History
In 1955, the original Open House Party was created as the afternoon show on radio station WORC in Worcester, Massachusetts. A few years later, then 17-year-old John Garabedian was hired to DJ on Saturdays and Sundays. One night in 1987 Garabedian went to a party in Boston. There he bumped into Sunny Joe White, radio programmer of Boston's WXKS-FM "Kiss 108". White asked Garabedian if he would do the weekend shift. The following week, the two of them met to discuss it at dinner, where Garabedian proposed the idea for a national interactive weekend party show. White loved it, and agreed to put it on Kiss 108 after Garabedian created a studio to do the show. After looking into various office buildings, Garabedian decided to do the show from his basement. He and his friends strapped a 50-foot pole to his chimney to hold up a little microwave antenna aimed at the Prudential Tower, 27 miles (43 km) to the east, in downtown Boston.
On September 5, 1987 at 7 p.m., Open House Party hit the air for the very first time on Kiss 108. Within six months it became the most listened to radio program in Boston on Saturday night, as well as the most listened to radio program every week in the Boston radio market with a 14.8 share.
By the following April, stations across the country had heard about Open House Party's success and were signing on. The 50-foot pole was taken down and was replaced by a satellite dish. By 1990 over 100 stations were carrying Open House Party in the United States and another 40 in Canada.
Garabedian continued to DJ on both Saturday and Sunday until March 2004, when WFLZ afternoon DJ Kane took over the Sunday night show from his house in Tampa. Kane later moved to Washington, D.C. and is now the morning host on WIHT. In December 2007 Kannon, the afternoon DJ at WRDW-FM "Wired 96.5" in Philadelphia, became the new host of the Sunday edition.
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