Being an astute businessman Gordon was always interested in new sources of revenue for the radio stations. I think any smart licensee feels the same way. Then, in 1965 he had a brainstorm. He was always envious of the newspapers ability to capture millions of dollars not by the usual and obvious display advertising but by the Classified Ads. Just look at your daily paper, especially the Sunday editions, and you’ll find page after page of ad revenues that are strictly off-limits to broadcasters. “Off limits, Hell” I’m sure Gordon thought. “Let’s go get some of that money with an all-ads station”. After some discussion he assigned me the job of designing the format. He was in the process of buying an FM station in Los Angeles. We decided that the call letters would be K-ADS! What a natural!

Those of you who are getting a bit gray around the temples will recall that hated exercise we all went through called “Ascertainment”. This was due during license renewal time as well as being necessary for a new station. For the uninitiated, “ascertainment” was a deliberate survey that the licensee or his appointed representative conducted with a hundred or so members of the general public. People like the Chief of Police, the Head of the local Red Cross Chapter, the local ACLU people, labor unions, the Mayor, the Boy Scout Council, etc, etc. The list was virtually endless. We would meet one-on-one with these people to find out what community problems they envisioned. Then later, back at the station we would try to determine what kind of Public Affairs programming we might provide to address these problems without screwing up our basic format too badly. It was a booger!

Now in Los Angeles, the challenge was simply this. How do I get a hundred or so community leaders to say that an all ads station was really a keen idea? Hell, nobody had ever heard of an all ads station. Therefore, I had to explain what an all ads station would be, and then get them to tell me that that was a really great idea! I recall meeting with the President of Rockwell Aviation in his office out at LAX and putting words in his mouth. I suggested that he might suddenly have a need for additional workers on the midnight shift and K-ADS could get right on the air under our ”Help Wanted” section and advertise those job openings immediately. I did the same thing with the Red Cross. A disaster happens and the Red Cross needs additional volunteers, etc. The Red Cross guy thought that would be dandy! So I spent two weeks in Los Angeles conducting this ascertainment survey with a ton of community leaders. Then it was back to Dallas to put the whole thing into it’s proper form and submit it to the FCC. You broadcasters might be interested in knowing how we avoided listing any Public Affairs programming, any religious programming, any news programming. It was really quite simple albeit a bit gutsy. We simply told the Commission that all the other L.A. stations were providing all that programming ad nauseum, and the market didn’t need any more of it!

Sure enough, after a month or two we received permission from the FCC to proceed by means of a one year, temporary license! No such license had been granted before or since. It was another milestone for McLendon!

So now I flew back to L.A. to hire the staff and design an operational format.

Using the newspaper as a guide, I set the format up in the usual categories. From 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM we featured “Help Wanted”. Since we had no track record in sales, we initially stole the ads from the Los Angeles papers. From 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM was “Used Cars” and the various other categories appeared throughout the day. It was during the Used Cars segment that a wee small voice kept gnawing at me, and I couldn’t figure out why. I had this peculiar feeling that this format, indeed this whole idea, wasn’t going to work at all. But surely I must be wrong. Gordon McLendon had come up with this concept and he was never wrong. He was Gordon McLendon after all! So what was it that was bothering me? It hit me!

IN THE NEWSPAPER FORMAT, DUE TO IT’S VERY NATURE, THE EYE COULD RE-READ AN AD, BUT IN RADIO THE EAR COULD NOT RE-HEAR THE AD BECAUSE ONCE IT WAS BROADCAST IT WAS GONE, OUT IN THE ETHER THERE SOMEWHERE!

For example, let’s say you’re looking for a nice used Mustang convertible. There are ten of them listed in the paper, which you can read at your convenience. You settle down in your recliner and slowly check ‘em off. The color, the year, the mileage, the price, etc. After some considered comparisons your hand reaches for the phone, and you start gathering more information from the owner. There’s no way on the planet that you can do this via radio. First of all, you would have to know that you must be listening between 7:00 and 8:00 AM (or whatever time we chose) but primarily, if you heard an ad for that Mustang convertible and it somehow caught your fancy, there is no way you could re-hear it because by that time we’re out of the Mustang category and now were into Honda pick-ups!

I made my feelings known to Gordon, but for some strange reason he didn’t agree with me. I don’t know if he was in denial or what. It was now growing late in 1965. I had given notice of my pending departure, since I had bought my first station, an AM and an FM, in Canton, Ohio. And frankly, my mind was elsewhere.

So I left McLendon, but Gordon and I remained staunch friends for the rest of his life. KADS died a natural death and that frequency today is KOST.

So should you ever think that you might try for an all commercial license, read this chapter over again or lie down and rest until that feeling goes away!

Oh yes, one other embarrassing moment that was really blown out of all proportion by many in broadcasting.

If you’re a Program Director or a General Manager perhaps you’ve experienced what we used to call losing one’s “momentum”. Let’s say you’ve put a new station on the air. The jingles just sparkle, the jocks are witty and brief, the music policy is unmatched, the News Department (Whatever happened to News Departments?) sounds sensational but a couple of months deep into the format a certain sameness creeps through the overall sound and, worst of all, it’s reflected in the ratings! The station has lost its momentum and something must be done and done quickly. Maybe you get a new jingle package, change the jock’s shifts, move the news to the half-hour, shorten the newscasts, launch a new promotional campaign calling attention to “The All New KXXX”. All of this in an effort to recapture that lost momentum. Gordon McLendon had this happen to him at KTSA in San Antonio.

After much soul searching we decided a complete facelift was in order. To attract the huge military population in San Antonio we decided to drop the storied, old call sign of KTSA in favor of KAKI, pronounced “khaki” the color of Army uniforms. Clever, right?

Well, maybe…and maybe not.

San Antonio had and still has an enormous Mexican-American population who speak a lot of Spanish. And we were told by a few of these people close to us, that “khaki” sounded an awful lot like “ca-ca” which is Spanish for what the French call “merde” or what we call (how can I put this?), er, ah, “defecation”. Frankly, I wasn’t all that concerned because “khaki” with its hard “a” sound and with an “e” sound at the end of it was a far cry from “ca-ca” with its two soft “a” sounds but Gordon got nervous and decided, as we used to say in the Air Force, to abort the mission. We switched back to KTSA and life went on.

Then all the detractors came out of the woodwork. Broadcasters who never had an original idea or the guts to implement it if they had , proceeded to make fun of McLendon and the KAKI story grew like Topsy when it really never was that big in the first place. I was irate!

But now that I’m 300 years old and very wise I’ve seen this strange behavior happen to others. Look at the present Rush Limbaugh debacle. The little smug minds in the media are having a field day about Limbaugh’s medical records. Here’s a man who virtually single handedly saved AM radio from the junkyard being held up to public ridicule. I guess it’s a chance to try to boost one’s own ego. So to these detractors I say “What have you done in your career for the betterment of broadcasting?”

The silence is deafening!