A Lament for Buckwinkle, part 2

A stand alone radio station cannot stand alone for long. Even before the telcom bill, media companies were acquiring stations by the hand full. Local marketing agreements were springing up everywhere, allowing what amounted to multiple station groups to grow within a certain market. A mix of formats or the targeting of a specific audience was the goal. As I heard it put, probably by Randy Michaels, the name of the game was to control as many frequencies as possible.

On the surface, this appeared to be sound business. It works for Pepsico. In my hometown, there are a number of fast food restaurants. There are, of course, the golden arches, and the cowboy hat acts as a beacon for travelers on highway 30. And then there are Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Competitors, right? Well, yes... and no. The Bell, the Hut, and the Colonel are all owned by the same company: Pepsico. Different restaurants with different fare for different tastes or just to offer a variety, but all three providing the same basic service: hot delicious food served quickly at a reasonable price. A solid business plan that continues to work.

So, radio tried the same thing, and when congress dropped the restrictions on station ownership in a market, the flood gates were opened. C-Span was still showing the vote on the telcom bill when WBUK was bought by Jacor along with WIMA, WIMT, and Mix. How far had Jacor jumped the starter's pistol? Let's put it this way:

First, you need to know that Jacor's mastermind Randy Micheals has a section of his brain partitioned off as a repository for used and unused call letters. Name a frequency, and he can tell you who is on it, where, and the history of call letters with any particular station. He's one of three people on Earth who can remember the strange journey of the KGW calls, knows why KDKA has four letters instead of three, and why WHO is in Iowa. He's the only person I ever met who could keep track of all the WONE's and WCET's and has any clue what call letters the 1230 AM frequency in Cincinnati is using this week. Which brings us to the journey of WMLX.

WMLX began life in the late 1970's at 1230AM in Cincinnati as a Music Of Your Life station. The 1230 signal was unable to penetrate the walls of the nursing homes in the area, so 1230 dumped the format and the calls for an oldies format in the early '80's. The letters next appeared at 1180 AM in Florence, KY - just south of Cincinnati - for another attempt at the Music Of Your Life in the market. (Only after the station owner's failed attempts to get the WKRP calls from some numb nuts in Alabama.) WMLX the second sucked a dry tit until 1990, when it went dark.

Fast forward to 1995. Enter a new station at 103.3 FM in St. Marys, Ohio - the frequency originally assigned back in the '50's to Lima, operating at what is now WLIO-TV's site. The format is called Mix, and somehow, somebody, somewhere just happened to know the WMLX calls were a perfect match and were available. Hmmm. Yeah. Randy had nothing to do with the Lima group until the ink was dry. Sure. Whatever. And we'll never have a president caught in an affair.

And so the machinery was in place. We were home. The Buck was now part of the mighty Jacor, an idiosyncratic malefactor operating within a iconoclast's playground. A marriage made in Heaven. And it was good.

But it wouldn't last.

My Jacor employee manual rode around in my car for week before it was replaced by the Clear Channel manual. Randy made his wad and bailed.

And that was the beginning of the end.