In 1947, I got into radio and had a normal life until I met up with top forty radio! In '58, I got a job as Deejay and Program Director of AM radio station KALL in Salt Lake City.
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We had a great staff including Roger Barkley, Al "Jazzbeaux" Collins, Don Bruce, Chuck Benson, Don Shafer and, me...

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..............WE WENT ...NUMBER ONE!!!

......Stan Kaplan - 1959

"You're Whitney, right?

"Name's Kaplan...Stan Kaplan. Balaban Broadcasting."

"Let me tell ya something, kid. It's really dumb to go to Houston. It's already what its ever gonna be - a hot buggy place. Big muggy pond...little teeny fish. Morning men in Houston are minnows. There are better things in life!"

"For example?"

"For example: you can come with me to St. Louis to meet JOHN BOX.

It'll change your life. You want real success? Follow me!
C'mon! I've got a ticket...."

Well, Top Forty was hot stuff in '58 & '59. And if you were a kid
from Salt Lake and your little station quickly topped the Hooper,
this sort of stuff might happen to you.

We stopped at the airport bar. (Clink)

Hey World! (super brag!) Meet a top forty
programming star about to burn big 'n bright?

Balaban's gonna buy a bunch of stations.  

Big markets! Ground floor!

Only a damn fool would refuse to burn bright
on the big ground floor right?

It was exciting and horrendously scary....

 It was muggy and buggy in Houston.

Weaver was a nice man.

He acted like he wanted me to come on down to KILT.

He'd talk to Keyes.

How was KBOX?

KBOX's little pumphouse studio managed to spit out its 500 nightime watts to its four, tiny, snake-infested towers which aimed the pip-squeak signal straight up. I named the place KBOX RADIO PARK. Short for .......The Little Spark at Radio Park

And these Balaban people ?

I liked Stan - (not sure why!)

And - I loved the kookie little studio building.
When I was there it was half the size of the later pictures

It had a good air conditioner and you could turn up the speakers real loud.

So - I cut the KBOX playlist in half, pumped up the reverb, put up the hot clock, screwed a MacKenzie into the rack.

(PLS Make a note. It took me a year back in Salt Lake to find out how all the random sounds were made at Disneyland and I finally got the five drawer "repeater" shortly after taking the KBOX job. MacKenzie had apparently never thought of selling the "repeater" to radio stations, believe it or not. WFUN got one at least a year later, but I'm pretty sure KBOX was first with MacKenzie as it was with the resulting "News You Can Dance To" and most everything else.)

(Frankly, the MacKenzie was a pain in the butt -
BUT, it changed our lives.)

We had acted FAST when I arrived. John Box got New Yorker Dan Ingram out of WNHC, New Haven - not only fabulous on the air - but the best production man in the business. Not only did we understand each other instantly, but Dan spliced up intros, bumpers and promos by the dozens. And what a great voice and production sense. The KBOX sound started to get encouraging.

We started booking big name shows - you know, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis. We couldn't get any good stars for one show so we got twenty local bands and had 'em play all at the same time until they dropped. It was a pretty raucus marathon. If you could guess the winning band - you would win a big prize.

Well, that KBOX Battle of the Bands got a little out of hand. The Dallas Morning News gave us a quarter of the front page with a picture of some people hitting each other. Stan, Dan and I were ecstatic, but it didn't please John Box a whole lot. The headline was Rock 'n Roll Riots Hit Dallas.

Damned if KBOX didn't do pretty well in a few weeks - considering its puny technical resources! Also, considering that I put myself on the air 7 to 10 pm. The 'winning sound' wasn't there yet but we started to grow some slim and encouraging Hooper numbers.

Soon, I began to think the damn thing was starting to sound pretty good and even now, after forty years (that's TOP forty years, y'all), KBOX is remembered for its unique, cookin' Big D sound. (C'mon! You know it is!) And the sound didn't stop in Big D. It went about everywhere including (and especially) New York City. (Read On!)

Let's not go overboard here. KBOX had a terrible signal and a toilet dial position (1480) not to mention horrendous competition from 50,000 watt KLIF The Mighty 1190 - with my erstwhile buddy, Mister Keyes over there! (I never met the guy but I was a little nervous. I mean, he must have figured out how I got to Dallas.)

Quickly, I stole and added two guys from the Salt Lake City crew: Chuck Benson and Roger Barkley (the other two best production men in the business.) And we even got Al Lohman on mornings. (Now you know where Lohman and Barkley met their futures.)

I Stuck 'em together, I did!

We had the start of a FABULOUS CREW! My round-the-clock lifestyle was now writing promos on the backs of envelopes, 3-voicing contests into our one production room mike, helping Dan steal stingers from LP's, lying to salesmen, splicing promos, cajoling Dan into doing one more spot, loading MacKenzie loops for The News You Can Dance To -- (that's what the salesmen called it) -- and listening to more audition tapes.

Eventually, I found and hired Johnny Borders, Jerry Clemmons, Pat Hughes, Bill Holley.

Facilities? No cart machines yet, ofcourse! But we did have - get this - a 16 inch transcription recording turntable. And we had four air-studio turntables (to play the 16 inch transcriptions on, ofcourse.)

In mid 1960 after some further slim and tortuous ratings growth in Dallas, John Box asked me to run around and look at the other stations. At least it got me off the air at KBOX. (Sales had a party.)

I wrote JB a few self serving memos and he promoted me to PD of flagship WIL, St. Louis and later I became National PD of the 3 Balaban stations. I talked Dan Ingram into coming to St. Louis, but we kept coming back to Dallas to create promos and such for the other stations. In those days, if you wanted to sound like KBOX, you had to go to KBOX.

There were many surprises ahead - and this saga goes on and on. If you want more of my story you can click below - or return to Mike Shannon's history of Dallas
Radio.

Enough awready...take me back to Mike...