KMBS is a

radio station Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radi ...

airing a

talk Talk may refer to: Communication * Communication, the encoding and decoding of exchanged messages between people * Conversation, interactive communication between two or more people * Lecture, an oral presentation intended to inform or instruct ...

format licensed to

West Monroe, Louisiana West Monroe is a city in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, United States. It is situated on the Ouachita River, across from the neighboring city of Monroe. The two cities are often referred to as the Twin Cities of northeast Louisiana. Its populat ...

, broadcasting on 1310 kHz AM. The station serves the

Monroe, Louisiana Monroe (historically french: Poste-du-Ouachita) is the eighth-largest city in the U.S. state of Louisiana, and parish seat of Ouachita Parish. With a 2020 census-tabulated population of 47,702, it is the principal city of the Monroe metropol ...

area, and is owned by Red Bear Broadcasting Corporation.

History

KUZN signed on the air August 4, 1956. The 1,000-watt, daytime-only station was owned by Howard E. Griffith and broadcast primarily country and gospel music. KUZN moved to new quarters on Parkwood Drive in 1967, when Griffith launched a television station, KUZN-TV channel 39. An expansion into FM radio followed the next year with KUZN-FM 98.3. In the mid-1960s,

Gary Burbank Gary Burbank (born Billy Purser, July 1941 in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American radio personality. He was heard daily on WLW in Cincinnati, Ohio, from June 15, 1981 until December 21, 2007 and nationally as the voice of his fictional character, ...

worked at KUZN as "Johnny Apollo, the blue-eyed soul brother in the front row". Griffith, who also was an engineer who had developed a new type of television antenna and who had twice attempted to establish local TV stations, died of a heart attack in February 1976. The next year, KUZN and the FM station (by this point known as KYEA) were sold to Morgan Broadcasting Corporation, owned by Chuck and Kay Morgan, for $305,000. The buyer was intimately familiar with the Griffith stations, as he had worked for KUZN since its 1956 establishment as staff announcer and served as general manager since 1961. Under Charles Morgan, the station became KMBS in 1994; it changed formats several times, including contemporary hit radio, jazz and lastly oldies, which was the format at the time of Chuck Morgan's death and the transfer of KMBS to his widow Kay. The FM station was sold off in 1986. Kay Morgan sold KMBS in 1993 to Red Bear Broadcasting Company, owned by Chuck Redden. Under Redden, the station has aired a variety of oldies and talk formats; it also aired

Fox Sports Radio Fox Sports Radio is an American sports radio network. Based in Los Angeles, California, the network is operated and managed by Premiere Networks in a content partnership with Fox Corporation's Fox Sports division and iHeartMedia, parent company ...

for a time.

References

External links

{{Monroe Radio Talk radio stations in the United States Mass media in Monroe, Louisiana Radio stations in Louisiana Radio stations established in 1956 1956 establishments in Louisiana