Chapter 2

The regional stations dominated the early history of broadcasting, but in their shadow, the hometown station -- for which KFJB was the very early prototype -- was taking root in other places. These hometown stations would play a highly significant part in the history of Iowa broadcasting, and in the lives of the people they served.

One of them was in the Mississippi River city of Clinton. There were only about 17 commercial stations operating in Iowa, when the mayor cut the ribbon to officially launch KROS in September of 1941. It would be deeply ingrained in the life of Clinton for the rest of the century.

KROS was formed by a group of local investors, but they hired Morgan Sexton, an alumnus of the WHO experience, to manage the station. Sexton brought the WHO philosophy of full service, public interest broadcasting to the 500-watt station and applied it on a much smaller playing field. It is an operating philosophy long since abandoned by many stations, but remains substantially intact at KROS today.

"The goal of the company that owns the station is to operate a broadcast facility that's consistent with our 55-year tradition of broadcast service to the community. Many of the programs we have on are on at the exact same time for that entire 50-year period," said Don Schneider, manager of KROS.

One of those programs is an hour-long homemaker show called "Homespun Lane", which Margaret Gideonsen inaugurated. "We did an awful lot of recipes and household hints and how to cure this, that, the other thing. It was great fun," Gideonsen said.

Gideonsen started working at KROS while she was still in high school. She did many other jobs at the station besides hosting "Homespun Lane", and stayed at KROS until she retired.

So did Hank Dihlman, who joined KROS as an announcer in 1942 and became manager in 1976. Over the course of more than 40 years, Dihlman did just about everything there is to do at a radio station, including more than 5,000 play-by-play sports broadcasts. Eventually, 40 years of calling games took its toll on his vocal cords.

"Yes, I did it for 40 years and that's why the voice sounds like it does now. Used it a lot, roughly 5,000 games of one kind or another. Something I thoroughly enjoyed," Dihlman said.

From the beginning, KROS put a lot of emphasis on local news and was a key player in holding the community together, as Clinton fought the disastrous Mississippi flood of 1965 and succeeded in keeping the water out of the downtown area. Hank Dihlman says KROS did nothing but cover the flood 24 hours a day for three weeks.

"The downtown area basically was protected (with) a temporary dike and I think it was very interesting. We would put out a call -- oh, there was a problem in one section -- and within 10 minutes there would be 40 or 50 people there, filling sandbags and piling them into places where they had to be," he said. "I've always thought it was one of the greatest examples of cooperation that this city has seen."

Before he retired in 1986, Dihlman was instrumental in forming a group which retained local ownership by buying back the AM station after KROS and its companion FM station had been sold to outside interests.

As Morgan Sexton had come from WHO to manage KROS, his successor, Walt Teich, left KROS in the early 1950's to take over management of KOEL in Oelwein and develop another variation of this new tier of hometown stations.

KOEL's Dick Petrik was honored with lifetime achievement awards from both the Iowa Broadcast News Association and the Northwest Broadcast News Association (as seen above)

Teich hired Dick Petrik, who invented the concept of doing local news -- including birth and death announcements -- in a 16-county area in northeast Iowa.

Over a distinguished 40-year career, he did most of the reporting by telephone.

"All I would say is, 'This is Dick' and 'KOEL' and everybody knew me," Petrik said. "Our surveys, not necessarily taken by us, but by national groups, would show we used to have -- in the immediate counties around, we'd have 80 to 90 percent audience."

The value of that hometown radio station was proven once and for all on May 15, 1968 -- the day twin tornadoes struck Charles City and Oelwein. The twister cut a devastating path across the center of Oelwein, but only two lives were lost. Petrik lived at the transmitter for the next week, broadcasting thousands of disaster-related messages.

But, ironically, it was the transmitter engineer who saw the twister coming and got the life-saving message on.

"Somebody at the station got the tornado warning on the air," Petrik said. "Our transmitter man, he managed to get the warning out and he went and jumped in a hollow, because he knew it was going to hit our transmitter. The tower fell down, just missed our transmitter...he was credited with being able to save peoples' lives by getting it on quick enough...he later became a minister -- he got religion."

Another architect of the growing local radio phenomenon was Ben Sanders, who got into radio very early in the game despite the advice of his father who owned a Cadillac dealership and told his son he should learn how to grease cars.

"And I told him, 'Nuts' -- I was going to go into broadcasting. He said, 'It'll never last,' but he was wrong -- it did."

Ignoring his dad's advice, Sanders found his first niche as a salesman on one of the country's first radio stations, in San Jose, California. From there, he passed through KFJB in Iowa and wound up in sales at an Illinois station. Sanders traveled back to Iowa when he got wind that a station in Spencer was in financial trouble and the owner was under a court order to sell his interest by December 31, 1944. Sanders made his offer on that New Year's Eve.

"The upshot of it was, I said, 'If you want to sell to me -- fine, well and good. I'm all done and here's the quotation, the price -- $19,000 for 68-and-a-half percent of the station. It was practically bankrupt, as you know. But when the clock on the courthouse rings 11 o'clock, I'm done. (I'll) get back on the train tomorrow and go home. So he sold it to me," Ben Sanders said.

"Of course, our problem in those early days was WHO," Sanders said in an interview with his son Bill, who now owns the station. "WHO was one of the most fantastic stations in the country in those days. It was Iowa broadcasting."

The problem was convincing the audience loyal to WHO that their hometown station could provide a service worth listening to. Sanders and his staff were among the first to do that with great success.

Today, there are more than 200 radio stations in hometowns, large and small, all across Iowa.