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WLKK
WLKK (107.7 FM) is an American radio station located in Wethersfield, New York. The station is owned by Audacy, Inc. It operates from studios at Audacy's Buffalo offices in Amherst, New York, with its transmitter located near Warsaw, 35 miles southeast of Buffalo (For legal purposes, WLKK's official studio was shared with WCJW in Warsaw, a legal fiction which ended with the elimination of the Main Studio Rule by the FCC in 2017). Its format is gold-focused country music, branded as "107.7 & 104.7 The Wolf".
The FM station on 107.7 at Wethersfield originally started broadcasting June 6, 1948 as WFNF, a member of the Rural Radio Network based in Ithaca.
The network changed ownership three times in the 1960s, and was most notable between 1969 and 1981 for being upstate New York's arm of Pat Robertson's original Christian Broadcasting Network as WBIV.
In November 1981, Robertson dismantled the CBN radio division and sold WBIV for roughly $350,000 to a coalition led by Ron Chmiel, a dentist based in Williamsville; John Bunkfeldt, who owned radio stations in Utica; Bob Allen, a local program director; and Allen's parents and aunt. Chmiel held a majority stake of roughly 60%, while Bunkfeldt and the Allen family each held 20%. Allen, then age 32, had either left or been fired from six radio stations in the previous 12 years, and by buying a minority stake in the station, Allen believed he was untouchable, no matter what he did.
WUWU began as an effort to revive progressive/underground rock radio, by then a nearly extinct format, with personnel who had previously been involved with the city's previous progressive station from 12 years prior, WPHD, and with WZIR, a short-lived progressive station that operated in 1980 and 1981. WUWU was the first incarnation of the station explicitly marketed as a rimshot to the Buffalo market, establishing a studio in West Seneca that would continue to be used for the next two decades. Eighteen months after the purchase and format flip, tensions between Allen and Chmiel had reached a breaking point: Allen had allegedly used his talkback program The Town Crier to spew obscenities (which Allen denied), and Allen had increasingly tried to force WUWU to adopt a heavy metal format over the objections of Chmiel, advertisers and the board of directors. Quoth Allen: "He can't fire me. I don't fill teeth, and he doesn't know how to run a radio station." Allen had also developed paranoid delusions of Chmiel attempting to sell the then money-losing station to another buyer at a steep profit, which Chmiel denied. Chmiel fired Allen on May 21, 1983, only for Allen to refuse to accept the firing and show up to work the next day with an armed guard. When Chmiel himself hired two armed guards to keep Allen out of the WUWU studios, on May 27, 1983, Allen, Bunkfeldt and two accomplices drove equipment for remote broadcasting out to the Wethersfield transmitter site and hijacked the signal, where he declared an "emergency broadcast" and began playing heavy metal until Wyoming County sheriffs surrounded the transmitter site and arrested them; the hijacking lasted roughly one hour. The arrest also did not deter Allen, who again hijacked the station in early July; this incident was somewhat more successful, lasting nine hours throughout the overnight before being accosted by police.
Allen escaped criminal trespass and obstruction of justice prosecution when, in December 1983, the Wethersfield town judge presiding over the May trespassing case accepted a motion for dismissal on procedural grounds. The charges for the July incident were dropped because Allen had hired the winner of the county's district attorney election that November, which would have forced the county to hire a special prosecutor at their expense to prosecute the case. Allen and Chmiel both sued each other.
WUWU eventually shifted to a New Age and jazz format as "The Sound Future," a format that lasted until 1986.
During Memorial Day weekend in 1986, the station flipped to classic rock as "The Bear -- High Quality Rock and Roll." WBYR had a brief moment of great success in the classic rock format; the heritage album-oriented rock station, WGRQ-FM, was at the time an adult contemporary music station known as "WRLT," and as such, WBYR was able to make inroads into the Buffalo market, including hiring WGRQ jock Slick Tom Tiberi. This, however, ended when WRLT changed back to classic rock as WGRF and hired back Tiberi. Chmiel finally gave up on the station and sold WBYR to John Casciani.
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WLKK
WLKK (107.7 FM) is an American radio station located in Wethersfield, New York. The station is owned by Audacy, Inc. It operates from studios at Audacy's Buffalo offices in Amherst, New York, with its transmitter located near Warsaw, 35 miles southeast of Buffalo (For legal purposes, WLKK's official studio was shared with WCJW in Warsaw, a legal fiction which ended with the elimination of the Main Studio Rule by the FCC in 2017). Its format is gold-focused country music, branded as "107.7 & 104.7 The Wolf".
The FM station on 107.7 at Wethersfield originally started broadcasting June 6, 1948 as WFNF, a member of the Rural Radio Network based in Ithaca.
The network changed ownership three times in the 1960s, and was most notable between 1969 and 1981 for being upstate New York's arm of Pat Robertson's original Christian Broadcasting Network as WBIV.
In November 1981, Robertson dismantled the CBN radio division and sold WBIV for roughly $350,000 to a coalition led by Ron Chmiel, a dentist based in Williamsville; John Bunkfeldt, who owned radio stations in Utica; Bob Allen, a local program director; and Allen's parents and aunt. Chmiel held a majority stake of roughly 60%, while Bunkfeldt and the Allen family each held 20%. Allen, then age 32, had either left or been fired from six radio stations in the previous 12 years, and by buying a minority stake in the station, Allen believed he was untouchable, no matter what he did.
WUWU began as an effort to revive progressive/underground rock radio, by then a nearly extinct format, with personnel who had previously been involved with the city's previous progressive station from 12 years prior, WPHD, and with WZIR, a short-lived progressive station that operated in 1980 and 1981. WUWU was the first incarnation of the station explicitly marketed as a rimshot to the Buffalo market, establishing a studio in West Seneca that would continue to be used for the next two decades. Eighteen months after the purchase and format flip, tensions between Allen and Chmiel had reached a breaking point: Allen had allegedly used his talkback program The Town Crier to spew obscenities (which Allen denied), and Allen had increasingly tried to force WUWU to adopt a heavy metal format over the objections of Chmiel, advertisers and the board of directors. Quoth Allen: "He can't fire me. I don't fill teeth, and he doesn't know how to run a radio station." Allen had also developed paranoid delusions of Chmiel attempting to sell the then money-losing station to another buyer at a steep profit, which Chmiel denied. Chmiel fired Allen on May 21, 1983, only for Allen to refuse to accept the firing and show up to work the next day with an armed guard. When Chmiel himself hired two armed guards to keep Allen out of the WUWU studios, on May 27, 1983, Allen, Bunkfeldt and two accomplices drove equipment for remote broadcasting out to the Wethersfield transmitter site and hijacked the signal, where he declared an "emergency broadcast" and began playing heavy metal until Wyoming County sheriffs surrounded the transmitter site and arrested them; the hijacking lasted roughly one hour. The arrest also did not deter Allen, who again hijacked the station in early July; this incident was somewhat more successful, lasting nine hours throughout the overnight before being accosted by police.
Allen escaped criminal trespass and obstruction of justice prosecution when, in December 1983, the Wethersfield town judge presiding over the May trespassing case accepted a motion for dismissal on procedural grounds. The charges for the July incident were dropped because Allen had hired the winner of the county's district attorney election that November, which would have forced the county to hire a special prosecutor at their expense to prosecute the case. Allen and Chmiel both sued each other.
WUWU eventually shifted to a New Age and jazz format as "The Sound Future," a format that lasted until 1986.
During Memorial Day weekend in 1986, the station flipped to classic rock as "The Bear -- High Quality Rock and Roll." WBYR had a brief moment of great success in the classic rock format; the heritage album-oriented rock station, WGRQ-FM, was at the time an adult contemporary music station known as "WRLT," and as such, WBYR was able to make inroads into the Buffalo market, including hiring WGRQ jock Slick Tom Tiberi. This, however, ended when WRLT changed back to classic rock as WGRF and hired back Tiberi. Chmiel finally gave up on the station and sold WBYR to John Casciani.