The KVIQ television station was located at the top of Humboldt Hill, the same site where KEET-TV, Channel 13, is located today. In 1961, Allen Jones began as a sales manager for KVIQ after spending 16 years with Safeway as a store manager, and was appointed general manager and vice president in 1972. On March 31, 1958, KVIQ-TV came on the air, founded by Carroll Hauser and owned by Carl and Leah McConnell, longtime residents of Redding and Happy Camp. Paul Hoff was appointed vice president and general manager of KRED in the early ’60s, purchasing the radio station in 1965, keeping it in the family by selling it to his son Jim Hoff, who owned it until 1994 when it was sold to Clear Channel Communications.
Keka radio tv#
“My grandfather came from Grants Pass in 1956 with my dad (Jim Hoff) to run the TV station” at the request of Smullin, Henry Hoff said. Henry Hoff, 21, remembers his grandfather, Paul Hoff, who used to run KIEM News Channel 3 in the building still located today next door to the KRED radio station at Spruce Point overlooking Humboldt Bay. The lone station offered programs from its affiliations with CBS, NBC, ABC and DuMont, which folded in 1955. Understanding the power of images and voice, Smullin started KIEM-TV as Eureka’s first television station, going on the air on Oct. In the late ’60s, the radio studios were moved from the “Radio Center” to new quarters around the corner at Sixth and D streets in Eureka. Call letters for the radio station were changed from KIEM to KRED in July 1961, and in 1962 half of KRED was acquired from Smullin’s Redwood Broadcasting Co. Telford would later moonlight as one of the first College of the Redwoods broadcasting instructors in the early 1970s. Telford as KIEM radio’s general manager, soon becoming part owner with Smullin. The 110-by-130 foot structure was dubbed “Radio Center” and was occupied at the same time KIEM began using a newly constructed 337-foot half-wave vertical radiating tower and a new Western Electric 443-A-1 kilowatt transmitter.
Keka radio full#
Smullin, then the commercial manager for KIEM radio, acquired part interest in the new Redwood Broadcasting Co., and by 1938 acquired full ownership, purchasing Hanseth’s remaining shares and becoming both president and general manager of KIEM radio, during which time the familiar slogan “The Voice of the Redwoods” was born.ĭuring the mid-1940s, the radio station’s quarters began to get too cramped at the Vance Hotel, and Smullin constructed a new studio and office building just after World War II at the corner of Sixth and E streets in Eureka. In 1934, Hanseth divested individual ownership to his Redwood Broadcasting Co., the same year KIEM moved its transmitter out of the Vance Hotel to a new site at the Eureka inlet along Humboldt Bay (the same site that is home to KINS 980 AM radio today). According to the Broadcast Pro-File, Hanseth was “both the owner, manager and chief engineer of the new Eureka station, the first broadcast voice since the demise of KFWH some five years earlier.”
Keka radio license#
Hanseth applied for a license to open a new broadcast station in Eureka, going on the air on May 12, 1933, as KIEM 1210 AM radio after constructing a more suitable radio station inside the Vance Hotel. in 1927 at the Vance Hotel on 525 Second St. Pumping coverage from five to 100 watts was the short-lived KFWH 1180 AM radio, opened by F. The first radio station in Eureka, with five watts of power, was started by Pete Radelich in 1925, using call letters KFVU 1430 AM. The first radio license in Humboldt County was granted to T.W. “He was very competitive.”Īllen Jones went on to become vice president and general manager for KVIQ-TV in 1972.Ī variety of news clippings, personal interviews and the industry’s historic listing organization, Broadcast Pro-File, painted a picture of early television and radio history on the North Coast.īroadcasters in Humboldt County had to be competitive from the very beginning just to survive. “That’s when Smullin started locking his garbage cans,” Mike Jones laughed. Mike Jones explained that when his father was a salesman for KVIQ-TV, Channel 6, in the 1960s, he would “sneak and go through KIEM-TV (Channel 3) garbage cans to look for scraps of news leads, trying to determine who was on television that day and trying to get their copy.” That was the first day Mike Jones met Smullin, the local radio and television empire-builder and broadcasting icon. Smullin was walking by, stopped at their table and addressed the elder Jones with the provocative question. It was an odd and stilted moment in 1974 as Mike Jones sat eating lunch with his father, Allen Jones, at the Ingomar Club in Eureka. ”So, are you still going through garbage cans?”