Kansas City Star

On a Sunday afternoon in 1955, hundreds of Kansas City residents descended upon Loose Park in search of a turtle.

On its shell was inscribed a number. It was the last of many clues delivered over several weeks in a treasure hunt promotion conducted by WHB.

The ensuing traffic jam prompted the police to deploy.

To public safety officials it represented a frivolous waste of resources that rated a reprimand from the Kansas City police chief. But for the executives of WHB it was one more hint of the apparently vast audience whose attention they had somehow gained.

This anecdote is cited early in Something in the Air: Radio, Rock and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation, a new history of radio by Marc Fisher, a Washington Postcolumnist.

This is radio history with a crucial difference, in that there’s little here regarding Jack Benny or Orson Welles.

Rather, it’s a history of radio beginning when an emerging demographic – young people – discovered that a segment of the media had decided to address them directly.

That’s something that had just begun in Kansas City in 1955. The year before WHB had been purchased by Todd Storz, the son of an Omaha brewery owner who a few years earlier had noticed something.

One night in the late 1940s he saw how patrons in a restaurant would play the same handful of songs on the jukebox. Then Storz watched as the waitress, at the end of her shift – during which she had heard all those same songs – put in her own change to hear the same songs yet again.

At least, that’s how Storz sometimes told it.

Fisher concedes Storz was a student of the industry and perhaps didn’t bet his station’s equity on a bar revelation.

The point is, with Storz, the nickel dropped. His eureka moment held that a radio station could attract traffic if it played the same songs several times a day. The strategy challenged conventional radio wisdom.

But by the end of 1951 the share of radio listeners tuning into KOWH in Omaha, which Storz had acquired two years earlier, had swelled from 4 percent to 45 percent.

“In the heartland, Storz wanted to sell radio the way his family had always sold beer,” Fisher writes, “in massive quantities, with Prussian efficiency ”

In the days of the Loose Park turtle hunt, Fisher writes, WHB commanded 52 percent of the Kansas City radio audience, with a few others splitting up much of the rest. (In the fall of 2006, according to one ratings service, two Kansas City stations, KPRS-FM and KUDL-FM, achieved a market-leading 6.7 share, or percent, of the listening audience.)

The Storz format featuring the repetition of a short list of songs, along with the occasional stunt, came to be known as Top 40.

As Fisher writes, other forces were at work. Breakthroughs in technology freed radio fans from the huge Atwater Kent in the living room. By 1953 nearly one in three Americans used the radio to wake up.

Radios in cars grew common. By the 1960s teens could carry transistor radios with them and routinely represent ratings that made more programmers seek to please them. Storz didn’t plan that part, but he was quick to realize it. While the Top 40 took root with Patti Page and Connie Francis, it flowered with Elvis, the Beatles and the Supremes.

Fisher also corrects the sentimental idea that 1960s AM radio programmers, as if benevolent elders, bequeathed to baby boomers the soundtrack of their lives, giving them Motown and the British Invasion.

As Fisher states: no. What got these programmers out of bed each day was not the chance to broadcast thrilling music, but to attract audience and advertisers.

The vast demographic anomaly that these wildcatters drilled down to almost by accident responded in historic numbers. And if these kids seemed to enjoy Marvin Gaye and Mick Jagger, the programmers adjusted the playlist accordingly.

“If the public suddenly showed a preference for Chinese music, we would play it,” Fisher quotes Storz as saying.

But while Fisher salutes the music, he is ultimately more interested in a larger story: the transformative force that radio can sometimes represent. Where Fisher hits his stride is when he writes of the “Night People,” the faceless acquaintances whose words, uttered after dark – as he quotes media scholar Marshall McLuhan – “acquire new meanings and different textures.”

Exhibit A is Jean Shepherd, the off-hours storyteller of several stations, among them WOR on New York, who is most remembered today for the 1983 film “A Christmas Story,” which he narrates.

That’s a fun movie. But, as Fisher writes, Shepherd on the air was much more anarchic, sometimes provoking listeners to perform spontaneous acts of performance art, requesting that they gather in a particular public place, mill about for an interlude and then disperse without explanation.

“When radio works,” Fisher writes, “it grabs hold of one person at a time and creates a bond between the unseen voice and the listener.” When that one-on-one relationship grows more intimate, he adds, “the listener gains a sense of belonging to something larger. The act of listening connects us to others when we cannot see them. And it connects us to something deep inside, a private place.”

Deep thoughts, yes. But who can argue?

With radio, everyone’s an expert. As for me, I’ve read enough about Howard Stern, even though a history of modern radio must include him, and this one does.

And outside of a brief discussion of Jon Miller, one of the best baseball broadcasters, there’s almost no mention here of sports talk. That format might represent a reasonable facsimile of the same hustling want-to that marked competing Top 40 stations in the 1960s, and which the current incarnation of WHB is devoted to.

“Today, radio seems clueless,” writes Fisher, who spends much of his final pages defending that conclusion. Corporate ownership has stifled creativity on the FM band, he believes, with radio professionals no longer trusting their own instincts for fear of driving one listener away.

Fisher’s most depressing passage describes the oldies stations that hire companies to conduct tests in motels, gathering roomfuls of listeners to hold palm-sized “Perception Analyzers” and twist dials, giving instant yeas or nays after hearing a few seconds of standards from the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Linda Ronstadt or the Supremes.

At one session, the ratings tank for everything Motown.

That’s some of the same music that built contemporary radio. But the exec that Fisher quotes, watching a computer monitor behind a room divider, has to live in today’s world.

“Maybe we ought to re-think Motown Mondays,” he says.
—BILL BURNES

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