Local radio arrived in Mt. Pleasant in 1948 when Winston O'Neil Ward established radio station KIMP-AM, which began broadcasting on October 8, 1948. Winston Ward was born August 28, 1917 in Titus County to Mr. and Mrs. H.G. Ward, and was a life-long Titus County resident. He married Melba Stanley of Pittsburg on November 25, 1939. Before opening radio station KIMP, he operated a radio repair shop located in the back of Western Auto Store on the west side of the square and also ran a juke box route. According to those who knew him, and as evidenced by his work on radio stations KIMP-AM and FM, Winston had a knack for electronics. While it has progressed over the years, Mt. Pleasant is not exactly the technology center of the country, and things were worse in 1948. Much of the equipment used in a radio station is highly specialized and very expensive. When you need replacement parts, you can't just run down to the local store and buy them. Winston Ward was very good at both building equipment that he couldn't afford to buy and in building replacement parts and doing his own engineering work when possible.
KIMP was one of the first radio stations in this part of northeast Texas. The closest stations at the time were in Sulphur Springs, Tyler, Longview, and Texarkana. KIMP's call letters stood for "Keep Improving Mt. Pleasant." It was a cutting-edge innovation, especially in such a small town, that made instant celebrities out of its original announcers and performers. Broadcast station licenses were very hard to obtain, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulated the industry very strictly. KIMP was licensed as a 1,000 watt AM radio station authorized to operate during daytime hours (sunrise to sunset). Winston Ward hired Clarence Clifford "Cliff" Taylor as his chief engineer to help maintain the station's transmitter and equipment. Cliff Taylor also recorded station IDs and other announcements aired on the station from time to time in addition to his primary duties as an engineer.
The 1940s and early 1950s were the golden age of radio and northeast Texas was starved for entertainment. There was no television, and the only form of readily available entertainment was attending a movie or the occasional dance with a live band. Most people who listened to radio could only receive distant programs from KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana or WFAA in Dallas, Texas. Radio station KIMP featured a combination of recorded and regularly scheduled live programming. KIMP's d-jays developed quite a fan base and received fan mail from miles around, as did bands that played on the station. Shortly after establishing KIMP, Ward established radio station KBEL in Idabel, Oklahoma in 1953, and added KWDG-FM in Idabel in the late 1960s.
Radio station KIMP is located on Highway 67 West, approximately one-half mile on the right from the current intersection of Highway 67 and Ferguson Road, which did not exist in 1948. The original studios were located in a small concrete block building immediately west of the current studio. The building contained business offices, the AM (and later FM) transmitter equipment, record library, broadcast control room, and three studios for use by live performers. Mr. Ward and Cliff Taylor hand-built the AM control console and much of the equipment used in the station. To their credit, the same hand-built AM control console was still in use in the early 1970's.
The AM radio transmitting antenna consisted of a 300' tower that was connected to an arrangement of several copper cables attached to its base and buried in the ground to form the second half of the antenna. KIMP's tower stood in a pasture immediately behind the radio station. It was located in a marsh because the ground stayed wet much of the year and the wet soil provided better conductivity to ground the antenna. KIMP had excellent coverage when it first went on the air because of this.
Winston Ward told Clint Cooper that the station offered a $5.00 prize to the listener who sent in a post card from the greatest distance when the station first went on the air. The winning post card came from Canada.
The AM broadcast band in the United States ranges from 540 KHz to 1600 KHz. Most of the time, the distance and direction that the signal will travel can be calculated based on the radio frequency, antenna height, and the power that is applied to the antenna. AM (amplitude modulation) radio signals are drastically affected by conditions in the ionosphere and sun spots. In certain weather or sun spot conditions the distance and direction that AM signals bounce off of the atmosphere becomes abnormal and the places where they return to earth is unpredictable. Because ionospheric reflection does not occur to any great degree during daytime, AM signals travel principally by conduction over the earth's surface, known as "ground wave" propagation. Useful daytime AM signals, even from a powerful station, are generally limited to a radius of not more than about 100 miles. However, AM radio wave propagation changes drastically at night. At night AM signals reflect off the ionosphere, which acts as a mirror and bounces the signal back to earth, sometimes hundreds of miles away from their point of origin. This is called "sky wave" propagation. Seasonal climatic conditions, especially heat inversions, can create ducts in the ionosphere that allow waves that are not usually subject to refraction to bounce between layers, returning to the earth hundreds or thousands of miles from their source.
There is no way to verify if KIMP being heard in Canada was an abnormally long signal skip or if the station could occasionally be heard that far away. In 1948 AM signals carried much farther than they do today because they weren't impeded by electronic interference from power lines, other radio signals, and other sources of electronic noise. However, Canada was way outside their normal range. The station covered a radius of around 60 miles with a consistently solid signal. In some cases, it could be heard with regularity for 100 miles.
In a 1998 interview with Hudson Old of the East Texas Journal, Bob Dunn said he helped install the equipment in the building and was the first announcer to broadcast on KIMP. Bob Dunn was born and raised in Titus County's Yancey community, which was located east of Mt. Pleasant near Center Grove and Pleasant Grove. In the interview, Mr. Dunn said that he was present when the new transmitter was installed and equipment tests were conducted in the presence of a Mr. Apple from the Federal Communications Commission. He was told to write a test notification message which said "KIMP 960 Mt. Pleasant is on the air for equipment tests" and to broadcast the message every 10 minutes or so the rest of the day while Mr. Apple and Winston Ward made field measurements of the station's signal.
Bob Dunn remained with the station for several years. In the 1998 East Texas Journal interview he said that he everything while he worked there (which was pretty much the way things were in the latter 1960s and early 1970s.) For several years, he signed the station on the air early in the mornings. On weekends, he'd work from sign on to sign off. He collected, wrote, and broadcast the news and weather, selected and played music. He swept floors, emptied the trash, and wrote commercials, which were read live before the station got tape recorders. He announced play by play descriptions of football games. Before equipment to broadcast live remote broadcasts was available, they would tape the game Friday nights on a wire recorder and play it back over the air on Saturday mornings. Later, the station got a tape recorder that used recording tape made of paper with iron oxide sprayed on it, which continually fouled the machine's heads. KIMP ran an afternoon request show, which received hundreds of cards and letters from listeners.
Bob Dunn left KIMP in 1950 to serve a four year hitch in the U.S. Air Force. After the service, he went to work as a staff announcer for WFAA in Dallas and later worked at KDNT in Denton while he attended North Texas State University. After he graduated, he moved to Lubbock and managed a radio and television station. In 1959 he bought a radio station in Nacogdoches, which he operated until he retired in 1989.
Until the latter 1980's or early 1990's, the Federal Communications Commission regulated the industry very strictly down to the smallest details. Each person who was in control of the station had to be licensed by the FCC. The engineer who worked on the transmitter was required to have a First Class Radiotelephone License. Transmitter power and frequency deviation readings had to be recorded in a written log each 30 minutes while the station was on the air. If the transmitter deviated from the center of its frequency too far, the operator was required to shut it down immediately until repairs could be made. While the engineer was on the premises, others could broadcast, service the equipment, and take transmitter readings under his direct supervision. Each d-jay who broadcast was required to have a Third Class Radiotelephone License. An engineer with a First Class license had to be on call 24 hours a day and available to quickly correct any problem that arose. The FCC required that all licenses belonging to operating personnel be posted on the wall in the station for their inspection. Every repair to the transmitter or antenna had to be recorded in a written log, along with the date and time it was made.
A daily program log had to be prepared each day before going on the air. The program log listed each commercial and each public service announcement to be played during the day, along with the time (to the minute) that it was to play. The log also had to include exact times that station ID's were aired, which the FCC required to be given on the hour and half hour at a minimum. The logs were hand-typed on a typewriter, and could not contain typos. If the actual program ran a minute or two early or late in airing a commercial or other announcement, the d-jay on duty had to alter the time on the log to match the actual air time and initial the change.
The FCC monitored stations, both for program content and power and frequency deviation, from a distance. They were subject to walk in the station door at any time and request to see the program and maintenance logs. If they found errors in either the program log or in equipment readings, they didn't mind assessing very heavy fines or pulling the station's operating license at all.
In addition to creating and maintaining the federally-required logs, the station had to bill clients for services rendered, pay accounts payable, and do all of the other things that normal businesses must do.
Ruby Stanley was Winston Ward's sister-in-law and worked in Lone Star Steel's administrative offices when Winston opened the radio station. It wasn't long until Winston was covered in paperwork required to operate the station, so he hired Ruby as his business manager to generate and update the program logs, do the billing, and do other things required to run the business.
One of KIMP's highest rated programs was "The Hometown News." One day when the person who normally read the news didn't show up, Ruby had to cover for them on the air. She was apprehensive about going on the air, so Bob Dunn introduced her as "And now here's Miss Lee with the hometown news." The alias and reading the news stuck, and she read local and area news each weekday morning at 11:00 o'clock for almost 50 years. Ruby was a pioneer woman in broadcasting at a time when radio was a male-dominated business. Miss Stanley retired from radio and later passed away on January 1, 2004. In an ironic twist of fate, KIMP's original 300' AM antenna tower, erected in 1948 when the station was built, crashed into the field behind the station without warning in January, 2004, only a few weeks after her passing.
The Ward family took the responsibility of providing local news and information seriously. Since its founding, radio station KIMP has been the National Weather Service's official weather observation and reporting station for Titus County and has also been the Weather Service's primary weather warning station. When mobile two-way radios became available, KIMP rigged up a mobile news unit to cover local news from the story's scene. In addition to network news feeds from the Texas State Network and the Hometown News, through the early 1970's KIMP's mobile news unit provided on the scene coverage of major local news events of the day. Reporters would rush to the scene of large fires, traffic accidents, and other items of local interest to broadcast their reports live from the scene. The station maintained large backup power generators to insure that the station could stay on the air to provide the public with emergency information during severe storms and other times when the electric grid power failed. The radio station regularly provided public address systems to announce election results on the court house square in addition to broadcasting them.
Jesse Pate was also a pioneer KIMP broadcaster. The following information about Mr. Pate is primarily taken from a 1998 interview that Hudson Old of the East Texas Journal conducted with Jesse, and is used with his permission.
Jesse Pate was raised on a Titus County farm and graduated Cookville High School in 1939. Mr. Pate told Hudson "My generation grew up with radio as a major source of entertainment. Families gathered around the radio to listen to comedies and adventures every night. During the day, women listened to dramas called 'soap operas' because soap manufacturers sponsored them. Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor and Bob Hope became household names as comedians because of radio."
"I wanted to be a part of it," Mr. Pate said. He'd stuttered as a child. "I learned not to stutter standing on a tree stump making speeches to a spotted pup and a bull calf," he said.
Mr. Pate worked at Red River Army Depot after graduating high school. About ten years later, the "Tate Medical" traveling medicine show came through Mt. Pleasant selling elixir. Mr. Pate told Hudson that the medicine "sold like hotcakes."
According to Mr. Pate, when he heard that Winston Ward was building a radio station, he told Ward that when the station began broadcasting that he would like to work as an announcer. Ward told him that he could probably find him a spot - which meant that he could buy some time if he had the money and wanted to.
Rather than sell ads to businesses, Jesse paid $6 for 15 minutes of air time the day KIMP went on the air. He booked 15 minutes each day, five days a week, at 4:00 pm. "When I couldn't find a sponsor, I tracked down that medicine show and bought a case of elixir," Pate said. "I pitched patent medicine and played a couple of records." The response was instant. Patent medicine he bought for 25 cents a bottle sold for $1. "It was an incredible thing," he said, recalling the piles of mail -- not just medicine orders, but fan mail from everywhere. "We got mail from all over southeastern Oklahoma, western Louisiana and as far up in Arkansas as Hot Springs. We got lots of letters from Hot Springs." Later, he expanded the show to 30 minutes, then forty-five minutes, then an hour. Next, the radio station hired him as its advertising sales manager.
Mr. Pate hired Bill Cade, a local photographer, to shoot a promo photo of the Jamboree Boys posing with him in the studio. Mr. Pate would mail listeners a copy of the photo for a dime.
Acquainted with the Louisiana Hayride's booking agent, Mr. Pate booked recording artists for local performances and promoted them on his radio show. Mt. Pleasant became a musical landmark between Dallas and Shreveport. Recording artists of the day sought Jesse Pate out to play their records. Burton Harris, whose Jamboree Boys also served as house band for Jesse Pate's Mt. Pleasant Jubilee and Cornbread Carnival, recalled, "Jim Reeves came to Mt. Pleasant to get Jesse to promote his first record release." Slim Whitman, Kitty Wells, Hank Snow, Hank Williams, Red Sovine, the Wilburn brothers all came to Mt. Pleasant for Jesse Pate. "If you had a Who's Who list of the day, Jesse knew them all," Burton said.
Jesse Pate established the Mt. Pleasant Jubilee and Cornbread Carnival, a local circuit moving from the American Legion Hall to the county's country schools. Jesse did the promotion and ran the shows, and Bob Dunn did the announcing. Burton Harris continued, "For a portion of the gate, schools let us use their auditoriums. We played at Sugar Hill, Marshall Springs, Maple Springs, Argo -- when we got to Cookville, we were up town." Mr. Pate recalled a day he spent riding East Texas with Elvis Presley, tacking up posters promoting an upcoming show. "He wasn't much more than a kid, 18 or 19 years old," Mr. Pate said, "but everywhere we stopped, people loved him. About noon we stopped at the truck stop in New Boston and a waitress there ran for her camera to get a picture." By then, Bob Dunn -- who was less than impressed with Elvis' first appearance -- was playing Elvis' Blue Suede Shoes on KIMP, giving local listeners their first taste of the man who became a legend. Bob Dunn also remembers Hank Williams coming through, but he didn't draw much of a crowd at old American Legion hall. During his show he said he just gotten back from recording a song for MGM and sang Lovesick Blues. A month later it was the biggest thing in show business.
"There weren't any limits," Jesse said. "We played whatever kind of music caught our attention." People today don't understand, Mr. Pate contends, that music then wasn't country western. "You had western music, men like Gene Autry," he said. "And you had what was called hillbilly music, which was really the industry evolution from folk music. I didn't like the term 'hillbilly,' so I started calling it "country music" long before any of us ever heard of country and western. Hank Williams Sr. was country."
Jesse Pate worked for KIMP for four years, then moved to Dallas to work for the Liberty Network where he was heard daily on over 278 stations. He was voted among the nation's top ten disc jockeys in 1954. After leaving Liberty, he worked in a number of radio stations from Texas to Arkansas to California. Health problems struck at the height of his career. He had an ulcer removed from his vocal cords, then suffered three major heart attacks. He retired from radio and worked in insurance. He returned to Mt. Pleasant after his permanent retirement and continued taping a weekly radio program that was played on KIMP-AM until shortly before his death at age 83 on February 6, 2000. He is buried in Lone Star Cemetery north of his native Cookville, Texas.
Charley Monk was another of KIMP's original announcers who worked for the station until the latter 1950s. After leaving KIMP, he was one of the founders of radio station KEGG-AM in Daingerfield. We were unable to locate more historical or current information about him.
From 1948 to the mid 1950s, KIMP-AM featured two live half-hour shows featuring the Jamboree Boys, a local band which at different times included Bob Dun, Robert Colley, Bruce Buckner, Burton Harris, Roy Key, Smoky Coe, Pee Wee Walker, and Dock Knipe. The country music industry was in its infancy, and major entertainers of the day traveled the country to promote their records. Many of them performed at the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, Louisiana, and the Big D Jamboree in Dallas, Texas. It was common for them to drop by KIMP to perform when they were in the area. Among the well-known entertainers of the day who played live on the air at KIMP were Hank Williams, Sr., Red Sovine, The Bailes Brothers, The Wilborn Brothers, The Delmore Brothers, The Shelton Brothers, Bill & Joe Callahan, Slim Whitman, Riders of the Purple Sage, Riley Crabtree, Webb Pierce, Johnny & Jack, Kitty Wells, and Shot Jackson. In the 1990s, someone was looking through a pile of old records that had been dumped in a storage building near the station for many years and found a Sun record that was signed "Thanks KIMP - Elvis Presley."
In the mid-1960's and 1970's, KIMP featured a mixture of all kinds of music (easy listening, country, and rock), local news, and locally produced programs of local interest like the "Swap Shop" where listeners could buy and sell their farm produce and household goods.
When FM radio frequencies first became available, Winston established KIMP-FM in 1961. KIMP-FM was established as a 50,000 watt station and operated from sunup to midnight. The new FM antenna was mounted on the AM tower behind the radio station. In those days, FM radio was a novelty. Even though FM signals provided a wider frequency range, resulting in better quality audio, and were not degraded by electrical interference like AM signals were, people did not take FM seriously for several years after its introduction. Public response was so indifferent, in fact, that the KIMP was unable to sell commercials on the FM station. Because of the lack of enthusiasm shown for FM by listeners, the Wards spent several years experimenting with what to do with the station. For several years, it was fully automated and played pre-recorded easy listening music. Mr. Ward and Mr. Taylor built the station's first automation system from three reel to reel tape recorders that used 10-1/2" reels of 1/4" tape running at 1-7/8" per second. When a tape reached the end of the reel, they used sub-audible tones to swap to another tape deck. Later, KIMP-FM switched to an Autotron automation system that used four large carousels of tape cartridges and could be programmed to play at specific times to provide more variety. The Autotron was programmed by inserting small metal pins into a large grid of holes that corresponded to time units and cartridge numbers, which caused a given cartridge to play at the desired time. Radio station IDs and public service announcements were played from a special rack of cartridges in the machine. In the early 1970's, they changed the format to country music and began airing live request shows. When FM eventually caught on, KIMP-FM drew a larger listening audience than the AM station.
Winston O. Ward passed away on September 24, 1973 after a long illness and fighting Parkinson's disease for several years. He is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery.
David Ward, Winston's son, took over management of KIMP-AM and KIMP-FM. By the mid-1970's, KIMP-AM and FM had outgrown their original 1948 studio building. Much of the 1950s and 1960s equipment had not been upgraded and needed to be replaced. Around 1975, David built a new studio building immediately east of the original building and equipped it with the latest in broadcast equipment. He bought a Honeywell Level 6 computer to generate the station's daily program logs and billing invoices.
Around 1980, David changed KIMP-FM's call letters to KPXI and increased the power output to 100,000 watts. How far FM radio signals reach depend on the height of the antenna and the power put into the antenna from the transmitter. David constructed a new 900 foot antenna tower Franklin County's Purley community and moved the FM transmitter to the tower. The 900' tower raised the broadcast antenna to 1,500 feet above sea level, which gave the station a much greater coverage area. With the massive tower and increased output, KPXI provided an excellent signal as far away as Longview, Tyler, and Canton and could occasionally be heard in downtown Dallas.
Clarence Clifford "Cliff" Taylor worked at KIMP/KPXI until he passed away March 7, 1985. He is buried in Masonic Cemetery, Mt. Pleasant.
The original building was also built on piers over the edge of the marsh that helped the AM antenna provide a good signal. Water frequently stood under the building in rainy weather, which caused the floor joists to deteriorate over the years. The original building deteriorated even faster after it sat vacant when the station moved into the new building. David replaced the old building's roof, but deterioration from the ground up continued. Holes rotted in the floor and parts of the ceiling fell in. The old studio building that was once home to so much local broadcast and music history had deteriorated far past feasible repair and had to be demolished in the latter 1990s.
