KOL 85 Today but Celebration Cancelled

[jon]

Today is KOL's 85th birthday, and we have a look at some highlights of the station's history in Today in History at viewtopic.php?p=12756703#12756703

KKOL management had planned a Reunion style celebration, but a clean sweep (GM and PD replaced) a few months back saw the event cancelled.

For myself and many of my then-teenage friends, KOL was very often as good as it got, when it came to Top 40 radio. And some great DJs worked there over the years, rivalling KJR in terms of famous names, partly because a lot of KJR jocks also worked at KOL before, after or in between their KJR stints.

[skyvalleyradio]

that figures - I;m guessing today's 'up-n-comers' in radio really don't care about heritage Calls & history. Me...I'm going to load up my KOL audio montage (thanks radiofan!) fill up a glass of cheer & raise a toast to the Lucky 13 "Kolorful K-O-L Sea-attle". Going back to its marine origins, K-O-L tapped out on a morse code key sounds even more romantic:

dahditdah dahdahdah ditdahditdit (KOL)

[jon]

Unfortunately, CHQM being on 1320 made it tough to listen to KOL-1300, especially after CHQM went to 50,000 watts in the late '60s. Anyone North or West of the QM transmitter was getting the equivalent of 100KW because of the requirements for QM to protect so many stations, especially to the South.

I was fortunate enough to have a DX communications receiver with enough selectivity to completely eliminate the co-channel splatter. But I never could listen to KOL on any car radio (before or after I learned to drive), so it did cut down my listening time a bit.

The late Lan Roberts told me that he had listeners in downtown Seattle call him who couldn't get a listenable signal at night from KOL. On the other hand, a former KJR engineer told a friend of mine that KJR was grounded to the railway tracks that ran to Chicago. There is no question in my mind that KJR always had the superior signal. Nothing like the 50KW stations, of course. KIRO was particularly strong into Vancouver, despite CBU and CKLG only 20 KHz on each side.

[skyvalleyradio]

Jon - I too had a pretty selective receiver and an outside long-wire antenna so had no problem hauling in KOL during the daytime in Kerrisdale. (Nighttime forget it!) My toughie there was KPUG 1170 - my first receiver just wan't selective enough, but my 2nd - an old Stromberg-Carlson military issue 100 kc/s - 30 mc/s receiver did the job, I did okay with KIRO 710 too. In Keerisdfale, the splatter from CKLG went all the way up to 760 and the CBU splatter down to 660 with that receiver.