I will respond to a number of the comments that were posted since my post yesterday.
As for KOQT, 1970, being a mess that is true. It was very disorganized in the early days of getting back on the air. When I got there in June it was still a mess. Les Cole found out that my father was a carpenter and he wanted some semblance of order. My dad made large album racks for KOQT that were in the production room off the control room. There really never was much of a production room other than a mic, a cheapo board with a couple slider pots, from a local music store, and one old turntable. As I recall, we had to record directly on cart....no reel to real so no splicing or anything fancy. I learned that at KBFW.'
The State street office of KOQT was short lived. The idea was to make it seem a sophisticated place, but things never really took off for them. Sales were poor, I think the reason Chet Mathieson left in fairly short order. The downtown studio vs. the trailer studio in north Bellingham, was right under the YMCA, although I may not be able to pick the exact spot.
I had left out the moves made by KBFW. When the station went off the air around 1967, the studio was across from the Sears building on Cornwall Ave. In the same complex was Skagit-Whatcom Electronics where I bought parts as a kid for my bedroom station. This hole in the wall office, if you looked, actually had old cardboard egg cartons glued to the control room wall as soundproofing....no, not something that looked like egg cartsons, it was the bottom "egg holding" side of egg cartons.
Fred Danz of SRO had the money to run a station and he wanted something classy. And shortly after going back on the air, he moved the station to the top floor of the Bellingham Towers or Bellingham Hotel. That was a great studio, I worked there for a month or two, and we could see police chases, everything going on. We got the temperature with binoculars reading a lighted thermometer at a bank on Cornwall Ave. Fred build the Samish Drive-In theater and built the top floor as the radio studio. I helped chief engineer, Bill Hamelin, move KBFW from the tower to the Samish. First we moved the production board and some extra cart machines. We got it hooked up and working. As we did that, we stayed live at the main studio in the tower. We had the phone company run another equalized phone line from the new studio to the transmitter....at King Mountain at the end of James Street Road past K-Mart. That night, I stayed in the studio, Bill went out and switched over the new phone line to the audio processing gear at the transmitter. Then, at midnight when we could legally experiment or do a proof of performance or whatever, we went back on the air and made sure it was all working. So for a couple weeks to a month, until the main control room was moved, we broadcast from the production board during the day, cut the ads at night in that same room. On the air staff, at the time, was Lan Rogers (later Lee Rogers in Seattle, Portland and all over), Jay Hamilton (worked at KMPS), Bill Taylor, David James and me, Steve Lewis. After buying the station, we stayed at the Samish for a number of years. But we moved over to the corner of Meridian and Broadway about 1992. My business partner was Ted DeWitt, of Dewitt's Furniture store, and we were in office space above his building. That space is now occupied, top and bottom, by the Re-Store. The Samish was the most fun....they had a couch where we could sit and watch movies, with our own audio speaker. Sometimes you might walk in on another jock with a girl on the couch, that could be embarrassing. Before the move and at intermissions, they played tapes made by KBFW jocks. We got cheap pizzas and hotdogs. That space is now the parking lot for WWU, but if you look at the blacktop, you can still see the bumps or high spots where the speaker posts were.
I cannot help with any KENY music surveys. Other than official FCC docs and engineering, I have nothing as far as trivia on KENY.....except for stories by friends who were there. And several documents reference Tom Haveman. In all the years, like 27, that I was at KBFW, I don't think we ever did a printed music survey. At one point we gave one to a local newspaper and they printed it. And I do not recall ever doing a countdown show other than, when I owned it, we ran the nationally syndicated American Country Countdown with Bob Kingsley.
I do have some jingles and old air checks from KPUG and KBFW. I know I have at least two or three different eras of jingles from KPUG and, probably, some from the station I owned....KBFW. I have boxes of old tapes and some of the best stuff is reel to reel, so I would have to transfer that and will try to do so. If I dig out such materials that might be of interest, who would I send them to post here at this site? The early KOQT, of Joe Tyrrell, probably had jingles, but the operation I worked at in the 1970's did not have the money or the wherewithal to buy or produce jingles.
I would have inserted a couple old and topic appropriate photos here, but I clicked on image above but could not figure out just how to do put in a photo from my computer. Any explanation of how to do so would be helpful, send by private email if you wish.
kingofthehouse@comcast.netAlso, is anyone here old enough to remember the night, in 1962, when KPUG's Mike Forne created a national news story by locking himself in the control room and playing only Telstar by the Tornadoes during his late night shift. I managed to come into possession of a recording of that 50 year old broadcast, also, I got the real story as to what really happened that night from a witness, and I have a number of photos of Forne at KPUG in that time-frame. Fun stuff.