By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
KFEQ celebrates 100 years on the air this week.
To celebrate, we will run a series of stories on the rich history of the station each day this week.
But, what does it mean for a radio station to celebrate its 100th birthday?
“It is a remarkable achievement. In fact, I believe this is the first centennial that I’m aware of in radio stations that I know about, certainly here in the rural Midwest,” retired Kansas State media professor Steve Smethers of Manhattan says, who adds a misperception is that broadcasting started in the East and moved westward.
“And KFEQ was likely one of those radio stations that was put on as an experiment,” Smethers says. “It was probably put on with the idea that, gee, isn’t it fun to play with radio without any kind of an idea of what it was going to be used for.”
Smethers, who also taught at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville and knows KFEQ well, says that in 1923 there was no formula, no guidance for radio.
“KFEQ would have gone on at a time preceding all of the standards of local programming and broadcasting and that’s what makes, I think, your centennial so significant,” Smethers says.
Put this in perspective: KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was the first commercial radio station in the United States. It first hit the airwaves on November 2nd of 1920, broadcasting the Harding-Cox presidential election results. KFEQ would come on the air less than three years later.
Smethers says though KFEQ was born at a time of no rules or regulations, nevertheless radio stations sought to serve their communities.
“People would turn on the radio to hear information,” Smethers says. “There was no mandate that radio stations would have done news back when KFEQ was in the kind of the pre-Federal Radio Act. That didn’t happen until 1927.”
The Encyclopedia Britannica reports that by two years after that first broadcast by KDKA, the federal government would issue licenses to more than 500 radio stations. Those early years proved to be chaotic, unplanned, and unregulated, according to Britannica.
Retired Eagle St. Joseph General Manager, Gary Exline, says the fact that KFEQ turns 100 says a lot in and of itself.
“Well, it means it was one of the early players on the air, period,” Exline says. “It’s a 1920s radio station, right? There’s not a lot of those, let alone not a lot of those that are high-powered stations like KFEQ is.”
It might have power. It might broadcast to that mass audience. It’s the one-to-one connection that makes it special, according to Exline.
“It’s an amazing thing,” according to Exline. “And, you know, they say the more things change the more they stay the same and the great thing about radio, while it brags about reaching all these thousands and thousands of people, there are many, many cases and KFEQ certainly has those cases, where being the one-to-one friend to the listener is the most important thing.”
Eagle Communications Chairman Gary Shorman says KFEQ’s power, a 5,000 watt station located at the low end of the AM dial that covers northwest Missouri, northeast Kansas, southeast Nebraska, and southwest Iowa, often called the Midland Empire, attracted Eagle to add KFEQ to its radio stations in 1969.
“But, when KFEQ came on, it took that to a different level, because of the signal strength of KFEQ during the day,” according to Shorman.
Shorman remembers coming to St. Joseph to visit KFEQ.
“You’d walk up the steps of the station and take a look around and the big KFEQ sign that was there; it was an institution in St. Joe,” Shorman says.
But, KFEQ didn’t start in St. Joe – it actually started in a small town in Nebraska.
We’ll have that story when the series continues tomorrow.
