KHAD Radio has a shaky history. It began in 1968 as a small-town country station with 1,000 watts day, later upgrading to 5,000-daytime in the late 70's or early 80's. It's signal was directional; it transmitted away from St. Louis (mostly likely, at the request of the owner, so as not to compete with the St. Louis market) and away from the east (to protect Fort Wayne's WOWO 1190, which at that time, was still a 50-000 watt Class A, clear-channel station). For it's first 20 years, it was owned and/or managed by Pinckney Cole, a local resident. Sometime in the late 80's, he added a low-power FM station, KDJR 100.1. The format was country (with an emphasis on classic country), news, public affairs, and religious programming on Sunday. It was sold around 1990, but with a couple of years, the station went dark (I'm guessing, due to bankruptcy). In 1993, two people from Kennett, Missouri...Charles Isabelle (a gospel music songwriter) and Bill Odum, a banker, purchased the station and put it back on the air, first by simulcasting country music on both stations, then later splitting off the AM into a gospel music format. They hired Carla Hill, a lady from Potosi who had managed KYRO there for many years (I worked there twice under her when I was a teen), to be the general manager. A year later, she hired me to be the news director. But not long after that, they brought in a new general manager, who demoted her, took some of her sales accounts and gave them to himself and another employee he had hired to do sales, then fired her after they had gotten into a heated argument. Things really went down hill from there. He and his new sales lady failed to bring sufficient revenue.....so much that I worked my last four weeks for them without getting paid. I didn't get my back pay until a couple of months after I had quit and the owners had fired the GM. But by that time, it was too late. Their station had been driven so far down into the ground that it could not be saved, so it closed its doors a few months later and chalked its history up with a second bankruptcy. It was put back on the air again a few years later by another local business owner who hired a completely new staff (possibly all out-of-towners) and they managed to bring the station back to life for a few years with a country/talk format. I'm not sure when they flipped to a sports format, but I believe it was not long after the station was sold again to the Riverfront Times (a St. Louis newspaper) and the call letters were changed to KRFT. By that time, the signal had been re-configured to target St. Louis (but still avoiding Illinois and Indiana to protect WOWO). Since then, it has changed formats and ownership a few times; today, the city of license has been changed to Fairview Heights, Illinois and the studios are somewhere in the St. Louis metro area. The format is talk and targets a staunchly right-wing white conservative audience (listen to them for a while if you don't believe me) with border-line shock-jock type programming. When they aren't doing talk, they are playing classic country music.
