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Balaban Brought Top 40 to St. Louis
WIL Aircheck 1
WIL Aircheck 2
The St. Louis radio scene in 1959 was interesting, to say the least. WIL, the upstart at the right end of the AM dial, had made a successful run at KXOK, but now WIL's ratings growth had leveled off. The radio listening audience was increasingly made up of a growing share of baby boomers, and pop culture was undergoing a metamorphosis. National advertisers had begun to show an interest in Top 40 radio with its tight rotation of pop music hits, the stuff kids were spending their allowances to buy.
Here in St. Louis, the owners of WIL saw a problem developing. It looked like competitors KXOK and KWK were moving toward all-out Top 40 formats with shorter music lists, heavy contesting, jingles and a ratcheting up of the on-air excitement quotient. The current pop music format on WIL, coupled with the station's clever, wordy disc jockeys, might be left in the dust. Parent company Balaban knew something had to be done. WIL would target the teenage audience with its own brand of Top 40.
 Bob Whitney was sent to St. Louis to make Top 40 a reality, just as he had done at the company's Dallas station, KBOX. He had his work cut out for him. Disc jockeys Dick Clayton and Jack Carney had very loyal followings and were still generating the bulk of the station's local advertising income, but Whitney had a job to do, and that meant making major changes in the WIL air product. It also meant he and Carney butted heads on more than one occasion. Whitney also went head-to-head with the IBEW, the station's engineering union. It was not an easy station management gig.
"My first move was bringing in Dan Ingram from Dallas," says Whitney. "He and I were partners in crime." Ingram was used to doing his own engineering, but such combo hijinks were forbidden by the IBEW contract. This posed a major problem because the Top 40 technical style was seen as a threat to WIL's traditional control room protocols. Whitney and Ingram made several trips back to co-owned KBOX in Dallas, which was a non-union shop, to record WIL imaging drop-ins and production spots. "We needed a 'big show' sound, with echoes, filters, rhyming, music under everything. At the time that was next to impossible in St. Louis.
"I knew the pumped up tempo and short music list could have a major negative effect on local advertising revenue, because some of the ad accounts on the air wouldn't understand, but that was a risk Balaban was willing to take. The company supported us completely."
To take care of the ad sales, Bob Whitney relied on a "fabulous sales manager" named Stan Kaplan. "Stan would go into a client like a furniture store and the owner would complain about the music we were now playing on WIL. Stan would turn it around by asking, 'Do you want to talk about music or do you want to talk about selling furniture?' Kaplan often walked out with the order." 
Jack Carney, who was on during afternoon drive, had a laid back on-air approach. He'd carry on conversations with his engineer. He was very talented, and funny, but "it wasn't exactly what we were after," Whitney says. "For starters, I had to get him to talk less. For awhile, we lived with a 'rocky marriage of our two on-air cultures.'"
Other new names were soon added to the WIL roster, including Dallas newsmen Gene Hirsch and News Director Nelson Kirkwood. Bob Whitney says he came up with Kirkwood's air name thanks to a very good Kirkwood, Missouri dentist, a Dr. Nelson, who had saved the life of Whitney's wife in a Kirkwood hospital emergency room. So "Nelson Kirkwood" became WIL's longtime news director. Ron Lundy came aboard, as did Bob Dayton (whose air name was Robin Scott).
"Those were years when stations really battled each other," says Whitney of the 1958 - 1963 era. "It was all intensely exciting. Our guys did lots of outside shows. Balaban let me pick my own air people and we a great team." There were no formal staff meetings at the offices in the Coronado Hotel. "We usually met in the hotel bar. We used a hot clock formula I'd worked out over a long period of time, and we were going after those teenagers who would switch the radio dial to WIL (so we could sell furniture to their parents.) Anyhow, that was our Top 40 sales story in 1960.
 "We ran shows and contests and crazy promotions up the kazoo. WIL was getting to be a fun place and the on-air sound seemed too good to be true in tradition-bound St. Louis. Even the engineers got to clowning around. After awhile, there really wasn't a lot more [for me] to do. WIL was number one."
To their credit, Balaban realized what Bob Whitney had accomplished in St. Louis and they promoted him to National Program Manager of the Balaban Radio Stations. Whitney left St. Louis at the end of 1960.
(Reprinted with permission of the St.Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 4/04.)
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