Howard Kemper - KXYZ - 1940

Howard Kemper was an announcer on KXYZ in 1940.  He was also an amateur photographer.  Recently his son John discovered some old negatives and with the assistance of grandson Michael Kemper restored them and shared them with me. 

John Kemper supplied biographical and career information about his dad which I am copying here as submitted since it needs no editing.

"Howard, my dad, was from Abilene, Texas and his very early interest in radio inspired him to pursue radio broadcasting.  As there were no schools for this, he was self-taught mimicking other announcers and practicing before a mirror.  At age 17, after graduating from high school, he took his first job as an announcer with KLAH in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  A year later, he was hired as an announcer with KBST in Big Spring.  Later, he worked at KRBC in Abilene and in early 1940 KXYZ in Houston.  His time at KXYZ was brief as his young wife and new daughter had remained in Big Spring. The distance was a strain on family life and he eventually returned to KBST in Big Spring.

 

During his broadcasting career, Dad announced the news, sports, and weather, did much on location reporting, announced live dance band performances, hosted talent shows, and as "Uncle Gus" even read the funny papers to kids. He also interviewed many local celebrities and movie stars including Bill Elliott, Jeannie Porter, and Spanky MacFarland.  

 

He is probably best remembered for his "Man On the Street" or "Curbstone Reporter" program interviewing people of all walks. He also participated in the Texas 1943 War Bond Tour traveling with Wild Bill Elliott, Anne Jeffreys, Gale Storm, and Gaby Hayes. He was later recognized for his fine efforts and contribution to the tour's success by the State of Texas and Republic Pictures.

 

Eventually, Dad entered the life insurance business and enjoyed a successful career for a good many years."

So Howard Kemper's time in Houston radio was brief but these pictures are priceless.  Thanks again John and Michael.

Howard Kemper was from Abilene.  He wrote to his younger brother in college there about his job at KXYZ.

Howard Kemper reading the news and making an announcement.  KXYZ was an NBC Blue affiliate, perhaps explaining the pretty blue stationery.  Notice what appears to be a pass-through along the bottom of the window.  Perhaps the headphones were handed through?

Getting ready for that 15 minute news review at 2 am?   Looks like teletype machines didn't change much over the years.

An unidentified individual at a control board in a very tight space.  No microphone so is this an engineer?  Did engineers have to show up in suit and tie in those days?  I cannot tell if the second board looks out over another studio (or indeed, the one the man is sitting at).  Any information that anyone can supply, including the identity of this individual, will be appreciated.

There isn't much evidence of soundproofing in any of these pictures.

The next three pictures are of the equipment room.

Close-up of one the transmitter tubes from the preceding photo.

Up on the roof of the Gulf Building, tallest building in town at 37 stories.

Looking south along Main Street from the roof of the Gulf building.

Looking north from the Gulf Building roof along Main Street toward the bridge over Buffalo Bayou and out over the North side.  

The Gulf Building was completed in 1929 at 712 Main Street @ Rusk.  At 37 stories it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi at the time and the tallest building in Houston until 1963 when the Humble Oil and Refining Company/Exxon building was completed.  It is now known as the JP Morgan Chase Building.

The 18 story Rice Hotel was completed in 1913 at the corner of Main and Texas, 2 blocks north of Rusk, on the site of a former capitol of Texas.  It housed the studios of KTRH for many years and now houses the Rice Apartments.

KXYZ had been operating on the 1440 frequency with 250 watts of power since 1932 when the operations of KXYZ & KTLC were consolidated and KTLC ceased to operate.  By 1935, power increased to 1 kilowatt.  The transmitter had moved to the Chronicle building, Texas at Travis, in 1928 and in 1930 to the Gulf building.  The main studios moved from the Texas State Hotel on Fannin at Rusk to the Gulf Building in 1935.  Thus, the studios pictured above were still quite new.  Just when Harris County Broadcast Co. took over the station from William John Uhalt is missing in the FCC data I have located so far, but the company retained ownership of the station until December, 1948, when it was taken over by Glenn McCarthy’s Shamrock Broadcasting.  The Uhalt Electric Company had been the original licensee (call letters KTUE) on August 24, 1926.

As a result of the North American Radio Broadcast Agreement in March 1941, KXYZ moved to the 1470 frequency and a couple of years later to 1320, where it still operates.  In 1943, KXYZ was authorized to relocate its transmitter facilities to Deepwater, Texas, subsequently identified in FCC records as ‘southwest of the intersection of Route 225 and South Avenue, Pasadena, Texas” and again as 2800 Powers Drive, Pasadena.  This was the site of the joint KTRH/KPRC transmitter facility, originally the location of KTRH when it first moved to Houston from Austin.  KTRH was exiting the facility.  Completion of all the construction needed took a couple of years and KXYZ wound up on the 1320 frequency with 5 KW daytime, 1 KW nighttime power.

The former main transmitter at the Gulf Building was licensed as an auxiliary transmitter, limited to 1 KW power, and was activated for use during the construction delays.

KXYZ moved its operations (studios, offices) out of the Gulf Building to the 16th floor of the Fannin Bank Building at Holcombe and Main in October, 1963.  

The longtime transmitter location on Texas 225 southeast of Houston, used by several local operators since 1930, became too valuable for industrial purposes and was sold in the last few years.  KXYZ now transmits from a triplex set-up with sister stations KBME (790) and KPRC (950), all owned by IHeart media.

Letters from our Listeners - KXYZ, 1930

I received these images from Christina Bowker. 

The letter, a song request, was postmarked in November, 1930, just months after KTUE became KXYZ.  Both stations operated from the basement of the Texas State Hotel.  Earl Flagg and Al Hendly had a program on KXYZ called Pals of the Air.  One of the announcers has written on the letter 'will play soon.'

My correspondent expressed surprise that a request would be sent by mail but I think this was very common in those days, perhaps more common than phoning in, although that would have been possible.  Radio stations did not have the capability at that time to put phone calls on the air I don't think.

Earl Lawrence Flagg, Christina's grandfather whom she never met as he died in 1955.  It was said that he could play any instrument he touched but his specialty was the electric guitar.  He also was a photographer, as is his granddaughter. 

I was also asked if any recordings might exist from that era.  I think that would be extremely unlikely.  The only means of recording in those days would have been electrical transcription.  I think very few individual stations had such capability and even if they did, it would be unlikely the disc, a large phonograph record, would have survived.

If Flagg continued in radio for some years, there may be a possibility of a recording of him from later.

My thanks to Christina for sharing this photo, one of only a few she has.  I mis-filed the letter in my word processor and am happy that I finally found it.

Milt Willis, 1929 - 2005

He was born Milton T. Willis in Houston; raised in Montrose, he graduated from Lamar High School, class of 1948, and went off to the Navy. While stationed in Hawaii he met and married his wife and they returned to Houston and raised a family of four children.  He was known to family and his closest friends as Milton but to hundreds of thousands of listeners over the years and most of the hundreds of other broadcasters he came in contact with, he was just Milt.

I have not been able to pin down when he first got into radio but for the most part he was associated with KTHT, KXYZ and KODA.  Except for a very brief stint in Rapid City, SD, he spent all his career in Houston radio and in addition to air work he did a lot of voice work for advertising agencies and film production companies.  I first have a record of him at KTHT, listed as program director, on a music survey in August, 1959.  He was also one of the deejays as were Jack London and Larry Kane.  He would have been in his late 20s by then and with a voice like his he had undoubtedly been receiving admonitions all his life that ‘you should be in radio,’ so undoubtedly he got his start some years earlier.  He would not likely have been a Program Director in his first job, either.  Good friend Gene Arnold remembers him at KTHT and says he had worked earlier at KXYZ where Gene had also worked although not at the same time.

Arnold remembers Milt did the morning show at KTHT and hated the shift.  One time when he was interviewing a new over-night talent for KTHT that Arnold had referred he told the man he’d have to be willing to hang around some mornings until 6:15 or 6:30 when Milt couldn’t make it on time, a condition the prospective hire was not happy about.  By 1960 he had found another solution to that problem; a KTHT survey published in June of that year shows him working a split shift - 8 to 10 am and 2 to 4 pm.

In the late 50s, KTHT went by the moniker Downbeat, using Ray Conniff’s ‘S Wonderful’ as an hourly ‘downbeat’ to the launch the programming.  The Chronicle had reported in June, 1958, that Robert D. Strauss’s Texas Radio had purchased KTHT from Roy Hofheinz and it appears to have been a  few months later when the Downbeat moniker began appearing in the listings.  Gene doesn’t know for sure but doesn’t think Milt was responsible for coming up with the programming. 

The station was sold again in 1961, the formal transfer of ownership to Winston-Salem Broadcasting occurring in March.  The incoming owners installed new programming they called Red Carpet Radio and GM Sam Bennett resigned.

Three months later, in early June, Public Radio Corp. of Houston took control of KXYZ-AM and FM from NAFI Corporation of Los Angeles.  Public Radio was composed of Lester Kamin of Houston, an advertising executive who had himself been a deejay in the 1940s, his brothers Max of Houston and Morris of Victoria.  They also owned stations in Tulsa and Kansas City.  They named Sam Bennett as new GM and Milt Willis as PD.  GM Cal Perley and PD Ken Collins were out and would later team up again at KFMK.  Collins told Houston Post columnist Bill Roberts he found out he was no longer PD of KXYZ when he read it in the newspaper.

During the early 1960s, KXYZ-AM and FM were outstanding radio stations.  In an era when the GM of another big Houston station described the city as just a big over-grown country town, KXYZ presented the city as sophisticated and cosmopolitan.  A big key to the imaging were the stagers which introduced musical segments with glowing audio pictures of the city.  I still think of the KXYZ of that era as one of the best sounding Houston radio stations of all time.  Gene Arnold doesn’t know much about the years Milt Willis was at KXYZ and does not know if he was responsible for the programming concept but his voice was ubiquitous on the station.

In April,1965, Billboard Magazine reported in a market spotlight on Houston radio that Milt was still PD of KXYZ but in January of the next year reported he had been upped to Operations Manager and a new programmer, Bob Winsett of San Francisco, was moving in.  By June of 1966 Milt moved over to KODA as PD; Don LeBlanc was upped to Operations at KODA and yet another new PD was named at KXYZ.

Milt continued as Program Director of KODA for some years.  Another Billboard Market profile in March of 1967 shows him still in the post but sometime between that time and the time I joined KODA in October, 1974, Milt accepted an offer from a station in Rapid City, South Dakota.  I remember him telling me the call letters and I remember they were just one letter different that KODA - I believe it was KOTA.  He realized almost immediately it was a mistake and he stayed a very short time.  He called GM Martin Griffin at KODA and asked to return, Griffin asked the staff and it was agreed they would welcome him back.  This may have been when he transitioned into sales.  By the time I got to KODA in ‘74 he was Sales Manager, having moved into that chair when Tom Hoyt was upped to General Manager not long before.

I worked as an announcer in the same building with Milt for four years until Tom Hoyt named me Operations Manager to replace the departing Jason Williams.  Just a few months later Hoyt left and Paul Taft promoted Milt to General Manager and then just a few months after that, Taft sold KODA-AM and FM to Westinghouse, Group W.  Milt and I worked together for the next three years to try to build KODA from an also-ran for years in the beautiful music war with Harte-Hanks’ KYND.  We talked everyday, went to lunch together often, but I wasn’t into radio history at that time and never asked about his career even though I had been aware of him since the 1950s.

We sometimes shared  bits of our personal lives, though.  I knew he collected movie theater lobby cards.  One Monday I remember him looking very bedraggled and I asked why.  It turned out he had spent the whole weekend on puddle-jumper flights to South Carolina and back to pick up some prized cards and he was beat.  He was as proud as a new Daddy of the cards he had scored, telling me all about them and their significance,  but he vowed never to do that again.  I also remember him sometimes beaming on a Monday morning after a weekend jaunt to the casinos in Louisiana where he apparently regularly did quite well.

Gene Arnold shared a passion for collecting movie lobby cards and got Milt into the hobby and they went to conventions together.  Gene says Milt liked to linger at the airport lounge and he warned him repeatedly he was going to miss a flight sooner or later but it was Arnold who almost missed a flight when he mistakenly boarded a flight to Seattle and didn't discover the mistake until the last minute. Gene says he and Milt also enjoyed betting against each other on college football games. 

Success in the Beautiful Music format on FM depended a lot on external advertising, chiefly on TV and billboards, to get the call letters across, since so much listening to that format was done at very low, background levels.  Harte-Hanks KYND had always had a much bigger advertising budget than KODA but when Westinghouse came to town, the tables were turned.   By the end of 1982, KODA's ratings success was so complete, Harte-Hanks pulled the plug on KYND and turned the frequency over to their wildly successful AM, KKBQ, the successor to KTHT and KULF on 790.

In February of 1983, just a little over a month after KYND called it quits, Milt was promoted to National Sales Manager of Group W’s Texas stations and he finish  his long career in Houston radio with Westinghouse.

Personal Postscript:  Milt lasted longer than I with Group W.  I clashed with the consultant Westinghouse assigned to their FM stations, all of which at that time were struggling except for KODA.  Finally I gave up and left.  The book that covered my last months as PD was the first one in KODA's history when it edged KYND but I was not there for the celebration.  I talked to Milt only once after leaving but some 20 years later, sometime in the first decade of this century, I was coming back from Austin on I-10 and decided to pull into the San Felipe de Austin State Historical site in Austin Co., the unofficial capital of Stephen F. Austin’s original colony.  I had known about the place since the 7th grade when every Texas school child took a Texas history course but I had never visited.  The town was an important commercial center before independence and  hosted several important meetings leading up to the Texas Revolution.  I walked around the grounds soaking up Texas history and as I stepped into a meeting hall, an audio track started playing.  It was Milt’s voice.  Son-of-a-gun, I thought, This guy is everywhere. I wonder how many other state historical sites have audio tracks voiced by Milt?

I am indebted to Laura Willis Hixon for the pictures above and to her and Gene Arnold for details of Milt’s life and career and their personal remembrances of him.

Johnny Goodman, a voice from the past

From the Valley Morning Star.

The Phil Harlow mentioned was the first program director of KCOH and also worked at KXYZ.

A Day in the Life -

- of a Galveston radio listener, Sunday, February 2, 1947.   KGBC had signed on the previous day but there were no listings in the Galveston News for that day; these are the first published listings.  The News also published the listings for the three Houston stations whose signals would reach Galveston.  The only other Houston AM on the air at that time, KTHT, was still operating on 1230 kc with only 250 watts and probably was not listenable to most Galvestonians.

An ad published in the News on Saturday, February 1, for KGBC's first day was posted here.

A Tim and Bob Gallery

Often referred to as Houston's first morning duo, Tim and Bob were together on KPRC for over a decade. For more on the duo on this blog, click on the label at the end of this post; for other mentions of either individual enter the words 'Byron' or 'Nolan' in the search box.

The St. Patrick's Day Parade was one of their biggest promotions. According to a history on the St. Patrick's Parade Commission website, Tim and Bob resurrected the long-dormant Houston St. Patrick's Day parade in 1960 but I don't have dates for these pictures.

Bob Byron, left, and Tim Nolan. Judging by the decorations on the cake, this had something to do with St. Patrick's Day, too.

KPRC carried the syndicated 1960s comedy feature Chickenman and the Fearless Feathered Fighter came to town to promote the series.

And now for something a little different:


Judy Bonham, Byron's oldest daughter, to whom I am indebted for these pictures, notes the guys seem to be enjoying themselves.

Miscellaneous clippings and shots:

This clipping was from the Houston Post on a Friday in August but unfortunately the date and year is cut. It appeared top left, right under the masthead and above a story about heart surgery for a Cuban boy.

And a couple of personal mementos from Byron:

My thanks to Judy Bonham for providing all these shots and my apologies for taking so long to get them online. My thanks also to all the children of Tim and Bob I have corresponded with over the last year or so for their help.

One of the reasons I delayed publishing these pics was to try and identify the football player in the third from the last picture. I wasn't in Houston during most of the 60s and have no idea who it is, but have a suspicion that he was rather famous for some reason. I will appreciate it if anyone can identify him or add any information about any of these photos such as dates or names. For instance, if anyone can hazard a guess about the name of the movie on the marquee in picture # 1, we can probably date that picture but since Glenn McCarthy appears in two different shots in two different vehicles, the pictures probably do not all date from the same year.

The 1960s - KIKK, Talk Radio, KODA, KENR

Most of the new station activity in Houston in the 1960s would take place on the FM dial; it was to be as active an era on FM as the 1920s or 1940s had been on AM. By mid-October, 1960, there were already two new FMs on the air as KARO-FM took to the air at 94.1 megacycles the weekend of the 15th and 16th. There will be more about this in the FM Chronology. Normally the launch of a new station would have had the radio industry buzzing but not only was there little publicity regarding the launch of KARO, industry types and many others were busy talking that weekend about the news of a Vice Squad raid at the offices of KILT. It was front page news in the Chronicle on the 15th with a follow-up story on Sunday. It seems the HPD Vice Squad had gotten a tip there was an office pool at KILT and, equipped with a betting slip provided by the anonymous tipster and a marked $1 bill, moved in on Friday afternoon. An undercover officer entered the station at 500 Lovett Blvd. and said he was there to place a bet. The slip and money were taken by a young copy writer, whose name is omitted here to protect the innocent. The officer then went back outside and motioned to the uniformed officers to move in. The copy writer was promptly arrested and just as promptly fainted.

The problem seemed to be that bets had been taken from persons outside the employ of KILT; one account alleged an employee of Air Call, which was located across the lobby from the KILT offices and I believe co-owned, had been allowed to place a bet the previous week and the young woman said she thought the man was an employee of one of the other companies in the building; she also had reportedly commented after the undercover officer left that she didn’t think they should be taking bets from non-employees. Felony bookmaking charges were filed; the $1000 bond was posted by the station.

Station Manager Bill Weaver was indignant. The next day Mayor Lewis Cutrer called Weaver to apologize for the raid and both men agreed the Vice Squad should have better things to do, but the Vice Squad officer who set up the raid, Capt. H. L. Ellisor, and the Police Chief both backed the action. The total netted in the raid was 11 betting slips and $9.00 (two of the bettors had not anted up). Weaver observed the Vice Squad must have been very busy the previous week during the World Series as there had been rumors of $1000 betting pools in town; Ellisor said no raids had taken place because no complaints had been filed. Weaver also said he had been told there was a betting pool at HPD the previous week.


In mid-December the Chronicle’s Open Mike column published an article headed ‘Dial a Station and Talk, Talk, Talk’ noting a growing trend of telephone talk shows on the radio. KXYZ had launched an evening program called Expressions a few months earlier and was so pleased with the results, plans were already being made to add more talk shows after the Christmas season, according to GM Cal Perley, but this did not come to pass. A change of ownership in a few months led to cancellation of Expressions and dismissal of some employees; the show would resurface later on KFMK-FM.

KTRH had noted the trend and launched a call-in program called ‘At Your Service’ which took calls on a wide range of topics. The Chronicle article opined that eventually talk, talk, talk might become so pervasive there’d be little room for rock ‘n roll on the radio. It took the rise of FM radio and a couple of other factors but that prediction, which must have seemed highly unlikely at the time, eventually came true.

Whether Expressions was the first listener participation talk show in Houston is not known and the Chronicle did not mention any other local stations that had latched on to the trend.

In the same column the Chronicle reported that KNUZ program director Ken Grant was talking about an unusual success story for that time of year, an album doing a brisk business and drawing lots of listener calls that had nothing to do with Christmas. The Humorous World of Justin Wilson had been aired on both KNUZ and sister station KQUE-FM and there were reports it was breaking sales records.

On March 19, 1961, formal transfer of ownership of KTHT to Winston-Salem Broadcasting from Texas Radio was completed. General Manager Sam Bennett resigned and the new owners unveiled a new moniker for the station, Red Carpet Radio. Within a few months the station would become known as Demand Radio 79.

On May 1, 1961 KRCT changed call letters to KIKK, again proclaiming the switch in a big ad in the Chronicle. A story in the TV section of the Chronicle the previous day helpfully noted the DJs would refer to the station as ‘kick,’ ‘for kicks.’ Owner Leroy Gloger told the Chronicle reporter the change came about because research had shown call letter confusion among listeners. By that time, the station had studios in the Montague Hotel at 804 Fannin at Rusk as well as in Pasadena.

According to Roy Lemons, who worked for KIKK during most of the 1960s as Sales Manager, the KIKK call letters were the idea of a San Antonio country broadcaster A.V. 'Bam' Bamford, who owned KBER in San Antonio. Bamford knew that the calls had been dropped by a California station. He also came up with the "boots" symbol over a drink at the Montague. The logo was designed by Don Newcomer, a Heights resident who charged $250 for the soon-to-be-famous KIKK design.


This ad in May, 1961, just used block lettering for the call letters; it is not known yet just when the familiar boots came to be used for the ‘K’s.

This image appeared in the Sam Houston High School yearbook for 1963 and is apparently of the side of the KIKK studio building on E. Sterling.  At the left end of the fence, note the partially obscured sign for the station hanging on the front of the building.  According to other information found online the building also housed a recording studio, perhaps after KIKK moved out.

This business card type ad appeared in the Pasadena High School yearbook for 1964.

I am grateful to Tori Mask of the South Belt Houston Digital History Archive who found these images and allowed me to use them.


In the first week of June the FCC approved the transfer of KXYZ from NAFI Corp. of Los Angeles to Public Radio Corporation of Houston. The new owners consisted of Lester and Max Kamin of Houston and Morris Kamin of Victoria; they also owned stations in Tulsa and Kansas City. Lester Kamin had been involved in advertising and radio since at least the 1940s when he was a disc jockey in an era when disc jockeys were often well known people who hosted shows spinning records in addition to their other jobs. Sam Bennett, formerly of KTHT, came aboard as GM and Milt Willis, PD of KTHT, came aboard as the new Program Director.

Within a few days, Bill Roberts’ column in the Post announced that Cal Perley and Ken Collins had departed KXYZ. They had been closely associated with the Expressions program and announced they were already talking to KFMK about re-launching the program there.

 

 July 31, 1961 saw the beginning of KODA-AM at 1010 kc, a daytimer and the first new Houston AM radio station in more than a decade, joining its sister station KODA-FM which had taken over KPRC-FM in 1958 as KHGM-FM and recently changed call letters to KODA-FM. KODA-AM brought the ABC Radio Network back to Houston; ABC had been dropped by KXYZ several years earlier and carried for a while by KWBA, Baytown. The station featured ‘good music’ news, sports and a traffic helicopter, the KodaBird. KODA-AM and FM were owned by Paul Taft of Taft Broadcasting who originally had been General Manager of KGUL-TV, Channel 11, Galveston in 1953. Taft also owned the Muzak franchise for Houston. Westinghouse Broadcasting, Group W, bought KODA-AM and FM in 1978 and quickly spun off KODA-AM which changed call letters to KLAT, La Tremenda, obtained permission to become a 24 hour operation, and still operates on 1010. The KLAT calls went into use on August 29, 1979.

The picture above shows the new building at 4810 San Felipe which housed the KODA-AM and FM operations.   Roche Bobois now occupies the building.  The building in back, added sometime after 1961, housed Taft's non-broadcast businesses.

KANI, Wharton, signed on June 17, 1962, at 1500 kc and those calls are still in use.

At the end of June, 1967, LIN Broadcasting of Nashville purchased KILT and KOST-FM from Gordon McLendon for $15 Million dollars. McLendon said he had plans to purchase a UHF station in the market when one became available.

January 17, 1968, KENR, ‘Keener,’ became only the second new AM signal in the market in the decade at 1070 kc. Originally a daytime only station, KENR expanded to 24 hour a day operation within a couple of years. The format was country.

Bill Edwards of Saginaw, MI, was the owner and he told Chronicle TV/Radio reporter Ann Hodges the station was the culmination of a nine year dream. Edwards, who had apparently never even been to Houston before his permit was granted, said nonetheless he had been fascinated by Houston for years and considered it the ‘most exciting and most profitable of major radio markets’ and was proud of his engineers for finding a way to squeeze the station in on the crowded dial. Jack Fiedler of WNUS, Chicago, was to be the first General Manager. Edwards also owned WKNX-AM/TV in Saginaw.

Although the station had a good run as a country station, it eventually left that field to KILT-AM/FM and KIKK-AM/FM. The station tried country gold and then aired a radio magazine format for a while. For a while it was known as KRBE-AM and carried classic rock and simulcast KRBE-FM. The call letters in use on 1070 now are KNTH; it is a newstalk station.

Brief Postscript on the 1970s

In 1974, KEYH, started broadcasting at 850 kc; originally a news station it’s now a Spanish station, still operating with the same call letters. Also that year, KACO, Bellville, signed on at 1090 kc. The station on that frequency now uses the old Houston call letters KNUZ and is a Hispanic religious station.


To be Continued.

Charles Nethery

Some punchlines just write themselves and some blog posts do too. I received the following communication from Tim Campbell with attached photo concerning his grandfather, one of the early announcers on KXYZ.

"I really love your site.

My grandfather, Charles Nethery, worked at KXYZ in the 1930's.

He was on of the regular announcers, etc. He left KXYZ somewhere in the late to mid 40's with T. Frank Smith, Sr. to start a radio station in Corpus Christi -- KRIS AM. This later developed into KRIS TV in 1956.

Frank Smith worked at KXYZ in upper management.

He stayed with KRIS & Frank Smith Sr until he retired in 1977. He was VP Programming, news anchor, editorial commentary, etc. He did it all.

He died five years ago --- lived a long healthy life to 93 years old.

I am sending this pic that I found and keep in my office -- he is probably in his late 20's. I figure it was early in KXYZ -- early 30's???

My brother has a box of pics /clips from KXYZ early days in the Texas Hotel and later in Gulf Building.

One story was -- my grandfather tied himself to a pole on top of the Gulf Building to provide "live" coverage of a hurricane.

If I get more-- I will share."

Thanks, Tim. We'll be looking forward to hearing from you again with more pictures or more stories.

Update to the KXYZ Gallery

Twelve images from a brochure published in the 1950s have been added to the KXYZ Gallery, originally published on 5 August 2009. Scroll down or find the gallery under the KXYZ station profile on the sidebar.

A KXYZ Gallery

A KXYZ Rate Card from 1936.



A KXYZ ad dated January 20, 1949


A KYYZ ad, undated.


Some KXYZ stationery and a letter from one KXYZ engineering employee to another in the Army in World War II. Dated 1942 the stationery shows KXYZ was using the color green long before Glenn McCarthy took over (the 1936 rate card above is a pale lime-green color).





The ads and letter are courtesy of Andrew Brown.

The following images are from a brochure published by KXYZ in the 1950s. Although a letter from Fred Nahas makes reference to KXYZ serving Houston for 27 years (KTUE became KXYZ in August, 1930), there are other clues that the brochure was published in 1956 or perhaps early 1957, such as the reference to Buff Baseball on KXYZ in 1956 and the fact the morning man pictured, Tim Nolan, left KXYZ in March, 1957, to join KPRC.

The first 2/3rds of the brochure dealt with Houston and its history, with images from over the decades, plus modern photos of the city and its industries and landmarks and some shots of outlying communities. I have posted only the images from the last third of the brochure dealing directly with KXYZ.

There are numerous images of Houston radio people of the era, some of whose careers were just beginning and others who were at their peak, plus one of Ted Hills, who had been involved in Houston radio since the 1920s and served as program director of several stations over the years.














These images are from the archives of the Houston Public Library.

This image is from the St. Agnes Academy yearbook for 1955 and was shared by Tori Mask of the South Belt Houston Digital History Archive.


This gallery will be listed under the KXYZ station profile on the sidebar and may be added to from time to time.