WTWS - Early Years As WKKM

Early Years As WKKM

For most of its years, WTWS was known as WKKM, "King of Kountry Music", "The Kountry King" and "The Mighty 92". The station signed on in March 1975 by David Carmine (aka Dave Carr to radio audiences), a former Detroit country radio personality and author of Rockin' Down the Dial, a book about the history of Top 40 rock and roll radio in the Motor City. For its first few years, WKKM broadcast from a trailer, then from its transmitter building. Eventually the station's studios and offices were moved to downtown Harrison.

If WKKM was legendary for anything, it was their low budget presentation. The station used basic voice production instead of jingles. As radio stations started tossing out vinyl in the 1980s for CDs, WKKM didn't fully make the conversion. In the early 1990s, WKKM became almost exclusively a classic country format when record companies decided to stop shipping out records to radio stations; the station instead relied its vast library of 45s.

One of the most obvious indications of WKKM's thiftiness was the fact that during its 27 years on the air, it never broadcast in stereo. According to Carmine, most of the records were in mono as it was, so why bother spending thousands of dollars to convert the station to stereo? Also, Carmine nicknamed the station "The Best Radio Station Radio Shack Ever Built", since it's rumored that parts and hardware for the station came from the electronics retailer.

WKKM was also a fertile training ground for up-and-coming radio talent. Recent graduates of Detroit's Specs Howard School of Media Arts often had their first jobs at WKKM straight out of school before moving on to bigger markets.