Questionable Reception

"I think there are some things that if you're from St. Louis you have an inferiority complex about," said Mark Lamping, the Cardinals' president, who grew up in the southern part of the city. "We don't have the great residential condominiums of downtown Chicago or we don't have the number of Fortune 500 companies as we used to have.

"But there are those things we think we do really, really well, like the Cardinals and KMOX and I think we take great pride in those things."

The link was always baseball. It passed from fathers to their children. It would begin at Busch Stadium and it would be told in a vivid story line that started with Dizzy Dean winding down to Enos Slaughter's mad dash to home plate in 1946, to Stan Musial, to Bob Gibson to Whitey Herzog. And the story was told by Dean who begot Harry Caray who begot Jack Buck, and their voices beamed at 50,000 clear channel watts from under the blue light atop the tower on the flood plain in Illinois until everyone spoke a common tongue that seemed foreign to anyone who didn't have their dial set on 1120-AM.

It was a language that could be summed up in a single phrase, five words uttered by the placid Buck on the improbable event of shortstop Ozzie Smith's first left-handed home run. A shot that just so happened to come on the last pitch of Game 5 of the 1985 National League Championship Series. A minor detail Buck declined to initially report as he instead shouted: "Go crazy folks! Go crazy!"

Times are different now. The brewery, which bought the Cardinals in 1953, sold them in 1996. Buck died in 2002. And Busch Stadium, a dated relic from the 1960s, will be torn down this fall to make way for a new, all-brick, red-seated stadium that is already rising behind Busch's south walls. The Cardinals might go to the World Series again this year, but the world is changing fast in a place where nothing used to change at all.

Going Back

In the early 1970s a journalism student at Syracuse University would tune his radio to the giant signal, listening to the Cardinals games that came in so clear it seemed the tower was just down the street. When someone told him KMOX was looking for an announcer to broadcast the games of St. Louis's new American Basketball Association team, he sent a tape, landed an interview and, in a coup for someone so young, was given the job. Which is how Bob Costas took his first steps toward our living rooms.

And it is how Costas first came in contact with Robert Hyland. In those days Hyland was a giant in St. Louis, almost as big as Gussie Busch, the brewery scion who owned the Cardinals, which made sense because the two practically ran the city together. "If Bob Hyland had a crazy idea he would call Gussie at 3 in the morning and Gussie would take the call," said Frank Absher, a former KMOX newsman who is now a radio historian and a journalism instructor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Perhaps because of the gargantuan signal he inherited, Hyland was obsessed with building the biggest and best radio station in the country. Many in the business credit him with inventing the talk radio format. In fact, hanging today in the KMOX offices is a note Hyland wrote extolling the talk radio potential of an aspiring broadcaster from rural Missouri named Rush Limbaugh.

At Hyland's KMOX no story was too big. When President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, Hyland ordered all programming and commercials scrapped, costing the station thousands of dollars, to instead go with continuous coverage. If the secretary of agriculture came to town to give a speech, the talk was carried live, not because it would draw listeners but because he thought it was the right thing to do.

And essential to his KMOX's success was sports. There was a time when the station carried everything that was important -- the football Cardinals, the Blues of the NHL, the University of Missouri and most significantly, the baseball Cardinals. To do this, he found the best announcers with Caray and then Buck on baseball, Costas doing the ABA and then Missouri. Dan Kelly, the Blues play-by-play man, was considered the best in hockey. Former football Cardinals player Dan Dierdorf became a KMOX broadcaster before eventually moving to ABC's "Monday Night Football."

Hyland "would do things like this: Say it was October of 1967 and the Cardinals were in the pennant race and the Cardinals game would get rained out, he would have the Phillies game piped in and then later catch the last three innings of the Mets and Dodgers," said Costas, who still lives in St. Louis. "It would be one in the morning and something would come over the wire, say Jackie Robinson passed away, I guarantee you within five minutes Pee Wee Reese or Leo Durocher would be on KMOX. Stuff like that happened all the time."

This was not lost on the audience. In the mid 1970s, when radio station ratings were first tabulated, KMOX had a 25 share of the market for listeners over 12 years old, which in a sense meant that one in every four radios at any time in St. Louis were tuned to 1120.