HazzardAyre: AyreWolf Howl,3 Radio has power.

I thought I’d do this now while I have a clear head and am not thinking of history of Tim and I.

At 19:00 Timmy’s Funeral will take place. He wanted the ritual of his right of departure to be in evening hours, theory is, is evening is the time Kahless is listening the most to hear the howl of a warrior on his way to Stovacore.

As I was into the last time.

it was 1976, I was now working on the KLIX AM 1310. Back then the news from ABC came in 1 minute after the top of the hour. So from 45, minutes to that top of the hour, we would do our show out of one bank of our headsets, and listen to the network on the other.

I can remember hearing a station, out of Alberquacky, 77 KOB, that also was on ABC network. They were doing this repeat show out of salt Lake City called JOC radio. the only west of Denver or the divide for truckers. I thought what a concept. For me it was the chance to take my aspirations of open road heavy haul trucking, although my operation was more short haul towing, and my love of radio and smoosh them together.

So that Monday in our staff meeting I brought up the idea, how about doing at first a weekend gig for OTR truckers, on KLIX? Our GM says, get me four committed sponsors for a year and you have your show. So Dad got with some of his vendors, and suppliers and we had 10 sponsors going in. So I took the idea I had already been brewing since my gig at KLHS, In Lewiston, and ramped it up. Long Haul Radio took off on February 14 Valentines day 1977. In November 1980, I was supposed to be going to Utah for the Salt Lake City AutoRama one of at the time biggest custom ride shows in the region. But mother nature, perhaps God, decided I wasn’t going. He poured out a snow storm like you all can’t believe. It was there at the Ramada Inn of Burley, now the Burley Best Western, that I met Tracy Tollman, who had started a fair restoration of ye old General from DOH. Of course still doing LHR on KLIX, but there were things I wanted to do on air on our show that I knew Tuma, wasn’t going to approve of, remember the LDS thing here. It’s a believed taboo thing that has little in reality but that area radio GM’s fear. It was time to make our club’s pirate station legal. More on that later.

In 1981, I got the opening from Utah AutoRama producer Mickey Ellis, to enter that years show, but we had only a minimal car and no thought of display. So I caught the movie the Hollywood Knights, (that’s where the Knights or as we spell it Knytes name came from) on there was car hops in Go-Go boots rather than the usual roller skates. So Bro and I for our display, went off in search of Go-Go boots. At the time boots were not in fashion so supply was none existent. So we found that East Minico Junior High still used them in Drill Team. I made a beeline and in the corner of my eye, saw ye old General was for sale. Really? I thought, $1,500.00 . discussions with the boots stopped, called Tracy he was off to an LDS mission, I though groovy. Talked to mom, in short we were in the 81 SLC AutoRama, then held at the Salt Palace rather than South Towne Center. Any mile we went, I had been bit by Hazzard.

For several months of being in jail from late May of 1982, to August for reckless driving, for some reason, it wasn’t excessive speed, the act of doing 185 from a standing start, to a dead stop in 1/8th of a mile wasn’t excessive speed, it was reckless driving. So in my solitude, I wondered how can I take Hazzard County, meld it together with the gig I was doing on air and be accepted by the RoadCommanders Club which was what we called ourselves, this is prior Hazzard Knytes, and it came to me. Daisy’s jeep is called Dixie, put that with the name of the station Diesel, and Dixie Diesel Trucker Radio was born as we said it, trucker radio done Hazzard Style. Nothing held out, just punch my way through it. But the station needed extra things going on except my overnight gig, so thought was, lets take what I do, in trucking and the industry in whole and put up a radio thing for us who tow. Of course the Hazzard Garage was now open, but legally still ran the tow service as Highway Hooker Radio. Hooker being trucker cb slang for tow truck. The rest as they say is history. After that I went full bull Marines, and got deployed. The show still ran but by what I could pre-record. I did a short version of both on Armed Forces Radio which thanks to many we still are there. Both Dixie Diesel and Highway Hooker were in both major and small markets, from KSOP 104.3 FM in SLC to KFI Los Angeles more stimulating radio. We hit the Native American market on KTNN Windowrock Arizona, as well as the little station here in West-Point Idaho. The power of anti-establishment , fight the system radio was everywhere. My cousin read for Elton on the Dukes-of-Hazzard’s WHOGG AM 1090 and ya’ll know the rest of the story. Always in part syndication, until the day the home studio got sold, and the homestead near Hazzard was someone else’s. So home base shut down. It wasn’t until 1989 that KTOW FM in Blackfoot Idaho reignited and we had home base. My cousin Bud, became bean counter. While the Dukes by this time had been off air since 85, the Hazzard Knytes kept that fire hot. In 1991 our ship came in again. I moved to Utah, still producing the shows via syndication, until I heard a small station in Price Utah called KOAL. They mine coal there in Price Utah. They ran a expiring network called the Interstate Trucker Radio Network. Come to find the network and its spot on the big byrd in the sky called Galaxy 5, was for sale. The club bought it, and the Dixie Diesel Trucker Network was born. We ran by network upload and syndication, until mid year 2000. I moved back to Jerome and found that at the Jerome County Airport sat 4 F4U Corsair WWII fighters. That rekindled my love of flying and the club gained its first subsidiary the BlackSheep Flyte Club, redone BlackSheep Aviation Association, then rebadged in 2004 as the AyreWolvez shortly after my 3rd Cousin Gordon and I opened AyreWolf Aviation.

All along its been this tiny little network this show I do overnight, for you every single night, that’s kept the club together, informed in ways this blog and all could never do, and I have had my butt in a chair behind the mic, playing tunez and delivering the trucing towing news, for 35 years.

HazzardAyre Radio is essentially Dixie Diesel Trucker Radio and AyreWolf Aviation Radio scrunched into one 12 hour show.

We still do Highway Hooker Radio on the weekends for a change of pace, as well as 6 half hour blocks during HazzardAyre.

In 2011 after a defeated attempt at buying a station out of Burley, the call letters KTOW was sold to a station in Colorado, and reignited as KDOH , or Dukes-of-Hazzard Radio. KDXB FM is the FM side of KDOH, and is short for Dixie Broadcasting, as we named our side media firm Dixie Broadcasting West LLC.

With the missed chance of refire at missing the LPFM filing in November 2013, we are looking to refyre anyway here once facilities and staff can be gathered together. However that said, we are also ramping up to go full power online.

Any mile gotta get off here, go wash my body put on my cuts and head to the Church for Tim’s final howl.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

AyreWolf Howl,3 Radio has power.

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