"Gimme Shelter" (dj edit) - Grand Funk

sriv94 wrote: We need one of those "Tell Us About Yourself" sections. :)

A "tell-all" here? I don't think so! :)

My KOMA stint was in the early '80s, when it was country. Still the same KOMA; the music changed, but not the presentation.

Indy, KOMA was one of my nighttime top-40 choices while growing up in Minneapolis-St. Paul, so I was well aware of that monster nighttime signal. Even so, on one of my first nights at KOMA, I took successive calls from Chihuahua and Winnipeg. Sure beat the 10-mile coverage of my first station! We received a DX report from a first-time listener and read it on the air, along with playing "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" for him, which he heard... in Perth, Western Australia.

KOMA was the only nighttime source for top-40 in much of the sparsely-populated western half of the country back during the golden age of the format, and the directional signal truly was a blowtorch. A salesman who'd worked at KOMA in 1967 sent me his sales aids, one of which (from a "refrigerated" Arizona hotel) backs up what you said about concert ads:

It's truly a shame what's happened to the 1520 frequency in Buffalo, NY in the last decade or so. They even tried oldies with the late Jack Armstrong voicetracking at night. It was 50 years ago this year that the original WKBW first went on the air.

The late Jim Connors, who worked here in Erie, PA from the early 60's until 1971 at WJET, before leaving for mornings at WMEX in Boston for a brief time in 1971 and 1972, eventually worked at WYSL from 1972-1976. Then, he was off to WROC in Rochester and a couple stations in New England.

His son, Jim, has a wonderful tribute site to his Dad, and the friendship his Dad had with Harry Chapin, which was the inspiration for the song, W O L D.