The Old KB1520

[Interested]

I remember being a kid and getting a transistor radio for Christmas one year. My Mom caught me listening to it at night, but I soon learned that I could put it under my pillow, that way no one else could hear it but me.

I would listen to Stan Roberts, Danny Neaverth, and Fred Klestine. Those were the days! I still lay in bed at night and listen to the radio under my pillow.

[bob1370]

KB was a great radio station, and an exciting place to work.

What a lot of people didn't know, and I admit I was surprised to find out when I interviewed there (and got hired) back in 1977, was that the old 1430 Main Street studio building they used from the early days to about 1978 was ANCIENT, and probably should have been condemned. It sat in the parking lot next to Clinton Churchill's old church which had been converted into WKBW-TV's studios back in 1958. Henry Brach insisted it had been old man Churchill's horse barn/garage before it was turned into a radio studio. It looked it. The place was a warren of little offices and workrooms, with a small production studio to the left of the main air studio/control room, the newsroom to the right, all at the back of the building. The main studio contained a podium for the main air board and jock's position, with a secondary board/stack of cart decks/podium for the newscaster off to the side at a right angle to the jock, all in the one room. Back behind an airlock, the other side of the main air studio wall, was a room that had once been master control but relegated to secondary production/news production duty after the station went combo; it had about a 1949-vintage ten fader RCA tube-type board, with a few cart machines and a single reel-to-reel deck, where the news people did longer form report production. The whole place felt like it needed a paint job...and the newsroom was such, that some of the rats were such frequent visitors, Henry had given them names.

Some of the best radio ever done, came from one of the worst studio buildings I've ever seen. The one thing KB did spend some $$$ on, and the one thing that really mattered, was talent. When you think of the quality of the competition they faced, from WGR and WBEN, you would have to say that was true of every major player in the Buffalo market back in the day.

Had the pleasure of working at KB that summer and fall, and then moving cross town to WBEN's news crew the next year, to be a part of Jeff Kaye's morning show for several years. That was a great time to be part of the radio business in Buffalo...

[Interested]

Great stuff Bob! Wish I could have been there back in the heyday!

[bob1370]

One additional thing I should mention...making the transition across town from KB's Main Street studios to daily work at WBEN's Elmwood Avenue digs was like going from an outhouse to the penthouse. WBEN had just been re-equipped with state-of-the-art Ward-Beck consoles, brand new Scully and ITC tape equipment, totally automated transmitter monitoring, and more--and more production studios and gadgets than you could possibly want. The Buffalo Evening News bought all that stuff, then installed it just in time to sell the stations!! Larry Levite got a brand new turnkey studio complex for his money, not to mention well-maintained and virtually new transmitter plants for both AM and FM. To his everlasting credit, he put together a top shelf staff and made the most of the whole package over the decade-and-a-half he owned it, setting the gold standard for programming quality and community service. They inducted him into the Buffalo Radio Hall of Fame--an honor well earned.

[KB memories]

I recently had the surprise of walking into a small coffeehouse/bookstore in the heart of Annapolis, MD where I now live and heard the voice of Fred Kelstine. It stopped me cold in my tracks. Apparently the store owner had found a Sirius Satellite channel that rebroadcasts old radio recordings from around the country. For the next 40 minutes I was in a time warp - a great return to yesterday!

I too, grew up listening to my transistor radio (with earphone) at night. Only managed to get caught a few times by my parents. The voices of all those DJ's and news broadcasters still echo in my head. It truly was a great era in radio.

I love this website and forward it to everyone I grew up with in Buffalo. Nice work.

[J Henry Jr]

I got my first transistor radio when I was a kid in the late '60s and KB was quickly my favorite station. A couple of years later I cobbled up a dog's breakfast of a sound system in the basement using all sorts of old cast off radio and hi-fi bits and pieces, including an old transistor am/police radio (might have been an Olson) that I powered with discarded Polaroid SX-70 flat batteries from used up film packs. Believe it or not, that little Frankenstein actually sounded half-decent running an old furniture sized speaker with a 15" driver. I still have that speaker and it's little sibling 12" unit. A couple years later I graduated to "stereo" and it was FM, 8-track and turntables for me for the next decade.

Around 1978 I got into some trouble at school and my step-dad convinced my mother to send me away to boarding school in New Hampton, NH for the rest of the school year. I absolutely hated it and missed Buffalo an awful lot. One evening I was walking down the hall in my dorm and I heard the KB call sign on a friend's radio in his room. He told me he could get it in a lot of nights and it was his favorite station. I don't remember where he was from, but it was somewhere far away from Buffalo. I hadn't come across KB on the dial as I usually played tapes or albums on my stereo or listened to FM stereo if there was something decent within range. Well after that KB was my sorely needed link to home on the nights I could get it. Thank goodness for their 50 KW blast that somehow managed to reach the almost 370 miles to my teenage ears!

Henry

[bob1370]

One other question...can someone either substantiate or debunk a story I heard, that WKBW's original 500 watt transmitter (which old guidebooks say was on 1380 kHz) was actually located on the premises of 1420-1430 Main Street at the Churchill Tabernacle (later the original Channel 7 building), before they later moved to Amherst near where the current Entercom studios are located when they got a boost to 5,000 watts on 1480? (Of course they made another move to Hamburg, 1520 kHz, and 50,000 watts in 1941 and remain that way today...that plant is now 71 years old though the original Westinghouse 50 kW transmitter, which was still on site as late as 1978, is probably long gone by now...)

I do know WBEN's original transmitter site was over on Martinsville Road, where a shack and a couple of self-supporting towers that once supported WBEN's old longwire antenna still stand. (It was later used for Buffalo Marine Radio after WBEN moved to Grand Island.) That was originally built for WBEN's predecessor, WMAK, which operated in the 20s on a variety of different channels before settling at 900 with 1000 watts in 1928 and going dark a couple years later only to be bought and reactivated by the Buffalo Evening News. (WBEN's official history never acknowledged the WMAK antecedent and I think they still claim a 1930 startup date.)