Sometimes narrow-minded in outlook, Rat people are nevertheless honest. They can always make a success of their lives as long as they manage to master their perpetual discontent and their insistence on living for the present moment. They are very organized and talented; perhaps that is why the Rat makes a good businessman or politician. Unfortunately, as soon as the Rat earns money, he spends it.”
As for Ron Jacobs, Year of the Ox: The good news. “A born leader, inspires confidence from all around. Conservative, methodical, and good with their hands. The Ox would be successful as a skilled surgeon or a general. Some Oxen: Walt Disney, Clark Gable, Rosa Parks.” Not so cool characteristics of Ox people: “Guard against being chauvinistic and always demanding your own way. The Ox would be successful as a hairdresser. Some Oxen: Napoleon Bonaparte and Richard Nixon.” Ah yes, Richard Nixon, the ultimate oxy-moron. And the Oxen who pose a major dilemma: He was called, “A painter with masterly control and power of observation, a mind perfectly capable of integrating the elements of its chosen activity.” How to categorize a visionary and artist when it comes to radio, a medium that stirred to life about the time of his death? Oh yeah? Who would want a program director that mutilated his own ear, Vincent Van Gogh?
Boss Radio was born in the spring of 1965, Year of the Snake. Ending our metaphor of KHJ as a giant fortune cookie, if the KHJ format were a person, it would be, “Charming and popular. Snakes are spotlight magnets, and they will not be ignored.” And on the Chinese Zodiac Animal Compatibility Chart (1 = least compatible, 100 = most compatible), guess who ranks #1 and #2? Ox at 85 (“This union can be a good one.”) and Rat at 67 (“Better be friends than lovers.”)
What does all this prove? That Bill Drake and Ron Jacobs should have open ed a chain of Chinese restaurants? That they were not lovers? What follows is the twisted path that highlighted disc jockeys as Gypsies, programmers as Tramps and most radio station owners as Thieves. And what more appropriate place than Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.? Where else would two radio junkies born over 5,000 miles and seven months apart join forces to take over America’s second largest market?
Historically, the starting point would be “The Battle of Fresno” in 1962. The town's #1 station, pulling 60% shares in the C.E. Hooper ratings, was Gene Chenault’s KYNO. It was the only Top 40 station in the market.
The Roots of Boss Radio
Ken DeVaney: It was 1953 in the era of Hydrogen Bombs and cold-war saber rattling. I was a full-time student at Fresno State College and a part-time radio announcer at KYNO, Fresno. The manager and part-owner was Gene Chenault. I was in my third year of a four-year ordeal at Fresno State and a cadet in the Air Force ROTC program, a sure deferment from the Korean War. My duties were pretty much the norm for that time and place — making station-break announcements when the Mutual Don Lee Network gave local stations the opportunity to scoop up a few advertising dollars — playing “middle of the road music” — reading news reports ripped from the noisily stammering Associated Press printer down the hall.
I graduated a year later, having returned to KMJ from whence I had come because the salary was better. In 1957 I began three years at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, working part time as a rock ’n’ roll DJ at KOBY in San Francisco (the first rock station in the Bay Area) and later at KEWB, the Crowell-Collier flagship station in Oakland. I was aching to get my law career on the road.
Ron Jacobs: I arrived in California to work in radio in 1962. Coming from Honolulu, my thing was that I had few outside influences, which was really great. Anything that I did at home in Honolulu wasn’t stolen from the next city. I don’t mean to say “everything” because to our General Manager at KPOI, his idea of a newspaper layout was to take an ad from BROADCASTING magazine, tear it out, rip off the call letters, put our KPOI call letters in and send it to the paper. We did the “KPOI Pay Phone Jackpot” in Honolulu, a slightly modified version of something done in Canada. OK, we didn’t create everything new but some things we did because we were crazy and we didn’t know what to copy. I remember coming to L.A. in 1958 to listen to KFWB. I was so stoked by the total entertainment of it that if they had contests I don’t remember them.
Frank Terry: I was about eight years old when I first got interested in radio. My father was a sales manager at a radio station in San Bernardino, California. KFXM. He was kind of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s manager. Tennessee Ernie Ford worked at KFXM playing hillbilly songs. My dad used to take me down to the radio station when Tennessee Ernie did his show, a Saturday Night Jamboree kind of thing, and he and I became friends. Later in Los Angeles his career just took off.
Ron Jacobs: I started doing teenage radio shows as a kid. Television didn’t come to Hawaii until three years after we became a state in 1959. By then I had been a PD for a year and had worked with and learned directly from Mike Joseph and Bill Gavin. Pretty incredible how that came to be, but Polynesian karma is heavy. By 1962 I was programming VP of a two-station group that bought KMAK in Fresno. I mean how does that sound, “A two station group?” Hey, the max limit in those days was seven.
Frank Terry: I was working at a radio station in Riverside, California when I found out that this Jacobs guy had actually come in to our station with some of his boys, sat down with our station manager and convinced him that it would be to our advantage to change format and stop doing Top 40 because Jacobs’ people were coming in to San Berdoo and we better get out while we could because these new guys were going to kick our ass. And that’s what they did!
Back around March of ’62 I got an appointment to see Jacobs. We went to breakfast. A couple days later he called me to come to KMEN out on Baseline in the middle of a cow pasture. When I got there he said, “There’s nothing here, the whole staff is set. We’re ready to go here,” but he continued, “I’d like you to hang out for a while, kind of be an advisor, help us with some of the local stuff we don’t know about.” Then he said, “You and me’ll go up to Fresno and we’ll set up the radio station up there.” (Laughing)
Ken DeVaney: In 1962, after a brief stint in a rather unsuccessful law practice in Sacramento, Joe Drilling, a broadcaster I had known for years in Fresno, called me. He was the newly-named president of Crowell-Collier Broadcasting and he offered me the job as his administrative assistant with offices at KFWB in Los Angeles. Since the salary was well above my subsistence earnings in the law office, I accepted.
Ron Jacobs: After kicking off KMEN in San Bernardino in March of 1962, I left it in the hands of PD Bill Watson. Terry’n me took off in his Corvair. You know, Ralph Nader’s “unsafe at any speed” car. We had a U-Haul trailer bouncing around back of us. All our earthly possessions were in that damn toy wagon. I knew that if Terry cranked the steering wheel too hard that a quarter-ton of vinyl records would shift violently and flip over the whole fucking setup. But we lived to tell the story.
We arrived in Fresno, “Agribusiness Capital of the World,” center of the San Joaquin Valley. Good cheap wine and stuffed grape leaves. The goal was to remake a station as
we had 90 days earlier in San Bernardino. By sunset the day I arrived “Sunny Jim” Price was hired as the new PD. His enthusiasm — the first time we shook hands he pumped mine like he was out to break the Rotarians’ Squeeze Record — and experience convinced me to hire Jim on the spot. He was another format pioneer who worked at KOBY, San Francisco. An ex-marine, Jim then did a major career favor for me. “There’s a guy who just got out of the army,” he blurted out, “name of Bob Morgan. He’s on KMBY in Monterey. You gotta hear this guy! Now, man.”
Robert W. Morgan: In 1962 KYNO had the market to itself. They had a 60 share. The only ratings back then were Hooper. But KYNO was sloppy. They had this old guy in the morning. A good guy, but he was older and there was nothing for the kids to listen to. “Sunny Jim” Price was one of the jocks at KMJ, a big old-line station in Fresno. I idolized him. In those days I idolized all deejays whether they were good or bad. When I was in Monterey, I was able to connect with him just to let him know I existed. Sunny Jim came through. He called me soon after I got out of the army. He was moving to KMAK to be the new PD and said there are some gigs coming. And I said, “It sounds pretty good. I need a job.” He called back and said, “We want you to do mornings.” That was all it took. I signed up. I was elated, of course.
They had some 26-year-old boy genius, Ron Jacobs, in charge of group programming. Before I got there, Sunny Jim called me again, “I’ve got bad news, Morgan. This Jacobs guy wants to do mornings. We’re going to give you noon to three.” I was crushed.
Ron Jacobs: Sure, I remember the day we met. Morgan and I peered suspiciously at one another through the double glass windows between studios in the small brick blockhouse on McKinley Avenue that passed itself off as a radio station. This was not just a casual first impression. For both of us it could easily have been a look in a psychic mirror. We began with both of us circling verbally, a few soft jabs. Sumo check shoves, very Zen. But our monosyllabic grunts and nods signaled the start of as intense a relationship I have ever had with anyone, in or out of radio.
Carol Morgan: You know, once he got out of the army, Robert was just thrilled to be doing what he really loved to do. When he went to work in Fresno, it was the first time he had gotten a radio job that was totally divorced from the army. That was when he considered that he really got into radio. And he just loved working with Ron Jacobs.
Frank Terry: KMAK went on the air in May of 1962 and got to rolling. Jacobs was doing mornings, I was doing 9 a.m. to noon, Morgan did noon to 3 p.m. It wasn’t long after we were on the air that everybody — Jacobs was the first — realized that there was an incredible talent in our midst and it was Robert W. Morgan. Jacobs was doing his executive thing. He was like the national PD for the whole Colgreene Group. He had to go out of town a lot and they’d put a part-time guy in there for the morning show. Jacobs realized that the logical thing was to put Morgan on in the morning and let him go, turn him loose.
Bill Drake: In mid-1963 someone named Gene Chenault from KYNO in Fresno had been trying to call me at KYA in San Francisco. He did this for a long time, but I never returned his calls. The only reason that I finally did was because Knox LaRue, who owned KSTN in Stockton, California, was a friend of Chenault’s.
Ron Jacobs: Drake is a reclusive person. He didn’t require new people. Drake wouldn’t return Chenault’s phone calls because they were from someone he didn’t know or know about. Drake has always been that way. It took a third party to vouch for Chenault. Later on, I had to light bombs underneath Drake to meet with Bill Watson and Tom Rounds, both of whom were in on the beginnings of RKO’s great run.
Bill Drake: When you look at it logically as far as people and things — the important decisions — it’s not just one station. It’s not just L.A. or other towns in California. Or even Honolulu. I mean, Jacobs discovered Morgan then got out of his way and let him take his best shot. I heard Morgan. Morgan put me onto Jacobs. Jacobs put me onto Tom Rounds. There was Frank Terry, there was Bill Watson and so on.
Ron Jacobs: Immediately Morgan and I fell in Love/Hate. We sat around Fresno dreaming of the Big Time. Three years later we had our shot. When we were in a total groove — say cutting tracks with Bill Mouzis at the board in what was ridiculously called “the KHJ production room” — we were always on the same page, literally. By then, as I wrote copy, I knew his rhythms and heard his incomparable voice in my head. Morgan emphasized the right words at the right time, performing them as intended, usually on the first take.
Bill Drake: A friend of mine, Jane Swain, former General Manager at WAKE, Atlanta, was working with Knox LaRue. She convinced me to meet Chenault. He, LaRue, and I met at Jane’s house. Chenault was from Oklahoma, an actor who got into radio right after World War II. KYNO in Fresno was his first radio-station-ownership deal. He also was involved with KRAK in Sacramento. I had never heard his Fresno station. He said he had the market to himself, and then some people came in and bought KMAK and started doing wild things. And they really kicked his ass.
Robert W. Morgan: Fresno was the big time. So, we go on the air. Sunny Jim worked afternoon drive, I worked noon to three. We started out with a one share. There were two AM, Top 40 stations: KYNO at 1300 and us, KMAK, at 1340. When we went up to a 35 share, KYNO went down. We beat them the first half-week. We were a lot better and the word had just gotten out about KMAK. All the stations in our group were doing wild promotions. But that was a long ass battle, boy. Meanwhile Jacobs had a seven to my 37, so they put me on in the morning and he took himself off the air. Jacobs has a tremendous ego, but he’s also very practical.
Frank Terry: Jacobs was the first to admit that Morgan was a better jock than he was, and Jacobs was no slouch, you know. He had Morgan switch from Bob Morgan, which is how he started, to Robert W. Morgan. And Jacobs got the “Good Morgan” thing going. Never again say, “morning,” it was always, “Morgan.” And he told all of us that. (Imitating Jacobs voice) “You don’t ever say, morning, it’s Morgan, God damn it. Shape up!”
Bill Drake: When our meeting ended, Chenault said, “Will you come down to Fresno, do your thing, listen to KYNO and talk to me?” I went down to Stockton again to talk to Jane Swain and she said, “I think this guy is OK.” So I met Chenault again. I had listened to his station and I looked at him and I said, “Gene, you’re in fucking trouble!” (Laughs.) He knew that I knew — and I knew that he knew — or I wouldn’t have been there. What else could I say, “You’re cool”? He knew he was in deep shit. I told him, “You got real problems here.” I didn’t tell him a whole lot of details about anything; just that he was in trouble and this radio station, KMAK, was killing him. Obviously the difference in the radio stations was vast.
2 B continued . . .
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