Bye, bye Q: FM radio station to end local operation
Buyer to relocate
station to lucrative Seattle area market
By RODGER NICHOLS
of The Dalles Chronicle
Last week, radio station Q-104 celebrated its 38th anniversary on the air in The Dalles. But the 100,000-watt FM station won’t be here much longer.
In the spring, the station will relocate to Covington, Wash., a Seattle metro area suburb east of Kent and northeast of Auburn.
General Manager John Huffman announced Tuesday that Q-104’s last day on the air in The Dalles will be March 30, 2007. The move has been in the works for a very long time.
“When we close, it will be eight years to the month,” Huffman said.
Mid-Columbia Broadcasting, the closely-held corporation which owns Q-104, was approached by Dallas-based First Broadcasting Investment Partners, LLC, in March 1999, he said. Dr. Frank Diegmann of Pasadena and Huffman are the two remaining stockholders.
First Broadcasting — which owns stations in Dallas, Sacramento, Cincinnati, Ann Arbor and Washington, D.C., among others — wanted to buy Q-104, but only if it could move the station.
By shifting the license for Q-104’s 100,000-watt signal to a south Seattle suburb, the station would instantly become a major player in the country’s 14th largest radio market. There are more than 3 million people in the Seattle-Tacoma area, and the bigger the market, the more valuable the station.
Huffman said such a purchase-and-relocation combination deal is known as a “move-in.”
“Then it was a relatively new thing,” said Huffman about the type of transaction. “Since that time, it’s become more common.”
Federal law requires all radio station sales and all changes in license location be approved by the Federal Communications Commission. For such combination deals, the FCC has to engage in a formal rulemaking, which takes longer than a simple sale.
In this case, there were two competing applications, which stretched the approval time into many years, as the competing engineering studies were evaluated, additional information was requested, and appeals by losing parties made their way through the system.
In this particular case, there was also a public high school station on Mercer Island for which a new frequency had to be found and that engineering study completed.
“FCC always chose us, throughout the whole process,” Huffman said. Technically, the move could have happened in September, when the FCC granted a construction permit for the relocated station in Covington. But there was still a period during which a losing party could have started the appeals process all over in the federal court system.
Now that deadline is passed, and the final application for transfer was due to be filed with the FCC today.
From the listener’s point of view, The Dalles will lose its most powerful radio station, and because the frequency itself is being reassigned, there will be no direct replacement.
Engineers agree that it’s doubtful a station of similar size could be moved into this market.
There will, however, be opportunities for other stations to appear in the market through low-power translators that re-amplify initial signals from elsewhere.
Just a few weeks ago, KCGB-FM in Hood River put a new translator on the air here, and its signal now reaches The Dalles area on 96.7mHz
“We’ll be working with our clients and other radio stations to make sure it’s a smooth transition for everybody,” Huffman said. “With KCGB-FM now coming into the market, and Y-102 here sharing much of the same target demographics, there should be a smooth transition.
He said work will start almost immediately in Covington, so that the facility there can go on the air by April 1, just two days after Q-104 signs off in The Dalles.
As part of the move-in deal, First Broadcasting is buying all Q-104’s radio frequency equipment, and what Huffman describes as a major part of the station’s studio gear. “We’ve not been bashful in investing in the equipment,” Huffman said, “so there will be plenty of gear they can use.”
Some longtime employees have drifted away in recent months, with the increasing likelihood of FCC approval of the transfer, but Huffman said that Q-104, in an industry known for rapid turnover, had enjoyed tremendous loyalty. “I’ve enjoyed the same crew for 12 or 15 years of the 22 years I’ve been here,” he said. “They’re all invited back to visit on March 30 to reminisce. It should be a lot of fun.”
Huffman noted the local business community had been aware of the potential move for some time, and would ask him why the company would be willing not just to sell the station to new owners, but to sell it out of the market as well.
“The simple answer is that as an officer of the corporation, if a profitable option presents itself, I have a responsibility to shareholders to pursue it,” Huffman said.
“Besides,” he added, “I’m not going anywhere. Corrine and I have just built a new house here, and I’m going to be around for a while.”
Other broadcasters were quick to praise their competitor. “Q-104 has done an incredibly good job in serving the community,” said Gary Grossman, president of the company that owns KACI, KACI-FM and KMSW-FM in The Dalles, as well as KIHR and KCGB-FM in Hood River. “John Huffman and his crew are some of the most professional broadcasters I’ve met in my career. Frankly, I’m sorry to see them go. They’ve been a good part of the community, and they leave big shoes for us to fill.”
Background:
Q-104 signed on in 1968 under a different name
The radio picture in the Mid-Columbia was a lot different when the station now known as Q-104 signed on the air in 1968.
There were only three radio stations in the gorge at the time, all of them on the AM dial. The Dalles had KODL (signed on in 1940) and KACI (1955), while Hood River had KIHR (1950).
Q-104 was the first FM station in the region.
Only it wasn’t called Q-104 then, and it wasn’t 100,000 watts, either. It signed on as KCIV-FM, with 24,000 watts, on Nov. 28, 1968.
Its owner was Leslie L. “Les” Cunningham, who had been the nighttime disc jockey at KODL.
The impetus for making the move was a 1967 decision by KODL’s founder, V. Barney Kenworthy, to sell his station to Seattle-based Sterling Recreation Organization. SRO wanted to turn KODL into a rock station, and Cunningham left. Station manager Paul Walden, who had held that post for 20 years, left to buy KIHR in Hood River.
Cunningham’s new station was an unusual setup.
He located tower, transmitter, studio and living quarters high on Dalles Mountain Road on the Washington side of the Columbia. He had electricity and water (thanks to a large tank that was refilled by water truck) but not telephone service. For many years, his lone salesperson would drive to Kelly Viewpoint at the end of the day, and transmit his latest ad copy to Cunningham by CB radio.
The salesman and Cunningham were the total station personnel. Cunningham served as engineer and the sole disc jockey. All of his ads were live ad-libbed, and most advertisers received two or three minutes hearty endorsement for each supposedly 30-second ad.
His programming was equally idiosyncratic. Listeners tuning in might hear an album of show tunes, played all the way through, a long set of Montovani violin-and-orchestra music or even light classical
As he signed off each evening, Cunningham would explain that the station’s call letters were chosen for the Roman numerals for 104 (CIV), and “for civilization, the eventual hope of mankind.”
Cunningham sold the station in 1982 to a group headed by Steve Woods. The new owners changed the call letters to KMCQ (popularly known as Q-104). They also moved the studios to what was then Judson Baptist College — now Columbia Gorge Community College — and installed a 100,000 watt transmitter, though they kept the transmitter site at the Dalles Mountain Road location. The old call letters eventually ended up at a station in Modesto, Calif.
In March, 1985, studios were again moved, this time to the current location on East Second Street.
John Huffman came to the station as sales manager in August 1985. Originally a Ford dealership manager from Missouri, he came to The Dalles to work at Ray Schultens Ford.
“I didn’t have any radio experience, but I had a lot of management experience,” Huffman said. In October, he was named station manager, a position he held ever since.
By that time, one of the partners in the Woods group, Pasadena veterinarian Dr. Frank Diegmann, had bought out all the other investors.
In another unusual twist, Diegmann has not visited the station he owns since signing papers with Cunningham in 1982.
“We have a really good working relationship,” said Huffman, who since has become a second stockholder in the closely-held company.
Huffman also managed Diegmann’s interest in an orchard in Parkdale for 12 years, marketing novelty items such as pears grown into wine bottles.
Shortly after taking over as general manager, Huffman had his first brush with the difficulties of a high-altitude transmitter site.
“That Thanksgiving weekend in 1985 there was a huge snowstorm,” Huffman remembers. “It dumped a couple of feet of snow on the site and the station was off the air. Phil Zoeller had an old Tucker snow cat. It was a two-passenger rig, so engineer James Boyd and I rode outside, with wind chill near 40 below zero. I’m from Missouri, I know what cold is. This was cold.”
That would be the first of many trips made to the site in bad weather, including a trip in 1996 where the sno-cat itself got stuck. “At that point, we thought maybe we wouldn’t make it,” Huffman said.
But they all survived, and upgraded equipment and milder winters have reduced problems in that area, he said.
Summing up his tenure at Q-104, Huffman said the station was best known for its willingness to experiment with different live programming.
“We’ve had lots of special shows,” he said, mentioning Sqrl’s Blues Revue, Juston Huffman’s All-Teen Radio, Geno Michaels’ Sunday Night Jazz and Dan Ross’ Singer Songwriter on Sunday. The station was also the first to broadcast daily wind reports for windsurfers, Bart’s Best Bet for Wind and Water.
“It’s been fun,” Huffman said. “We’re going to miss it.”
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