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Show Once there was only one radio station ; the editor's coltimn 1 I By MARC If If HADDOCK There was only one radio station in 1964. Its signal reached our isolated Idaho valley all the way from Oklahoma City, and we could only pull in those precious radio waves after dark, when they could bounce off the ionosphere and into our homes (or something like that). We started listening to the station when my older brothers discovered Rock and Roll a few years earlier -and a few years after the rest of the world. Things always came a little slowly to our valley. The call letters were KOMA, and it was pronounced just like the word for a state of profound unconsciousness un-consciousness or heavy sleep. But even though we had to listen to KOMA at night, it didn't put us to sleep, much to our parents' dismay. They urged us to listen to other stations, the ones they liked, with more acceptable. formats and less raucous music. My mother had a penchant for listening to KSL, one of the few daytime signals that reached the valley. The talk was easy and the music was mellow -- the kind of stuff popular in the 40's and 50's among adults. She had no love of what we heard on KOMA. At times, when the wind was blowing in the right direction, we could pull in the weak signals from the station in Soda Springs, 30 miles away. But for us, there was only one station. The rest were superfluous, acceptable and adult - in other words, boring. KOMA was the first station we could listen to that played what is now called "Top Forty" music - were for businesses we would never have an opportunity to patronize - businesses of the type we didn't have in our community of 3,000 men, women and children. (Who could imagine, in those days, a store that just sold tires?) We heard the good songs first on KOMA, and from what we would hear, we decided which singles to buy to play at home. Record stores sold a lot of singles in 1904. The music was very important to us. And so was the radio station. Even when we got our own community radio station, we still listened to KOMA at nights For several reasons. The local station (KVSI) had to appeal to a broad audience and mostly those with the buying power; in other words, the adults. Rock records were picked up about six months after we had heard them from Oklahoma - and the controversial con-troversial ones just didn't get heard. For example, we were all unhappy when the station refused to play "The Ballad of John and Oko" -pretty tame stuff by today's standards. stan-dards. And KVSI would shut down after 9 or 10. But KOMA kept playing through the night. More than this, we were captivated cap-tivated by the voices of the disc jockeys out of Oklahoma City, those voices were deep and melodious -and the good ones could talk so fast you could hardly understand a word they were saying. Besides that, they never missed a beat; if they weren't playing a record or a commerical, they were talking. There was no "dead air" on KOMA. But KVSI featured voices of people we knew too well for them to attempt to trick us by lowerfe: voices. Most of them 3,m classmates. They couldnl pro(i anywhere near as fast new professional deejays in Ott surp and they had a tendency tt pe talking when they ran out of" slide ' to say, which was prettyoften m As a result, we deveW show musical tastes from alandat. Eliza far away as that Spanish sK:'j Ihisj dwelt near KOMA on the rj favor I don't remember when I f B trying to pull in V CP' Oklahoma to listen to n towns where I went to p-stations p-stations that played roc i; I spent two years cW ;j transmitter for ;' language station we used r j -but we weren't allowed lithe li-the radio. Earlier this year, driving home late at; basketball game in ru struggling to fm . anything, on the ra . keep me awake. Sol J ; KOMA, to see if they" music I grew up with- i I found the Spanish AIR I station, and listened minutes. Now I language, but I had9 a taste for the music Then, fiddling aro, more, I heard the J. letters-KOMA 50,000 big watts in...tosomel940s My mother wouldj' Why. she might evV at night to listen to available anyy radio, with all thai roll music playing'" beaming boisterous tunes all the way from the plains to the Rocky Mountains. My brother's radio was permanently per-manently tuned to KOMA's frequency, close to a station that played Spanish music. (We wouldn't even turn it on until dark. ) When we slept out, we'd take along our transistors to listen to the forbidden for-bidden airways eminating from Oklahoma. Then we would be treated to a world outside our own. The station would relay information in-formation about Rock and Roll groups traveling to unknown cities in states that were vague places on the map to us. And many of the commercials we would listen to |