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Shannon’s Broadcast A Sea of Change Near Lake Coeur d’Alene, Idaho by Shannon Huniwell |
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It’s probably safe to say that many radio buffs started acquiring an interest in the broadcasting business while still in grade school or junior high. Often such fascination began by simply identifying with a favorite local Top-40 music station—especially one that our parents considered to be playing incredibly lousy music. Add to that a bit of dreaming about owning a station someday. Young listeners with a touch of “collector” in them sometimes extended that focus into amassing weekly music surveys, QSL cards, bumper stickers, or just by keeping a list of call letters and the locale of every station they could pick up on a given night. Key to this was having a copy of Radio-TV Experimenter with the “White’s Radio Log” near the back of the magazine. As a kid, I spent hours—in intervals of spare minutes here and there—pouring over various editions of White’s lists. For some reason, certain quadruple consonant callsigns (like WZZZ when it was assigned to the now defunct kilowatt daytimer on 1510 in Boynton Beach, Florida) and dual cities of license (for example, the 950 kHz, 1000-watt daytime facility for Potomac-Cabin John, Maryland) captured enough of my attention for me to pull the family atlas off the shelf and pinpoint the place. Most interesting to this erstwhile youthful easterner, though, were stations in communities that were rather far west of me and tough to spell. Few fit that bill better than KVNI in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Because one or two early 1960s “White’s Radio Log” editions note a mysterious and short-lived AM competitor to KVNI that even most long-time residents there never heard of, I asked Jan Lowry of Broadcast Pro-Files to see if he could dig up any other evidence of more than a single standard broadcast station in that beautiful northern Idaho community. His findings surprised me. And to sweeten the results, Jan also sent facts about a slick proposal there that the FCC bought, apparently without blinking a governmental regulatory eye. |
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