1430 was Kiss 108-Rex Sox baseball

[Kevin Vahey]

Up until MOYL the only thing 1430 had was race results from Suffolk and Rockingham - every bookie within 50 miles listened.
-----Original Message-----
From: "Chris Hall" <chris2526@comcast.net>
Sender: boston-radio-interest-bounces@tsornin.BostonRadio.orgDate: Thu, 14 Jul 2011 01:03:05 
To: <boston-radio-interest@lists.BostonRadio.org>
Subject: Kiss 108-Rex Sox baseball

Some of the info in the previous posts are not quite accurate, though the call letters were to be changed to WXKS it was
originally to be a Kiss of beautiful music as in WKSS in Hartford run by Perry Ury a friend of Cecil Heftels.  He suggested the 
change to KISS as WW call letters are notoriously bad with listener recall.  Heftel had a 
major promotional campaign with the billboards printed and ready to go when the Bonneville s..t hit the fan.
I still have some of the promotional items they paid a fortune for. Arnie Ginsburg was not the new GM, Tom Hoyt the 
President of Heftel came in with Richie Balsbaugh and took the department heads to the Coply Plaza for an all night brainstorming
emergency meeting and the format change was born.  Ritchie worked for Knight Quality Stations in the next suite from WILD
and it was decided to bring in SJW. I was one of the 4 people on the staff that made the transition.

As for the Music of your Life coming to WXKS-AM, During the fall of 1980 I was sent to engineer a remote for KISS-108 that had Ron Dwyer spend the night in the Amityville horror house, it was on this trip that I heard and recorded WHLI which I gave to Rich Balsbaugh and Tom Hoyt. They were looking
for something to split off the AM telling them my parents would go out of their mind to hear this music again. Arnie contacted Al Hamm and WXKS
became MOYL’s fifth station giving 1430 a real identity and ratings for the first time since it went on the air.

As for the night signal, there were two studies done, one in 1959 was a 5 KW three tower in line array across from RD Little at Fresh Pond Pkwy
This site was picked for full COL coverage to Medford. The second was a three tower array behind 99 Revere beach Parkway in the mid 60’s that was to be built until the MTA made plans for taking part of the land for the Orange line that was where the third tower was to sit.
The COL with 5 KW and the third tower just squeezed by.
When the Music of your life became such a hit Arnie and I pulled  out the old studies, he had a thought as to could we dump tower 
three running  1 KW which worked.if the COL was changed to Everett. The construction started after I move d to General Cinema Communications.