WMBM (1490 AM) is a

radio station Radio broadcasting is the broadcasting 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 rad ...

broadcasting a

gospel Gospel originally meant the Christianity, Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the second century Anno domino, AD the term (, from which the English word originated as a calque) came to be used also for the books in which the message w ...

format. Licensed to

Miami Beach, Florida Miami Beach is a coastal resort city in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States. It is part of the Miami metropolitan area of South Florida. The municipality is located on natural and human-made barrier islands between the Atlantic Ocean ...

, United States, the station serves the Miami area. The station is currently owned by New Birth Broadcasting Corp. Inc. and features programming from Westwood One.

History

WAHR

WAHR signed on the air October 31, 1954. Owned by and named for Alan Henry Rosenson, the station aired a continuous music format. Rosenson owned WLRD (93.9 FM), which changed its call letters to WAHR-FM in 1956. The manager of the station hired a young man, Larry Zeiger, to perform miscellaneous clean-up tasks. When one of the station's announcers suddenly quit, Zeiger was put on the air; Simmons suggested that Zeiger's last name was too ethnic, so he became

Larry King Larry King (born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger; November 19, 1933 – January 23, 2021) was an American TV and radio host presenter, author, and former spokesman. He was a WMBM radio interviewer in the Miami area in the 1950s and 1960s and beginning in ...

. King would become the station's sports director, leaving in 1958 for WKAT.

WMET

Rosenson sold WAHR-AM-FM to Community Service Broadcasters in 1958. ( Guide to reading History Cards) After the $150,000 purchase, the new ownership—most of which hailed from

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ; colloquially nicknamed Cincy) is a city in Hamilton County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. Settled in 1788, the city is located on the northern side of the confluence of the Licking River (Kentucky), Licking and Ohio Ri ...

—changed the call letters to WMET, continuing a format emphasizing news, sports and adult music. WMET eventually became a full-time Spanish-language outlet, the first in South Florida. In 1961, the owners of daytime-only station WMBM (1220 AM), Florida's first black radio station—which in turn had just absorbed the call letters and some talent of the previous WMBM at 790 AM—agreed to a deal with Latin Broadcasting Company to swap facilities. The deal was finalized and announced in March 1962; Consolidated Communications, which owned WMBM, paid $253,000 to acquire the WMET-AM- FM facility.

WMBM

On April 3, 1962, the WMET intellectual unit moved to 1220 kHz, and 1490 (and 93.9 FM) received a relocated WMBM. WMBM went on to develop a large and popular history as Miami's premier AM station for

rhythm and blues Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated within African American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predomina ...

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, h ...

and programming targeted to an

African-American African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. ...

audience. Noted jazz broadcaster

China Valles Charles Lomba "China" Valles (November 5, 1925 – December 17, 2014) was an American jazz radio broadcaster. Jazz authority and broadcaster He was a noted jazz authority and prominent jazz personality in South Florida for several decades. Over t ...

had a popular show on the station. In its 1960s heyday, the station attempted a Thanksgiving turkey giveaway which clogged the

MacArthur Causeway The General Douglas MacArthur Causeway is a six-lane causeway that connects Greater Downtown Miami, Downtown Miami to South Beach via Biscayne Bay in Miami-Dade County, Florida, Miami-Dade County. The highway is the singular roadway connecting ...

with drivers from Overtown seeking free turkeys. Motivational speaker Les Brown was a disc jockey on WMBM. In 1992, Eddie Margolis bought WMBM from his father. After a failed half-Haitian, half-gospel format, the station flipped to talk in 1993 and briefly adopted the call letters WSBH. On March 10, 1995, the station returned to a gospel format, as it had for much of the 1980s, and the WMBM call letters.

References

External links

FCC History Cards for WMBM
{{Miami Radio MBM Radio stations established in 1955 Gospel radio stations in the United States 1955 establishments in Florida