Part 4 (of 5): Once work on a new tower was complete a new identity for the FM station was unveiled on New Years Day 1990. But within a few years both the AM and FM stations would be sold, bringing yet another identity and the eventually shutting down of the FM signal. This is a work in progress. I welcome any corrections or additional photos, audio or stories.

POWER 102 HITS THE AIR

With a new tower, greatly expanded coverage area and new equipment, there was a feeling the station needed a rebirth and a new image. To emphasize that it now had the most powerful signal in the region, the decision was made to call it Power 102. Our liners frequently mentioned that we were broadcasting from the 1,100 foot "tower of power."

DENNIS ROGERS: "One of the major things that the Pattesons did was they didn't spare any expense when they decided to do the upgrade on the FM. Everything was state of the art. New studio, new production room, new production library. I mean, everything was fresh and new, right out of the box with a contract engineer installing all this stuff. We had the Texar Prism processors, which at that time were the best audio processors you could buy and we just had a kick ass sound. It was just so much fun. Those six years that I spent with the Patteson Brothers through the SMN, satellite delivered for the first year and then we got KJBR-FM Super Hits going and it was a little bit better. And then we did the upgrade and it just took off like a rocket and it was just so attractive and so successful that our competitor Larry Duke wanted to buy it and did."

ZEKE TERRY: "I was there when they were just fixing to upgrade stuff. Power 102 went on at the first of the year. I remember when we were doing the whole New Years celebration and all that saying 'after New Years we've got something in store for you,' and then they came along with Power 102. And I thought OK, this is kind of cool because it was different. It was my first taste of dayparting where you had some songs you could only play at night or during the day, which, in hindsight I thought was kind of funny because a lot of the harder stuff they wouldn't want the kids to hear they would only play when the kids were listening. And the stuff adults wanted to hear was only on when adults weren't listening. But it worked. I remember we played everything from Garth Brooks to Bon Jovi, Metallica to Celine Dion. It was strange. It was an odd kind of train wreck, but it worked the way that it was programmed and the way that it was imaged. It was a lot of fun. It was probably the one job that I had that when I walked in I was happy. I was like 'this is fun.' And there are things that I really do miss about it because with automation and stuff today you go into the control room and you sit there and you don't do anything. You wait for a stop set and stuff like that. The automation fires off and segues every element. We hit everything, every song, every liner or sweeper."

DENNIS ROGERS: "When Power 102 came on the air we had a tremendous reach and we had regular listeners in Cape Girardeau, Memphis, Little Rock, Brinkley, really a 70-mile radius of Jonesboro, Jackson, Tennessee, Dyersburg, Tennessee. And we did a television campaign that was very well produced, newspaper ads and we did a lot of promoting and that was the most fun of radio I've ever had. It was just a great station. Really good staff. And the owners were behind us and it was really a lot of fun. And we made some money I think."

The station began reporting new songs it was playing to the trade paper Gavin, which meant record companies eagerly courted KJBR to add new releases. Part of that included them sending us lots of extra copies of new CDs and cassettes that we could give away on the air. The office of Program Director Dennis Rogers was just crammed full of boxloads of new releases. Power 102 also had a steady supply of station tee shirts being printed up and given away. There was also a constant stream of tickets for practically every major concert in Memphis. The aggresive promotions were effective in building a tremendous buzz for the station, which sent staffers throughout the region in the "Power 102 Street Machine."

ZEKE TERRY: "I remember one time that Jennifer Reed and I went up to Pocahontus for some kind of school function. I think it was a career day and we got mobbed at the school. We were like, wow. I think Power 102 had been on three or four months, something like that and we just got mobbed, so we thought, maybe this is working. And we left the school and stopped at a McDonald's there in Pocahontus and we actually got blocked in by people who were wanting stuff. They were wanting tee shirts or anything we had. Even people inside the drive thru were like 'got anything for us?' So we're handing shirts through the drive thru window. It was unreal. It was as close to being a celebrity as you could think."

GOVERNOR/ FUTURE PRESIDENT CLINTON VISITS

Just a couple of weeks after going on the air with the new signal, Power 102 got a visit from then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton on January 17, 1990. Three years later he would become President of the United States. He came by to join Dennis Rogers on the air that afternoon after making a jobs announcement in the city. In the photo to the left he talks into the mic and you can just barely see a Junior Walker album in front of him. "Bill Clinton is a very interesting guy," Dennis said in 2010. "You could tell that he was super intelligent, but very accessible. Most politicians that I've interviewed over the years tend not to be that way. They tend to be a little aloof. They don't answer questions directly in many cases, but he answered every question I asked him and I thought he was very honest and very forthcoming."

DENNIS ROGERS: "It was rumored at that time that he was planning a run for the presidency, however his office had denied it. But he was in town for a dedication or a meeting and we arranged to have him come by, Guy actually did, and it was probably one of the best, if not THE best interviews I have ever had the pleasure of doing because he was so laid back and so friendly and was very accessible. He came in and sat down next to me and about 15 minutes into the program he said, 'Dennis, do you have any Junior Walker records?' And I said, 'Well as a matter of fact, I've got his greatest hits right over here,' and he said 'Well you know, I'm a sax man myself,' so we played 'Shotgun' and a couple others that I think he picked out. Then toward the end of the interview I said, 'Governor, I've got to ask you this because our listeners want to know. Are you going to make a run for the presidency?' He said, 'well that's to be determined. At this point, no, but I can't say what will happen in the future.' And of course we all know what happened in the future. He overstayed, he was supposed to be there I think only about 20 minutes and I think the interview ended up being about 45 minutes and his state police escort stood outside the control room the whole time watching the whole event. It was a very exciting day for Power 102."

THE POWER 102 PARTY ZONE

Another way we reached out to potential listeners and generated revenue was with the Power 102 Party Zone. A few of us on staff would DJ dances and parties, often at very distant schools and country clubs. To the right is Phil Jamison in 1991 at the Twin Rivers prom, about 50 miles nothwest of Jonesboro. The biggest ordeal about doing these events was having to lug the equipment, including a couple of speakers, a mixer, CD players and a whole bunch of crates full of CDs. I guess being a DJ is a lot easier today since you can have a whole library of music on a computer or ipod. But back then you had to make sure you had a CD of whatever anyone would potentially want to hear. And the funny thing was, it seemed the smaller the town, the more rap and hard dance music they would want, while at the last dance I did at one of the high schools in Jonesboro it seemed all anyone was requesting was country music.

The dances were a big pain to do, but we could make what would have been a weeks pay at the radio station for just a few hours work. And sometimes they could be fun. At that time I (Michael Hibblen) had a tiny Nissan Sentra, so whenever Guy would ask me to do a dance he would loan me his car, a larger four-door Mazda 626, which had a big trunk and just enough room to load everything inside.

PATTESON BROTHERS SELL THE STATIONS

Drastic changes were about to come to the radio industry and KJBR and KBTM were among the first wave of stations to be impacted by deregulation. A staff meeting was called for August 18, 1992. I think all of us knew something was up. A full staff meeting was extremely rare, especially since you had people working all hours of the day and night having to come together. There were fears that a format change could be in the works, but I don't think any of us expected that the stations were about to be sold to a cross-town rival, country powerhouse KFIN. To the right is the promo card we read on the air that day announcing the deal. Normally when I'd kill such cards at the start of my shift, I'd put them into Dennis' box, but I kept that card all these years as a momento.

DENNIS ROGERS: "My son, my wife and I had gone to Florida on vacation and the day after I got back to work, Alan and Guy took me, Rene Agee, who was the office manager and Perry Jones, who was in sales, to lunch at Piero's downtown, which at that time was located in the basement of the building where the Radio Jonesboro Group is operating out of right now. I thought something was up because we didn't do lunch a whole lot. Guy and I would occasionally have lunch, so I thought something was going on. Alan told us at the lunch that he had agreed to sell the two stations to Duke Broadcasting. And I'll be honest with you, I was in shock. I had no idea that was going to happen. It didn't surprise me, but it shocked me. So he said tomorrow we're going to make the announcement to the staff and then Larry Duke is coming in to make his announcement. And that's exactly what happened. We were sworn to secrecy and didn't say anything. The next morning, I think it was around 11, Alan gathered the staff together and made the announcement that he had made an agreement to sell the stations to Duke Broadcasting and he assured everyone that in the meantime, in the transition, everyone's job was secure, that part of his agreement was that every full-time staffer would be guaranteed six months of employment with full benefits and after that it would be negotiable with Duke Broadcasting. Right after that, Larry Duke and Clyde Bass, who was his general manager, came in and spoke to us. And Steve Tyler, who was our production guy and afternoon disc jockey, who had worked for Larry Duke and been let go there and was very bitter about it, walked out. Right after the meeting he came into my office and he said, 'Here's my key. I'm out of here. I'm not going to work for Larry Duke' and he walked out. Everybody else stayed, including myself and it wasn't very long before he started making the transition from Power 102 to Kiss-FM. It was lame, but Duke was only interested in making money. He had been very successful with KFIN. He knew how to make money."

Up until that time such a transaction would not have been allowed because of an FCC rule that limited ownership by a company to one AM and one FM in every market. But the first steps of deregulation had recently been cleared, which over the next decade would dramatically alter the radio industry. I recall Duke saying during that meeting that the key reason he wanted to buy the stations was that KJBR, with its incredible coverage area, was the only station in the market that he felt could have offered a significant challenge to KFIN, had it changed formats to country. He assured us we would all still have jobs at the station, but did make it clear there would be some modifications in the format coming. Dennis then typed out the promo card that you see above, which we immediately began reading on the air, announcing the change. Walking out of that meeting was a little surreal, with none of us really sure what was ahead. It wasn't just the radio business that was changing at that point. As Alan Patteson noted in 2011, deregulation was happening everywhere, changing the entire business landscape.

ALAN PATTESON JR: "I think radio, as many other industries... banks had to get larger, stores were getting larger, supermarkets were getting larger. You either had to get in radio for it to be economically feasible in a much bigger way or get out of it. Our commercial interests were primarily agricultural. Much as we enjoyed the radio, we were not inclined to expand in that direction. Guy was managing the station and we really needed him elsewhere at that stage of the game and Larry Duke happened to come along with an attractive offer. That was the truth about it."

It took more than a year for the sale to actually go through, which Alan Patteson says happened toward the end of 1993. But he says the agreement gave Duke the ability to immediately take over KJBR and KBTM. "Technically it was under our control," Patteson said, "but he operated it from the time that we made the sale. He took over by contact. We had a contract until the FCC approved the final sale."

ALAN PATTESON JR: "35 years was long enough. I enjoyed it. There were some really happy, fun years, but I had had it and we really needed to get out of it or get bigger, either go and buy stations and get a little bit larger, which most of them have done, as you've seen. Larry didn't hold his for very long before he sold them. And really now, it's like banks, they've changed signs so many times and merged and bought, you don't know who... I really haven't kept up with radio in the last many years. I don't know who they are, they changed hands so fast there for a while. But no, I really don't miss it. I enjoyed it, but I was glad... I think Guy may have missed it more than I did."

Duke brought in Jim Grant to become General Manager, who had held a similar position at longtime Little Rock pop station KKYK-FM 104, where Duke had also worked decades before with owner Ted Snider. They immediately altered the format, eliminating all harder edged music and making us a hot adult contemporary station Within a few weeks we also abandoned the name Power 102, which I felt was a shame because we had worked so hard building up that brand, especially because there were a LOT of cars in northeast Arkansas with our bumper stickers on the back.

The clock was ticking for Program Director Dennis Rogers. "I stayed for seven months after that and I just... we didn't see eye to eye programming-wise and I said 'it's time for me to do something else' so I got out of radio for about four years."

Read KBTM/KJBR History Part 5