With each step I’d take, swarms of frogs would jump away from me. It was almost surreal, like an Alfred Hitchcock movie or something. And when I’d walk out to the transmitter building to take meter readings every couple of hours, they would cover the entire path. They would gather on the outsides of windows so I couldn’t see out. In fact, several months out of the year, especially at night, the station would literally become covered with thousands of frogs. The low-lying flatland was almost like a swamp. The station was housed in a small metal building located along a highway in England. The building that had housed KLRA in England as seen in 2004. His afternoon air shift was equally professional. He had a great voice and did incredible commercial and promo production, especially considering the poor equipment we had to work with in our antiquated production room. I’ve got a few of his staff memos below, which very effectively convey his style of managing and programming the station. He was quite a character, to say the least, but a shrewd, smart radio guy. He was a radio veteran who had worked at several large stations over the years. I was hired at KLRA in August 1989 by Program Director Keith Dodd. This is from one of the raw tapes, without the live components that would be added by Vic Hart when it was aired. AUDIO: An episode of KLRA’s Brother Hal Show, November 7, 1989. Those stations also had the local host who would run the program go by the air name Vic, so that Brother Hal could converse using that name for his co-host. For that reason, when Brother Hal talked about recent events, he worded it carefully so that it wouldn’t be too dated when it aired on the other stations. After the shows were aired on KLRA, the reels would be mailed to radio stations in the Arkansas towns of Paris and Dewitt, which were owned by the same company, called Diamond State Broadcasting, and also ran Brother Hal in the mornings, although the shows would be a week or two older by the time they aired in those towns. Brother Hal would talk to Vic on the tape or throw it to him, and it really sounded like the two of them were in the studio together.īecause I happened to live less than a mile from Brother Hal, once a week I would stop by his house and pick up a stack of reels for that week’s programs. He would record about a half-hour of stories and old-style southern humor for each morning, which live co-host Vic Hart would mix together with music, weather and news. The station also hired KLRA’s original long-time morning man “Brother Hal” Webber, who had retired, but agreed to do the morning show if he could tape it from home. It did its best to pitch itself as a Little Rock station, but that was difficult because the 3,000-watt signal just barely reached Little Rock. My station called itself “The All New KLRA,” and I would say almost misrepresented itself as a continuation of the original station. It was bought by the company that owned WINS-AM 1010 in New York, just so it could be put off the air to avoid causing interference. Sadly, within a few years the old 1010 would completely disappear from the radio dial in Little Rock. When the original station changed its call letters in the late 1980s, along with a format change to business talk, KELC-AM in England, which had just gotten approval to start an FM counterpart, very wisely snatched up the call letters to capitalize on the notoriety. The station was born out of the death of the original KLRA-AM 1010 in Little Rock, which had been a well-known, long time country music station. KLRA’s call letters stood for Little Rock, Arkansas, even though it was actually located in England, Arkansas, a small town of about 3,000 people, 20 miles southeast of Little Rock. On the air in KLRA’s control room in 1990.
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