KAKC is a sports talk radio station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The station is owned by iHeartMedia, Inc.. Its studios are located at the Tulsa Event Center in Southeast Tulsa and its transmitter site is near Broken Arrow.
History
KAKC 970 first signed on the air on 24 December 1946 ; it was founded by Sam Avey. Avey was a local businessman and sports promoter, who owned the Tulsa Coliseum. When KAKC first went on the air, it was a day-time only station, called "The Hometown Station," with a focus on serving the Tulsa community, broadcasting local sports, local news, and some music. It began at 1570 on the AM dial. In April 1948, the station got permission to move to 970 AM, and it also received permission to broadcast in the evenings as well as during the day. In the mid-1950s, the station got new ownership and hired Vic Lundberg and Greg Chancellor as announcers. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, KAKC 970 AM was a Top 40 station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Known first as "The Big 97" and later "The Rockin' 97", the station was owned by S. Carl Mark. Both stations used consultant Bill Drake for their programming, with KAKC being the dominant music station for many years until the mid-1970s when long-time Top 40 competitor KELI and FM upstart KTFX "The Superfox 103" cut into their audience. KAKC-FM 92.9 FM in the 1970s used a Drake-Chenault programmed automated oldies format during the day. From 6 p.m. to midnight, the FM simulcasted with KAKC 970 to make up for the AM's weak 250 watt nighttime signal. In the summer of 1977 KAKC-FM flipped to the then-popular "Beautiful Music" format and changed the call letters to KBEZ-FM. In January 1979, KAKC shocked the Tulsa radio market by dropping Top 40 programming after 21 years for adult standards, with rapidly declining ratings as the result. A year later the station was purchased by the owners of KCFO-FM which changed the format to Southern Gospel music and Christian talk programming. In 1984 the legendary 970 call letters were changed to KCFO-AM. In 1985 KBBJ 1300 picked up the KAKC call letters and flipped from a MOR/Standards format to a satellite-based Oldies format. 1300 over the years has been a country music, R&B-disco, album rock, adult contemporary, news-talk, Spanish music, sports, and business news station. The station has had little success in the Tulsa radio market due to a limited night signal or little if any promotion by Clear Channel over the decades. Former call letters for 1300 AM include KOME, KCNW, KXXO, and KMOD-AM. John Henry and Spencer Rhodes had an early morning show that featured county/ western and swing in the early morning hours and early rock and roll later in the day. They featured many artists from the 1930s and the 1940s with a lot of focus on Hank Williams and Bob Wills who did a radio show from the Cain's Ballroom originating from Tulsa, Oklahoma. This show was on every day for many years and John Henry and Spencer Rhodes did a daily show on the old country music featuring their own personal record collections. They also concentrated on the early years of Rock and Roll and had many of the original artists in studio who gave interviews and spoke of their own upbringings. These artists included the Shirelles, Chubby Checker, Chuck Berry, Hank Williams backup musicians and driver of their tour bus, Roy Orbison, Bo Diddley who in an interview with Spencer Rhodes spoke of days of picking cotton as a child. There were many other artists from the 1940s and 1950s that played the state fair circuits later in life that came to Tulsa, Oklahoma that stopped by the studio and gave interviews to John Henry and Spencer Rhodes early morning Country Swing and Rock and Roll show known as the Hillbilly Hit Parade. Spencer Rhodes children recorded almost all of the shows and still have them on recordings. Spencer Rhodes maintained relationships with many of the artists he admired as a teenager and many of the records played on the Rock and Roll part of show were the records he bought as a teenager and to his appreciation he had many of the artists from that era autograph the records he bought in the 1950s. On April 16, 2007 KAKC changed their format to sports, with programming from ESPN Radio. In 2015 KAKC became the local affiliate of CBS Sports Radio. Currently, it is the Tulsa radio affiliate for the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Tulsa Roughnecks FC and the Cleveland Browns Radio Network.
