Doc Holiday 1976

In response to Pat's question:

Greetings, Emperor, may you live a thousand years!

This is in response to Pat's email posted on 10/17,
enquiring as to which Doc Holiday was on at night in
1976. That would've been me, David B. Treadway, on my
second tour of duty at KAAY. At least I think it was
the second; things have always been a bit blurry in
the radio business. You can be here today and gone
today.

Like Pat, KAAY was a big part of my youth. It was the
only thing happening for a teenager in the "suburbs"
of the VERY small town of Friendship, Arkansas (south
of Malvern, north of Arkadelphia, exit 83 on I-30) in
the early 1960s. From the first minute that I heard
Rock And Roll on KAAY, my consuming ambition was to
work at the Big Station in Little Rock. I saw it as my
way out of the boondocks. I would have been 25 when
Pat heard me on the air, and from what he says about
28 years in the business, that would put me eight or
nine years older than him. Give or take.

1976 was a watershed year for KAAY. In my opinion, it
marked the beginning of the long, sad decline of that
great station. Early that summer, Multimedia (who had
bought the station from Lin Broadcasting) decided to
dismiss Pat Walsh as General Manager. Operations
Manager and Program Director Wayne Moss was also
sacked at the time.

At that moment, KAAY began to lose its heritage and
its sense of connection to Little Rock and Arkansas.
We "old-timers" talked of it as the Invasion Of The
Brilliant Yankees--outsiders who had come to Podunk to
show us stupid, slow Southerners how it was done in
the Big Leagues. The latter half of 1976 was when
radio in Little Rock began to lose its soul, and I
suspect that KAAY was never again the money machine
that Pat Walsh had made it.

On November 1, 1976, we moved to the new studios at
2400 Cottondale Lane. The Riverdale section of town is
now thriving and crowded, home to Alltel world
headquarters among other notable businesses. In 1976,
it was regarded as swamp land and Pat Walsh caught a
great deal of grief from his peers about his decision
to move the station there. As usual, Walsh had the
last laugh.

There was a certain "magic" about KAAY; it was a
living, breathing entity--apart and complete unto
itself *without* the human beings who made it run. For
the past thirty years, I have been convinced that the
magic did NOT make the move with us from 1425 West 7th
Street to 2400 Cottondale.

It would take the clueless Multimedia almost the next
ten years to run KAAY completely into the ground, but
the Final Approach began on November 1, 1976.