Boss Radio in The United States
Although developed earlier at other stations, the U.S. "Boss Radio" format is most closely associated with KHJ, at 930 kHz AM.
KHJ, one of the original radio stations in Los Angeles, was owned by RKO, a legendary U.S. corporation that has produced movies, television and radio programming over its own stations. In May 1965, KHJ was under-performing in the local ratings. The unsuccessful programming on KHJ consisted of block segments of drama, mystery, soap opera, news, and music, both live and recorded.
Block programming gave way to Top 40 formula radio during the 1950s. Two California radio programming pioneers, Bill Drake and Gene Chenault, modified the Top 40 formula and gave their version the brand name "Boss Radio", after then-KHJ promotion director Clancy Imuslind originated the phrase. The word "boss" had come to mean something hip, new, exciting and the top of its class. Drake had tested some of the format elements in 1961 and 1962 while he served as program director and morning man at San Francisco's KYA, a station that promoted itself at the time as "The Boss of the Bay."
Drake and Chenault introduced and further developed this format at KYNO in Fresno, KSTN in Stockton, and KGB AM in San Diego. In April 1965 they brought it to KHJ.
Within a few months the "Boss Radio" format had brought KHJ to the top of the Los Angeles market. It also firmly established the careers of several "boss jocks" such as "The Real Don Steele" and Robert W. Morgan who helped to put "Boss Radio" on the air in Los Angeles, under the guidance of program director Ron Jacobs.
As a result of the station's success several other stations adopted the format, notably KFRC in San Francisco, WFIL in Philadelphia, WRKO in Boston, and eventually reaching as far north as Canadian border blaster CKLW in Windsor, Ontario. As a result of its massive clear channel transmitter and overnight signal propagation, CKLW was able to garner an international audience—even as far as Soviet Russia, making it almost certainly (though unprovably) the biggest of the "Boss Radios."
Read more about this topic: Boss Radio
Famous quotes containing the words united states, boss, radio, united and/or states:
“In the United States, it is now possible for a person eighteen years of age, female as well as male, to graduate from high school, college, or university without ever having cared for, or even held, a baby; without ever having comforted or assisted another human being who really needed help. . . . No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations, and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“All radio is dead. Which means that these tape recordings I’m making are for the sake of future history. If any.”
—Barré Lyndon (1896–1972)
“When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing to the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)