October 1991 - January 1993

When I started with Power 102, it was a hard-edged CHR station, playing a broad mix of pop, dance and at night, hip-hop and heavy metal. The 100,000-watt station, which proudly boasted of its 1,100-foot broadcast tower, was the most powerful station in northeast Arkansas and was heard in parts of five states, also showing up in the ratings for Memphis, which was about 70 miles away.

By the time I started with Power 102 in October 1991, I had been listening to it for more than a year, since moving to Jonesboro for college. What impressed me was the broad range of new and often edgy music it played, mixed with jocks who seemed to have a lot more personality than other stations I was hearing.

Program Director Dennis Rogers hired me part-time initially, working one shift a week, Saturday mornings, 12 am to 6 am. Within a few months I was offered a full-time position when overnights became available, working four nights a week along with a Sunday afternoon shift. I must confess that I enjoyed the name recognition that came from working at such a popular station.

Power 102 had the biggest audience of any station I had worked for at that point. Even in the middle of the night if I had any kind of contest giveaway I would be flooded with calls. There was also a regular stream of requests, many of which came from college students up late or people working overnight shifts at convenience stores, hotels and the local Kinko's store. I often taped phoners with these folks, commiserating by saying things like, "helping you make it through the overnight." I actually enjoyed working Midnight to six. First off, I've always been a late night person and feel more of a creative peak at those hours. Also, it was much less likely that any of my bosses would be listening, so I felt more freedom to skip songs I couldn't stand or play different edits of songs.

I was also the unofficial music director, putting in new music every Friday morning and pulling songs that were going out of rotation. I helped keep the music library organized, relabeling songs as they changed categories. It gave me something to do in the middle of the night.

Production here was very well done. The production room was equipped with state of the art equipment, as well as processors and harmonizers that could alter a voice and make me sound like Java The Hut, a chipmunk (as in Alvin and the Chipmunks), or any other number of possibilities. The Promos, sweepers and ID for Power 102 were also great, using the legendary voice of Mitch Craig, who remains one of the top voices nationwide for this kind of work. The station really went out of its way to sound as professional as possible.

It had only been a few years since the station had essentially been, as people told me, a joke in the market, as a poorly done rock station. But in the years just before I moved to Jonesboro the Patteson family, which had owned the stations for decades, made vast upgrades, building a new tower and buying state of the art boards and equipment. In later years I assumed they had done that so that they could then sell the stations for the best possible price. But during a visit with Guy Patteson in 2004, he told me that they made the upgrade because the FCC could have reduced the authorized broadcast power for the FM had they not moved it to a better tower. Before the transmitter was on a very stick tower next to the ASU campus. I heard all kinds of crazy stories about how having 100,000 watts being blasted on such a short stick very close to dorm buildings meant that college students could pick up the sound of the radio station in toasters or even their braces.

It would typically be two of us, with one driving while the other threw candy out to the crowds. We also worked hard to try and get station bumper stickers on the backs of cars. Periodically I would go out with another jock and drive around in the van looking for Power 102 stickers. We would usually spot someone fairly quickly, then flash our lights and get the driver to pull over. Then whoever was back at the station would record the stop, which was being fed back to the station live using the van's microwave link. I would get out with a mic in my hand, congratulate the driver and let the person take their pick of any number of prizes. Plus the winner's name would go into a drawing for a bigger prize. Those broadcasts always sounded great, often because the drivers would be so excited to actually be stopped because of the bumper sticker. I wish I still had some of those on tape today.

For a time the station was without a News Director to anchor newscasts during the morning show with host Phil Jamison. So I filled in for several months, staying a couple of hours after my regular shift ended, anchoring short updates every half-hour. We had a news service that would fax national news summaries every morning. I would use those stories and rewrite a couple of local and state stories from local newspaper The Jonesboro Sun.

Part of this also required me doing 10 minute newscasts daily for AM sister station KBTM-AM 1230. This was a mostly automated news and talk station that had a colorful history. According to station documents, it was started by teenager Jay Beard in 1924 as part of earning a Boy Scout's merit badge. His dad, who owned a music and electronics store in Paragould called Beard's Temple of Music, thought it would help sell radios if the town had its own station. So he increased KBTM's power and it took off from there. It would eventually move to Jonesboro and by the time I was working there, was broadcasting mostly national news and talk shows. It was also the second oldest affiliate running St. Louis Cardinal baseball games, many of which I ran the board for, inserting local commercials in the hours before my airshift began.

Everything changed with the first steps of deregulation. Up to that point, a company was only allowed to own one AM and one FM station in each market. But with changes that allowed one company to operate multiple stations, KJBR and KBTM were bought by Duke Broadcasting, which owned the only other 100,000-watt station in town, KFIN, a country station.

We were told in a staff meeting and then new boss Larry Duke walked in the door. One person, afternoon jock Steve Tyler who had worked for Duke previously at KFIN, walked out on the spot, refusing to work for the guy.

Duke 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 waste because it had been so well marketed and had its bumper stickers on cars throughout the region. During a transition period we even went about two weeks with no name at all. We would just back announce the music, but never give any kind of station name except at the top of the hour, when we would say the legal ID of KJBR, Jonesboro. We would also have to answer what had been known as the Power Line, simply as "request line, hello." All we could tell callers was that a surprise was coming up and to keep listening. Most listeners were extremely disappointed because we had really built up a following as an edgy station and suddenly started playing a lot more Celine Dion and Michael Bolton. We even had listeners call in from Memphis, which the signal just barely reached, telling us how upset they were. At that time there was no real CHR station there, so we were the only source of harder edged pop music. We had even started showing in the Memphis ratings, always near the bottom, but for a station in a small town about an hour away that was quite a feat.