By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
KFEQ Radio adapted over the past 100 years, always striving to inform its audience and entertain as well.
This is the final segment of our five-part series
No longer a music station, KFEQ now offers agricultural, news, talk, and sports programming.
Former News Director Barry Birr continues to host the KFEQ Hotline even in retirement, a program he started in 1992, after KFEQ became a Rush Limbaugh affiliate.
“That’s a national program,” Birr tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post in an interview. “What if we had a local program that addressed issues in the news and took calls?”
Never did the Hotline format prove its worth more than during the 2007 ice storm, a storm so severe it knocked other broadcasters off the air for days.
“For quite a while we were the only broadcast facility that was operating,” Birr says.
Soon after the storm created widespread power outages throughout the St. Joseph area, it became apparent to Birr and others that KFEQ needed to expand the Hotline, take calls, and serve the community more directly.
“This became a kind of place where ideas were exchanged,” Birr says. “People would share information about, well you can get water here; different things at different places. And here’s what it’s like in my neighborhood.”
Former General Manager Gene Millard says KFEQ stepped up to serve its community in a very personal way.
“People didn’t have power. The ice storm knocked down all the power,” Millard tells us. “But we had a generator that kept us on the air. And it was people calling in, saying I’ve got power now, no I don’t have power now. Everybody giving their personal reports. And that went on all night long. I mean, that was a service that nobody else could perform except this radio station; couldn’t be done.”
KFEQ kept operating, powered by a generator and even those without power could tune in with battery operated radios.
Retired Eagle St. Joseph General Manager Gary Exline remembers it well.
“We were it. A battery radio was all people had for communication,” Exline tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “So, we thought it was our job to be the clearinghouse for KCP&L at that time, because the number one question everyone wanted to know was when’s my power coming back on?”
It wasn’t the first disaster that proved the value of the KFEQ Hotline and its news department.
Birr remembers well the 1993 Flood when the Missouri River swelled to new heights.
“We got into the upper 20s on the river level,” Birr says. “We never thought we’d ever see 30 feet. And, we got to 30, and then 31, and then 32. And then the levee on the Elwood side breached.”
KFEQ opened its phone lines and news reporters covered the flood and its aftermath. The same can be said for the 2011 and 2019 Missouri River floods.
A huge decision came for Eagle Communications in 2009, when a farmer mowing the pasture ground around the four-tower KFEQ configuration off I-29 in Andrew County clipped a guy wire and brought down one of the towers.
“So, when you get the call, I laughed, because you think, boy, a farm station gets taken off the air by a farmer doing what farmers do,” Eagle Communications chairman Gary Shorman tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “And, it’s never a good day. It turned out to be a better day long-term, because we now have a brand-new tower system.”
Eagle, which has owned KFEQ since 1969, spent $1.1 million to repair and upgrade KFEQ’s four-tower configuration.
That move kept KFEQ on the air.
Former KFEQ newsman and recently retired Senior Pastor of Wyatt Park Christian Church, Scott Killgore, says throughout its history, KFEQ has been flexible.
“It’s still serving farm families in northwest Missouri and northeast Kansas, southwest Iowa, and southeast Nebraska,” Killgore tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “It’s been doing that a hundred years and that, to me, is an amazing accomplishment.”
Millard, the former KFEQ General Manager, says that can continue if KFEQ continues to adapt.
“I think radio has had a major part of making people’s lives better and I think it can continue to do that, but it’s going to have to be very flexible,” Millard says.
KFEQ, the voice of St. Joseph and the Midland Empire, now 100 years old, one of the earliest radio stations in the United States.
It all began in Oak, Nebraska.
“Oak, Nebraska, one of the earliest radio stations. Who would have guessed?”
Who would have guessed, Derrick Drohman, that that radio station begun in the back of a bank building in Oak would be going strong 100 years later?