RKO General
RKO General Inc. was an American broadcasting company that, from 1952 through 1991, served as the main holding company for the noncore businesses of the General Tire and Rubber Company and later on GenCorp, Inc. The concern was based around the consolidation of its parent company's broadcasting interests, which dated to 1943 and were brought together under the General Teleradio umbrella in 1952. The company was renamed RKO Teleradio Pictures following its 1955 purchase of the RKO Pictures film studio, and then RKO General in 1959 after dissolving the motion picture division. Headquartered in New York City, the company operated six television stations and more than a dozen major radio stations around North America between 1959 and 1991.
RKO General still exists, at least nominally, registered as a Delaware corporation and a subsidiary of GenCorp successor Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings. In addition to broadcasting, its operations included soft-drink bottling and hotel enterprises. The original Frontier Airlines was a subsidiary from 1965 to 1985. In 1978, the company revived RKO Pictures on a small scale, with the first of its few coproductions reaching theaters in 1981; the business was sold off six years later. It is as a broadcaster, though, that RKO General left its mark. It owned some of the most influential radio stations in the world and was a pioneer in subscription television service. However, RKO General also became known for the longest licensing dispute in television history, one that ultimately forced the company out of broadcasting.
History
Early days
The General Tire and Rubber Company entered broadcasting in 1943, when it bought a controlling interest in the Yankee Network, a regional radio network in New England. The Yankee Network owned and operated four stations: flagship WNAC in Boston, Massachusetts; WAAB in Worcester, Massachusetts; WEAN in Providence, Rhode Island; and WICC in Bridgeport, Connecticut. With the Yankee Network purchase, General Tire also picked up its contracts with seventeen independently owned affiliates and acquired a stake in the Mutual Broadcasting System, a cooperatively owned national radio network.On June 21, 1948, the Yankee Network launched New England's third television station: Boston's WNAC-TV went on the air just days after WBZ-TV, also in Boston, and WNHC-TV, licensed to New Haven, Connecticut. The television station's transmitter site also served a new FM outlet, the first and only station to be established under General Tire ownership. While the Yankee Network had been operating experimental FM stations since 1939, WNAC-FM was the first that would survive past the early 1950s.
In December 1950, General Tire purchased the Don Lee Network, a long-standing West Coast regional network, for $12.3 million. This brought three more leading stations into the General Tire stable—KHJ in Los Angeles, KFRC in San Francisco, and KGB in San Diego. The acquisition also expanded the company's holdings in the Mutual Broadcasting System. Under the terms of the deal, the Columbia Broadcasting System acquired Don Lee's Los Angeles television station, KTSL. In 1951, General Tire acquired its own station in the city when it bought KFI-TV from Earle C. Anthony, changing the call letters to KHJ-TV.
In 1952, General Tire purchased the Bamberger Broadcasting Service, owner of WOR-AM-FM-TV in New York, from R.H. Macy and Company. Bamberger itself was a division of Macy's subsidiary General Teleradio Inc. In the deal, General Tire acquired the rights to the name General Teleradio, under which the company merged its broadcasting interests as its own new subsidiary. The deal also gave General Tire majority control of the Mutual Broadcasting System. The company moved into Memphis, Tennessee, in 1954 with its purchase of WHBQ radio and WHBQ-TV. Exiting two mid-sized urban markets that same year, General sold off WEAN to the Providence Journal and KGB to the San Diego station's general manager, Marion Harris. On the evening of July 8, 1954, WHBQ disc jockey Dewey Phillips introduced a song called "That's All Right ", the first ever recording to air on the radio by a singer from Memphis named Elvis Presley.
The RKO purchase
General Teleradio's chairman, Thomas O'Neil recognized that his television stations needed access to better programming. In 1953, he tried to buy the film library of RKO Radio Pictures—including many of the most famous movies made by Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant—but was rebuffed by the studio's then owner, Howard Hughes. However, after Hughes failed in a bid to acquire total control of the RKO Pictures Corp. holding company, he sold the studio to General Teleradio for $25 million in July 1955. General Teleradio was rechristened RKO Teleradio Pictures, with a reorganized RKO Radio Pictures as its motion pictures division, and quickly recouped much of the purchase price by selling the primary rights to RKO's film library to C&C Television Corp, a subsidiary of beverage maker Cantrell & Cochrane, for $15.2 million. Historian William Boddy describes the sale of the RKO library as "the trigger for the flood of feature films to television in the mid-1950s."On the broadcasting front, RKO Teleradio briefly owned WEAT-AM and WEAT-TV in West Palm Beach, Florida; they were sold off before the company's next reorganization in 1959. In 1956, WOR-AM became the New York market's number one station with the success of its new "Music from Studio X." Hosted by John A. Gambling, the "easy listening" show was broadcast out of an innovative high-fidelity studio where, according to reports, "each clean new record was touched by a needle only one time." Also in 1956, a new General Tire subsidiary, RKO Distributing, acquired a controlling interest in the Western Ontario Broadcasting Company, which operated CKLW-AM-FM-TV in Windsor, Ontario. Another Mutual affiliate, the AM station served a large swath of the U.S. Rust Belt, centered on the major market of Detroit.
RKO Teleradio retained the broadcast rights to the RKO film library in the cities where it owned television stations, but it had little interest in the studio itself. After a brief, half-hearted dip into the movie industry, RKO Teleradio shut down both production and distribution early in 1957. That summer, it sold its entire majority stake in the Mutual network to a syndicate led by famed entrepreneur Armand Hammer. By the end of the year, the company had sold off the RKO Pictures studio facilities and backlot. The movie operation hung on through 1958 and early 1959 as a financial backer, coproducing a few independently made pictures. The final such coproduction was released in March 1959. That same year, RKO Teleradio was renamed RKO General.
A leading broadcaster
The classic RKO General station lineup featured the WOR stations in New York City, the KHJ stations in Los Angeles, KFRC-AM-FM in San Francisco, WGMS-AM-FM in and near Washington, D.C., the WNAC stations in Boston, the WHBQ stations in Memphis, and the CKLW stations in Windsor/Detroit, which RKO purchased outright in 1963. The company later acquired radio outlets in the major markets of Chicago and Miami–Fort Lauderdale. Between 1960 and 1972, RKO owned a sixth television station, WHCT, a UHF outlet in Hartford, Connecticut. After the Canadian government tightened rules on foreign ownership of radio and television stations, RKO General was forced to sell off the Windsor group in 1970. In the mid-1970s, RKO sought to dispense with the FM outlets it had established in some of its oldest markets, while maintaining its presence on the AM dial: San Francisco's KFRC-FM was sold in 1977; around the same time, WHBQ-FM in Memphis was divested as well. An attempted sale of the company's Boston FM station was aborted.In 1959, RKO and NBC reached an agreement on what would have been the highest-priced license transfer in broadcasting history to that time. The deal would have seen RKO acquire NBC's WRC-AM-FM-TV in Washington, swap WNAC-AM-TV and WRKO-FM in Boston to NBC for that company's WRCV-AM-TV in Philadelphia, and sell the WGMS stations in Washington to Crowell-Collier Broadcasting. The deal was an attempt to resolve a controversy surrounding a 1956 swap of NBC and Westinghouse Broadcasting stations in Philadelphia and Cleveland. In 1965, the FCC declared the 1956 trade null and void, effectively reversing the swap, and denied the proposed license transfers on what would prove to be the ironic ground that NBC would enter the Boston market as the product of its dishonesty in the Philadelphia/Cleveland transaction. Coincidentally, RKO's former Boston television station became an NBC affiliate in 1995 after its longtime affiliate, Westinghouse-owned WBZ-TV, switched to CBS in a precursor to that network's merger with Westinghouse, which includes the aforementioned Philadelphia stations.
RKO's lineup included some of the leading top 40 and urban contemporary radio stations in North America. In May 1965, KHJ-AM introduced the highly successful Boss Radio variation of the top 40 format. Consultants Bill Drake and Gene Chenault, who had devised the restrictive programming style, soon brought it to RKO's AM stations in San Francisco, Boston, and Memphis, also with great success. The format helped Windsor's CKLW to become the dominant station not only in Detroit, but also in more distant cities such as Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio. In turn, CKLW's Paul Drew became an influential tastemaker when he assumed group program director duties of the entire RKO cluster, earning a reputation for breaking new hit records to a national audience. After the Canadian government decreed in 1969 that the country's radio and television stations must be at least 80 percent domestically owned, RKO sold the CKLW group to a joint venture of Baton Broadcasting and the CBC.
Many non-RKO broadcasters around the U.S. were already hiring the Boss Radio consulting team to convert them to the format, or simply imitating it on their own. In October 1972, KHJ-FM debuted Drake-Chenault's new automated rock oldies format, Classic Gold, another major hit. As WOR-FM and its later incarnations, rock-formatted WXLO and urban WRKS-FM, RKO's New York FM station pioneered a number of styles, including a more oldies-heavy version of Boss Radio and, later, so-called rhythmic formats. In 1983, it became one of the first major stations to play rap music on a regular basis. In late 1979, the company launched the RKO Radio Network. In 1981, the network began transmitting what has been claimed as the first national talk show delivered by satellite—the six-hour-long America Overnight broadcast out of Los Angeles and Dallas, Texas.
As a television broadcaster, RKO was known as an operator of independent stations. New York's WOR-TV ran without network affiliation during its entire tenure with RKO, as did Hartford's WHCT. Los Angeles's KHJ-TV was a DuMont affiliate until 1955 and independent for its next thirty-four years under RKO control. Windsor's CKLW-TV was nominally an affiliate of CBC Television, but was programmed largely as an independent. Two of the company's stations were run as network affiliates: Boston's WNAC-TV, originally a CBS affiliate, also aired DuMont and ABC programming during its early years. It became a full-time ABC affiliate in 1961, returning to CBS exclusively in 1972. Memphis's WHBQ-TV was a dual CBS/ABC station at its 1953 launch; it joined ABC full-time in 1956.
The company's independent television stations were known for showing classic films under the banner of Million Dollar Movie. The trend-setting movie package was launched by WOR in 1954, nearly a year before General Tire's acquisition of RKO Pictures and its library. Into the 1980s, Million Dollar Movie—introduced by music from 1952's Ivanhoe and, later, Gone with the Wind—aired RKO productions and those of many other studios as well. In summer 1962, RKO General initiated on WHCT what became the first extended venture into subscription television service. Until January 31, 1969, the station aired movies, sports events, concerts, and other live performances at night without commercial interruption through the Phonevision subscription service operated by RKO's partner, Zenith Electronics. The operation generated income from installation and weekly rental fees for descrambling devices—provided by Zenith—as well as individual program charges. During its final decade as a significant business entity, the company would reenter the movie industry that had given it its name, reviving the RKO Pictures brand in 1981 for a series of co-productions and then its own independent projects. This new RKO Pictures was involved in the production of about a dozen feature films, the best known including a 1982 remake of the RKO classic Cat People and the war movie Hamburger Hill.