Kent State grad Ed Brady parlayed his KSU’s bachelor’s degree with his
master’s degree in divinity to make use of both talents in Austin, Minnesota.
Brady does his “Country Gospel” on 100,000-watt US Country 99.9 and AM
1490 KAUS out of Austin. It’s owned by Three Eagles Communications, which also
has four radio stations in Colorado.
Brady uses his 40 years in broadcasting to supplement his
income, doing radio
commercials (script writing and production) and voice-over talent (“friendly
& sincere delivery”).
In a Facebook post sent to his
former colleague, Bob Carpenter, a Kent State grad who lives in Punta Gorda,
Florida, Brady summarized the history of their mutual former employer, WKNT.
Bob responded:
“I was glad to
keep up with the old WKNT AM & FM that I worked as News Director 1968-1974.
A lot of changes over the years.”
Bob was news
director of WKNT on May 4, 1970 and as one of major contributors of news
coverage in the years that followed is often invited to speak at KSU’s May 4th
memorial activities.
He relocated from Kent to Maui in the mid-70s and worked
in radio and public relations there before moving to Florida. He retired from
his job as Public Information Officer of the Charlotte County, Florida sheriff’s
last year.
The Kent
station’s history:
WJMP AM 1520 is a daytime-only radio station licensed to
Kent and serving the Akron radio market. WJMP operates with a maximum output of
1,000 watts, using a six-tower, daytime-only directional antenna pattern.
WJMP is the Akron affiliate of “Mancow in the Morning,” “The Laura Ingraham
Show,” “The Savage Nation” and “The Dennis Miller Show.” AM 1520 also carries
CBS Radio newscasts hourly.
It is commonly owned with FM station WNIR and low-power
television stations WAOH-LP channel 29 Akron and W35AX channel 35 Cleveland,
which simulcast as the Cleveland market's Retro Television Network affiliate.
The station was signed on March 1964 as WKNT, owned by the publisher of the
Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier newspaper. It was purchased by Media-Com in July
1971.
WJMP has had a variety of formats, reacting to changes made by other stations
in the Akron and Cleveland markets.
Prior to affiliating with Fox Sports Radio, WJMP was an Air America Radio
affiliate. On June 2006, when Akron's WTOU/WARF dropped Fox Sports Radio for
talk radio, WJMP took the sports format abandoned by the Akron station. WARF
then added two Air America programs once run on WJMP to its existing talk
lineup.
In 2001, when Cleveland station WRMR AM 850 announced that
it was dropping pop standards music for the sports format of WKNR, WJMP changed
to a standards format.
WJMP also has been a talk radio sister station to WNIR, carrying various
syndicated talk programs in contrast with WNIR's mainly local schedule of
hosts.
It once relayed the TV audio of co-owned WAOH-LP/W35AX, and stunted during the
Major League Baseball players' strike of 1994 with a continuous loop of
"Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during its daytime broadcast hours.
This stunt gained the small station nationwide attention and an entry in the
Guinness Book of Sports Records.
Before 1989 the station used the call letters WKNT. Until sister WKNT-FM became
WNIR, and became a full-time talk radio station in the mid-1980s, WKNT AM 1520
simulcast with the FM station.
In 2009 WJMP dropped its all-sports format and became a news/talk station
featuring such syndicated hosts as Mancow, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage and
Lou Dobbs (WJMP replaced Dobbs with Dennis Miller following Dobbs leaving radio
in 2012).
Bob Carpenter did a bit of good work,
too. For years Bob and wife Kaye personally delivered Christmas gifts to hundreds of challenged
children in Beijing, China; Tokyo and Osaka, Japan; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and
Quito, Ecuador.
Bob served in Vietnam twice, in DaNang
and in Saigon. Wife Kaye purchased a brick with Bob’s name it that was placed at
the Kiwanis Veterans Garden in Laishley Park, Punta Gorda, Florida. It is next
to the Vietnam Veterans brick memorial.
