Tuesday, July 31, 2007

KTHT Station Profile

Original Call Letters: KTHT

Original owners: Texas Star Broadcasting (Roy Hofheinz)

Original air date: 8:30pm, June 13, 1944

Original frequency: 1230 Kilocycles (250 watts)

Original call letter meanings: Keep Talking Houston Texas and Kome to Houston Texas

Moved to 790 Kilocycles on February 17, 1948, boosted power to 5000 watts.

Additional call letters on 790: KULF (ca. 1970), KKBQ (8/13/82), KBME (4/24/98)

Current owners: Clear Channel Communications

Current format: Sports talk

Website: The Sports Animal

A link to all articles published on the blog Labeled KTHT (in reverse order as published). Includes a Gallery.

A link to all articles published on the blog Labeled Hofheinz.


A link to the 79KULF Facebook page

Additional mentions of the station may be located using the search feature.

2 comments:

Rage said...

I was just looking at the history cards for KKBQ and KBME which are now linked at recnet.com. I don't know if you already know this, but it appears these two stations were co-owned some years before Houston's Stereo Combination (79Q & 93FM) was born. I see these stations were owned by Southern Broadcasting in the early 70s then Harte-Hanks by 1978. Which now I understand how the format was able to move to FM. I never knew this
.

Bruce said...

Thanks, Rage. They were not just co-owned, they were managed by a husband and wife (I hesitate to say team because I don't know how much coordination there was before the simulcast started). Vickie (sp? Williams was GM of the FM, her husband (Dick?) was GM of the AM.

I thought I also remembered that Harte-Hanks was basically just a name change from Southern, but that's not the way it is described in the Wiki article on Harte-Hanks, which says it was a purchase. There may have been continuity also in the ownership change going back to Winston-Salem BC. My memory is very vague but it may be in my notes somewhere.

I did not know of recnet; thanks for mentioning that. Back when I was doing most of the research, the FCC history cards were not online. I wish they had been so I could have included more exact dates for some of this history. And many FCC notices about Houston stations did not always make it into the papers, or if they did, I did not find them. The papers archives were only available on microfilm at the HPL and were not indexed so I spent hours cranking through the reels on the old readers.

I'll be looking into recnet more and may sign up to add data.