saw that and it just went through my mind,” Price recalls in an interview with KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “I didn’t speak it, but it went through my mind, Roadmaster Special. And I said, hey, Roadmaster Special, that’s a good name for my show.”
Price worked at KFEQ from 1973 to 1996.
While KFEQ’s night pattern might not have been good for agriculture, Price used it to his benefit, talking with truckers up and down I-29 with the Figure 8 nighttime pattern covering a surprising distance.
“A lady that used to live in St. Joe called me periodically from Galveston, Texas. She said, ‘Hi, Roadmaster, I’m getting lonesome, home sick, I thought I’d call you and see if you would play a record for me.’”
Gallopin’ Gill, Galen Johnson, who worked for KFEQ from 1977 until 2014, credits Price with creating KFEQ’s Country sound.
“He interviewed a lot of famous artists and we all got to interview some of the great country acts,” Johnson tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “Stonewall Jackson stopped by, driving through, and I interviewed him. David Allan Coe stopped on his bus right in front of KFEQ and Bill Price took him to a motorcycle shop. Bob Orf and I once emceed a show in Atchison, Kansas with Jack Green, Jeannie Seely, Tommy Jennies, Hal Cochran, and some of the pickers from the He Haw TV show.”
Retired DJ Brother Brent Harmon remembers the call that led to him coming to KFEQ in 1977.
“I was amazed,” Harmon says. “I was working in a little town in Nebraska, Falls City. I had been there a couple of years and got a call from a guy I had went to college with at Northwest (Missouri State University) and said they’ve got an opening. I said, oh yeah, I’m going to go for that. It was the all-night show. I was thrilled.”
Harmon worked at Eagle St. Joseph from 1977 until retiring in 2022. Harmon worked at KFEQ from 1977 until 1999, then switched to become a mainstay on KFEQ’s sister radio station, Q-Country.
John “Flatbush” Christopher worked at KFEQ from 1980 to 1994 and says it was the people that made KFEQ special.
“KFEQ, I would say, is the best radio group that I have ever worked for,” Christopher tells us. “And it was because of our closeness, because of our chemistry, and there was a certain freedom allowed me that I’ve never experienced in any other radio outfit.”
Music along with farm and news programming created a following, but it was a change in ownership that provided stability.
Scroggin retained ownership when KFEQ moved from Oak to St. Joseph, selling 51% of his share in 1935 to Barton Pitts and Associates. A year later, Scroggin would sell his remaining shares to the St. Joseph News Press. Pitts bought out the newspaper in 1947 to become sole owner. Other owners came and went.
The Federal Communications Commission created a shakeup that eventually led to stable ownership of the radio station.
The FCC ruled a single person or entity could not own both the only radio station and the only television station in a market. KFEQ had flirted with a FM signal before dropping it to put KFEQ-TV on the air on September 27, 1953.
When the FCC forced the split of the television and radio station in 1969, Ross Beach and Bob Schmidt, acting as KAYS, Incorporated out of Hays, Kansas, bought KFEQ radio. They were the founders of Eagle Radio, which continues to own KFEQ.
Former General Manager Gene Millard says Eagle brought a new energy.
“What it is, we focus on radio,” Millard says. “We focused on who we are and where we are and what we can do that nobody else can do.”
KFEQ is still here, after 100 years, but the programming has changed, that tomorrow as we conclude our series on the radio station’s 100th birthday.