WKZV signs off for good
Bob Berry broadcasts the WKZV radio morning program to listeners in this file photo.
The exterior of AM radio station WKZV on East Chestnut Street in Washington
If you tune your AM radio dial to 1110 during the day, all you will find is static.
WKZV, the 1,000-watt Washington radio station that played a “classic country” format from sunrise to sunset vanished from the airwaves for good May 16. Exiting with no fanfare, the station had been on the air, on and off, since October 1970, when it signed on as WKEG and played country and polka music. The station’s fate was sealed by a 45-year-old transmitter that would have cost too much to repair, according to Randy Allum, a disc jockey at the station who hosted a Saturday morning program.
“A couple of tubes needed to be replaced, and it was going to be too expensive to repair it,” said Allum, a West Finley resident. Allum said he and the other disc jockeys who worked at the station were only notified two days before the plug was pulled, so he didn’t have a chance to bid his listeners farewell.
“That’s one thing I was kind of upset about,” he said. “It just disappeared.”
A letter submitted to the Federal Communications Commission May 21 by Robert Olender, a Maryland attorney representing Helen Supinski, the Canonsburg resident who owned WKZV, asks that the station’s license be canceled “due to adverse economic conditions and the health of its principal.”
It goes on to state that the station’s tower would be maintained until it can be torn down.
WKZV was a rarity in the radio universe – a station that only broadcast during the day, with no website and no live stream. Its format also was a throwback, as it primarily consisted of country artists who hit paydirt in the era before the “big hat” country of artists like Garth Brooks and Toby Keith. Most other stations had abandoned the likes of Merle Haggard or George Jones, despite the regard in which they are held by country purists, but WKZV kept them in regular rotation.
Daytime-only stations on the AM dial have been vanishing with some regularity, according to Ken Hawk, a Pittsburgh-area radio veteran based in Butler County who briefly worked at WKZV. That it was independently owned only made the hill harder to climb for WKZV.
“Mom and pop’s pockets eventually have a bottom,” he said.
The station could usually be heard throughout the Pittsburgh metro area. Though its exact listenership numbers were not known, Allum said he received more than 50 requests on one recent Saturday morning, a record for his show.
The station had a number of owners throughout its four decades and operated out of a number of locations, including a spot on Washington’s North Main Street now occupied by law offices. It went on and off the air as it changed hands and formats in the early 1990s, finally settling on the classic country format in 1993. Its offices were then on East Chestnut Street, where WKZV stayed until the end of its life.