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Classic99 turns 60
(by Kara Krekeler - April 07, 2008)
Sixty years ago, St. Louis’ first FM radio station, KFUO, took its place on the dial. Since then, the station has continuously broadcast thousands of hours of classical music and opera throughout the metro area.
Dubbed Classic99, the station will celebrate its 60th anniversary with a benefit concert at 8 p.m. April 13 at the Sheldon Concert Hall. The event will be hosted by former St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conductor Leonard Slatkin and will feature the talents of SLSO concertmaster David Halen, 14-year-old piano prodigy Peng Peng, soprano Sylvia McNair, pianist Michel Camilo and double bassist Edgar Meyer. Each of the musicians is volunteering his or her time on behalf of Classic99.
“We think of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra as our first partner,” said Dennis Stortz, director of broadcast operations for the station, adding that he sees Classic99 as a good way for the Symphony to reach beyond its patrons at Powell Symphony Hall. “The St. Louis community is fortunate to have a radio station that’s dedicated to the preservation of classical music.”
Indeed, there are few classical music stations on the dial in most major cities and even fewer that are independently owned. KFUO has been continuously owned by the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod since its inception. “Having a fully independent, non-university classical music station in a large metro area like this … well, it’s an unusual situation in the media market,” Stortz said.
KFUO got its start way back in 1924, when the station first began broadcasting as an AM station. In 1927, the station moved into a small stone building built for radio use on the campus of Concordia Seminary in Clayton.
In 1948, the Lutheran Church made the bold move to acquire an FM frequency. “All the AM stations were invited to take a channel, and it shows great foresight that the Missouri Synod got one,” Stortz said, explaining that at that time, most radios were able to receive only AM signals and FM languished for almost two decades before consumer electronics caught up with the technology.
For more than 25 years, the two stations simulcast their programming, stopping only in 1974 when the Federal Communications Commission outlawed such practices; KFUO-FM became its own listener-supported station that year, and in 1983 became a commercial station and adopted the Classic99 name.
But despite all the changes, both KFUO stations are still based in that building tucked back on a corner of Concordia Seminary’s property, and it is the oldest continuously used broadcasting building in the country, Stortz said.
“We have upgraded all of our equipment and office areas, and we’ve begun addressing the building with a piecemeal refurbishing,” Stortz said, adding that it would be difficult — both financially and physically — to overhaul the whole building at once. “We work on additional physical needs as we can, or as we have to.”
A walk through the building reveals several images from the past 80 years. Just off the lobby, the original studio is still used by the AM station, while a turn down the hall reveals windows and doors painted with 1930s signs for the transmitter room and “engineer’s laboratory.” One room, still in use today, shows the evolution of music storage and playback, with record and cassette players sitting alongside CD players and computers, which today play the music digitally.
But those bits of the past are simply a part of KFUO’s style. Stortz said that when he first walked into the building for an internship 35 years ago, “I thought I walked into a 1940 timewarp. It was just classic!“It’s hard to describe; you almost had to experience it,” he said. “It was like walking into a frozen time frame. It was weird, but fascinating.”
Stortz said he remembers seeing rooms filled with teletype machines, and longtime news announcer Herb Freer smoking a pipe in the broadcast booth, filling it up with so much smoke that one could barely see into the room. That same broadcast booth is still in use, albeit without the pipe smoke.
The station has a room dedicated to the history of radio, with old record players, radios and microphones on display — even the station’s first transmitter is in there, a 6,700-watt mono transmitter that was still in working condition when it was replaced in the 1970s, Stortz said. By comparison, today’s transmitter is 100,000 watts and broadcasts in stereo.
Despite all of the reminders of the past, Stortz said he fully expects the FM station to be around at least another 60 years, thanks in part to its partnerships with arts organizations, advertisers and the community.
“The community has really taken in the station,” he said. “We have listeners who are second, third, even fourth generation listeners to KFUO. It’s a unique situation. I know it sounds corny, but we really feel like there’s an obligation to the community to fill that [classical music] niche.”
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