40 years since the music died
October 14, 2015
KQV-AM (1410) was once a music station… and a well-known and well-loved one at that! Whether you knew it as “14-K”, “14-KQV”, or “Groovy QV” it was one of the greatest Top-40 stations in the country. It was 40 years ago today that the music stopped in favor of an all-news format which began when people woke up on October 15, 1975.
George Hart and Billy Soule did their final music show together. Taft executives were monitoring from Cincinnati, and the decision was made to pull the plug on the show –post haste– at 10:30 p.m. Their final song was “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show” by Neil Diamond. Bob Harvey finished the night with “Those Were the Days My Friend” by Mary Hopkin.
The studios soon moved from the street level of the Chamber of Commerce Building to the 7th floor. Eventually they moved across the street to Centre City Tower where they remain today.
UPDATE: From Ed Scharnhorst… a KQVer from 1980-85… Nice write up on KQV in your Pbrtv colum. The Chief engineer actually pulled the plug to get a jump start of rerouting cables to the upstairs 7 th floor. The new studios were very nice and the audio quality far superior to the studioes downstairs. New cart machines, Mc Curdy Consoles. WDVE also located to the 7 th floor as well. The original 102.5 KQV FM was originally on the 7 th floor. The offices were always on the 7 th floor for both stations. Taft decided to sell KQV back in 1983. They told then General Manager Bob Dickey if he wanted the station he could have it . Bob Dickey got ahold of Richard Mellon Scaife to form a new company to buy KQV. Thus came Calvary Broadcasting. Once the sale was finalized walls went up sealing off our access to WDVE. KQV and WDVEs production studios were shared till the sale . I stayed with KQV as production engineer and I literally threw the Studio to Transmitter link off to transfer WDVE to Greentree.
Joe Fenn was also there that day. Just a heads-up.
I grew up listening to KQV when it was a music station, it was the only channel blaring from our cars as we cruised the streets after school.
Wow, I remember that one.
I wasn’t quite sure how to feel, since I was one of the listeners that 13Q had robbed from them.
Who remembers the day they played only records, and nothing but the line “KQV plays too much music” on every intro (“KQV Pittsburgh plays too much music” was the top-of-hour exception)?
Or the promo campaign with their claim to being the *real* first radio station in the world, ahead of KDKA (“We were 8ZAE. You can look it up.”) (You can too: http://user.pa.net/~ejjeff/history.html)?
And when Jerry “World Famous” Christopher attempted the endurance record for continuous broadcasting, ending it by reciting the “Don’t Quit” poem (http://www.all-creatures.org/poetry/dontquit.html)?
And the series of over-the-edge bumper stickers that didn’t make you eligible for prizes, but declared wack stuff like “dompolski yunz”?
But it was all OK because I was taking the J200 level broadcasting courses at PPC and this came in handy for the news writing classes.
And God bless George Hart. +
Give us the world…….
You drive around town listening to KQV today and there are so many holes in the signal, it’s hard to believe that they were once the #1 way in which Pittsburghers consumed music.
thanks brother for doing it up like I knew you would…even though you wasn’t born yet!
I, too grew up listening \”fun lovin KQV, audio 14\” as the jingle used to say. Who could ever forget seeing the DJs in the street level studios at the corner of walk and don\’t walk. I am sure that those studios with their glass windows contributed a lot to the success of KQV. It really gave the public a way to connect with the station by being able to see their favorite DJ at work.