Welcome to 79WAKY.com...a tribute to Louisville, Kentucky's
ORIGINAL
WAKY
radio!
"Great site
for former WAKY people, WAKY lovers, Top 40 Radio lovers, Great
Radio lovers, etc."
- George Francis, former WAKY General Manager
Get
Bill Bailey: A Louisville Legend
AND WAKY Remembered for just $25, postage paid;
you save $10!
Details here.
What's New
August 24
We've replaced the low-fi RealVideo clip of the 2005
WAKY-WKLO Reunion with a
much better quality version, streamed from YouTube.
Check out in-studio video of John Quincy and Johnny
Randolph in action on 103-5 WAKY from earlier this month
here.
June 13, 2010
On June 9, 2010 your humble webmaster
had fun doing a 100-minute airshift on 103-5 WAKY. Check out a
scoped aircheck here.
May 31, 2010
Thanks to Byron Crawford and Rich
Gimmel for the just-added March 1968
aircheck of Rich doing WAKY news, plus an aircheck of a 1968
Weird Beard pre-recorded show
closer.
March 13, 2010
We added scans of two 1979 WAKY format
clocks to the WAKY 1979 Memos
Collection page, plus a scan of the flier for WAKY's Third
Annual Ramblin' Raft Race is linked on the
Promotional Materials page.
March 9, 2010
Get a unique perspective on the inner workings of a late '70s AM
radio station with the WAKY 1979 Memos
Collection, courtesy Darrell Douglas.
March 3, 2010
Hear Johnny Randolph's March 2, 2010 on-air conversation with
79WAKY.com's John Quincy
here.
February 26, 2010
The WAKY call letters disappeared from Louisville and 790 AM in
1988 -- and lots of people complained. Read how station management
replied to Gene Smith's complaint
here.
February 25, 2010
Hear Johnny Randolph's February 25, 2010 WAKY-FM interviews with
Bill Bailey and Joe Stampley (lead singer of The Uniques' huge
Louisville '60s hit "All These Things")
here.
Scans of the January 19, 1976 WAKY
music survey are now online. Our appreciation to Gene Smith for
sending them our way.
We switched our site search from FreeFind to Google Custom
Search. Now when you use the search box near the top of the main
page, it searches all of our radio tribute sites as once, not just
this one.
January 19, 2010
The station that hit the Louisville airwaves
with a bang in 1958 left it with not even a whimper nearly 30
years later. Thanks to Gene Smith, you can hear what the final
15 minutes of WAKY sounded like
here.
January 10, 2010
Nice to hear from the son of legendary WAKY DJ
Jack Sanders -- James Dale Spence. Jr. -- who sent us scans of
several photos from the family archives. Check out the new
images on our Jack Sanders Page.
From the Louisville Times, June 6,
1958 Agreement Near on Sale of WGRC for
$750,000
Final arrangements for the sale of radio station WGRC here to a
Dallas, Tex., firm were expected to be completed today.
J. Porter Smith, president of the Northside Broadcasting
Corporation -- owner of WGRC -- said the price for the local station
was about $750,000. He added that the sale, if completed, will be
subject to approval by the Federal Communications Commission.
The prospective purchaser is the McLendon Corporation of Dallas,
which operates three stations in Texas and one in Louisiana.
WGRC moved to Louisville in 1942 after six years of operating in
New Albany. Its offices are in the Kentucky Home Life Building. The
station has 5,000 watts during the day and 1,000 watts at night. It
operates on 790 kilocycles.
Gordon McLendon, son of McLendon Corporation head Barton
McLendon, broadcast sports on the old McLendon Liberty Network here
some years ago.
Smith and WGRC vice-president and general manager Charles L.
Harris would remain with the proposed new for a year in advisory
capacities.
McLendon owned WAKY
for three years and six months, selling the station in 1962.
Probably no call letters for a Top 40
station were as descriptive as those given the McLendon Station in
Louisville. The station's original call letters were WGRC -- the GRC
in honor of Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark. When WGRC
became a McLendon Station, though, an effort was made to create a
"ziggy call sign that people remember and that kids relate to," said
Don Keyes
(1989). Gordon's secretary, Billie Odom, suggested WAKY (pronounced
"wacky"), call letters that Don Keyes declared were "a natural"
(Keyes, 1989).
"We were there to come in and invade
Louisville, Kentucky. And that was...probably the biggest success
story of the whole chain. We went from zero to a 60 percent Hooper
Rating in two months. Absolutely destroyed people. When we went in,
there was an old-timer called WINN. They were the music station for
Louisville, Kentucky. They were playing fifteen minute segments of a
given artist. That was the state of Louisville radio 1957 or 1958.
Fifteen minutes of Kaye Starr, fifteen minutes of Frank Sinatra,
fifteen minutes of Mantovani. That was it....And we went on the air
with the usual flying circus. It was devastating, just devastating."
(Keyes, 1989)
[Excerpts from Gordon McLendon:
The Maverick of Radio by Ronald Garay]
Check out
LKYRadio.com, which salutes
other
Louisville and Lexington radio stations.
If you're a fan of
Louisville's other great Top 40 station of the '60s and '70s, check
out
1080WKLO.com.
Thanks to all the
former WAKY and WKLO employees and fans who have made the WAKY and
WKLO Tribute Sites possible by sending airchecks, photos and
promotional items. If you have any WAKY or WKLO material you'd like
to make available to these projects, please
contact us.
79WAKY.com welcomes the WAKY
call letters back to the Derby City! On May 11, 2007, WASE-FM in
Elizabethtown changed their calls to WAKY, while
maintaining their popular oldies format. Now much of the
Louisville market can enjoy the music and jingles that made
WAKY famous in FM stereo on
103.5 WAKY.
Why 79WAKY.com?
For over 20 years, WAKY (790 AM) in Louisville,
Kentucky was one of the most influential and highly-respected
secondary market Top 40 stations in America.
In the summer of 1970
while visiting Louisville for a week, I discovered WAKY. I had never
heard radio like WAKY before. The station boasted strong and entertaining
personalities like Bill Bailey, Dude Walker, Gary
Burbank, Weird Beard and Mason Lee Dixon. The
music presentation was upbeat and fun. WAKY was big time radio.
I
was so impressed with WAKY that when I returned home to Lexington,
Kentucky (90 miles from Louisville) I
started paying more attention to the local radio stations while
continuing to listen to WAKY every chance I could get. Because of
the spark WAKY ignited in me, I pursued a career in on-air radio
which continues today at
WTMA
in Charleston, South Carolina.
In 2003, with the
assistance of legendary WAKY Program Director Johnny Randolph,
I produced a one-hour audio tribute to WAKY.
WAKY Remembered became one of the
more popular streaming presentations on
ReelRadio.com. CD copies
were made for many WAKY fans and alumni. Due to all of
the positive feedback, in late 2004 I decided to put together a
sequel. Interviews were recorded
with many former WAKY DJs and Newsmen.
In the process of talking to these "Louisville Legends" the question
kept coming up: "Why hasn't anybody put together a WAKY tribute Website?"
Because WAKY was such an influence to me not only
as teenager but as a broadcaster -- and because nobody else had done
one -- I put the sequel on hold and launched this WAKY tribute site in January of 2005.
79WAKY.com
features downloadable WAKY jingles and airchecks, photos and music
surveys, information about the WAKY on-air personalities, and
memories from other WAKY fans.
We cover the entire history of WAKY
here: from its launch as a Top 40 station in 1958 -- to its Adult
Contemporary days in the late '70s and early '80s -- to its final
rock-based format (Oldies) between 1982 and the station's switch to
automated Beautiful Music in 1986.
If you have any WAKY
memories (pictures, tapes, promotional material, etc.) you wish to share with our site's visitors please drop me a line. A great big
thank-you to all former WAKY
personnel and fans who've contributed thus far!
Even though he was born 15
years earlier, Lexington, Kentucky native John Quincy [Real
name: Ted Tatman] didn't really
discover Top 40 radio until he smuggled in a transistor radio to a
church camp outside of Louisville in the summer of 1970. After a few
hours of listening to the legendary WAKY in his dorm room, he caught
the radio fever. Upon his return to Lexington and a visit to local
stations to find out how radio stations really performed that on-air
magic, he was hooked.
Shortly thereafter a high school
teacher told
him about a Junior Achievement program being sponsored by WVLK-AM.
Every Wednesday night WVLK would turn over a half hour of their
programming to high school kids who would sell, operate, and
program it. Quincy made sure he was one of the ones chosen to be one
of the teen DJs.
Between his junior and senior year
of high school, Quincy scored a summer job
working seven days a week at WBGR AM & FM in Paris, Kentucky. Most
of the time was spent running the board for Cincinnati Reds baseball games, but for
part of each shift he got to play DJ. While it was country music
(which was especially bad in the early '70s), it was radio. From
that point, Quincy never looked back.
There were stints
at other Lexington area radio stations (WEKY,
WAXU, WCBR, WKDJ, and WBLG) before Quincy got the call in 1979 to
escape Lexington's mostly awful winters and work in sunny Savannah, Georgia
(WKBX and WZAT). Then in 1981, Quincy moved up the coast to
Charleston, South Carolina to take on PM drive duties at rock
station WSSX. Later Charleston
gigs included AC WXTC (where he spent nearly 10 years as PD), All
70s WJUK, Country WBUB, Oldies WXLY, News-Talk WTMA, Country
WNKT and AC WSUY. Subscribers
to Tom Konard's
Aircheck Factory service might remember Quincy
as one of the narrators of "Around The Dial" and various profiles.
Today Quincy wears multiple hats (assistant program
director, technical director, morning show producer, imaging guy) at
News-Talker
WTMA in Charleston. Along with his radio work, he does
regular mobile
DJ gigs plus creates and maintains Web sites including tribute
sites to Charleston radio stations
WTMAWCSC and
WOKE, as well as pre-1990s
Louisville and
Lexington, Kentucky radio.
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