At three minutes in length, you won’t hear any commercials, but you will hear a lot of Chuck Diamond. He calls himself Oklahoma City’s original Chucker, but this isn’t the same “Chucker” heard in Scott Lowe’s special elsewhere on this site.
KOMA was another one of those clear channel stations, with a protected 750 mile nighttime signal contour, which meant that nearly all of the western United States could pick it up after dark. A great western Top 40 station, KOMA continued playing music until just a few years ago, when it flipped from it’s then Oldies format to News. I’m not sure when they dropped Top 40 for Oldies, but I’m thinking it was the early 90s. The call letters and Oldies format moved to FM the day of the switch to News.
WKY at 930 and 5,000 watts non-directional consistently beat KOMA like a drum from the 1950s until both gave up top-40.
Tony
WKY beat KOMA because of consistency behind the mic. Danny Williams, Ronnie Kay, Fred Hendrickson…and all went on to eventually reunite at the present-day KOMA at 92.5 FM. KOMA’s current studios, ironically, are in the same building that housed WKY in it’s heyday. Fred and Ronnie still hold daily shifts at KOMA.
WKY may have been the better station, but KOMA is remembered more fondly if you grew up outside of OKC because of it’s huge 50K signal. At this time there was a big Top 40 war in OKC with 4 Stations battling it out. (WKY & KOMA on the AM, KZUE “Z-103” and KOFM on the FM).
KOMA flipped to Oldies in late 1980, to Country in 1982, to automated “Music of Your Life” in 1985, and then finally back to Oldies in the fall of 1988 with much of the old WKY DJ crew. In 1992 they added a FM Simulcast and that lasted until 2003 when 1520 became news-talk KOKC.
I was at WKY when there was a four station country war in OKC with KXY, KEBC, WKY and KOMA all playing country in the post-Urban Cowboy days. I remember KOMA when “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma” playing the song every hour on the hour, they had a crazy strong signal, there was a DQ in Moore that used to have KOMA on their drive thru constantly. But yeah, growing up I was more of a WKY fan, and great jocks was a reason, part of why I went into radio. This tape brings back great memories, thanks for posting!
I’d sure like to hear this aircheck. Somehow, I can’t.
Anbody know why ? I can listen to most all other airchecks easily.
Kent – I see the problem. That’s one of the handful of old airchecks that I didn’t get converted over to my standard player. I’ll try to get to that this afternoon or tomorrow. Thanks for letting me know!
When I lived in OKC back in the summer of 1975 I remember visting the old KOMA building located @ 820 S.W. 4th and seeing a young guy in a room who said he was Chuck Diamond. I still can’t hear this Chuck Diamond aircheck on my computer. Hope you can fix the problem, Steve ! I can hear most all others.
Same problem here. Can’t get it to play.
You guys were right. It’s fixed now. Thanks for the heads up.
Great aircheck! Scoped checks are fun when you have spent time in radio. The songs were “industrial noise”, we wanted to hear the jocks! The jingles! The sweepers! The (dreaded) liners! Got here from a post on Facebook and glad I found it. Thanks for hosting it Airchexx…