EP 3 Part 1 Building Radio Station in Lincoln, Nebraska KBHL 95.3 FM

Larry's Sorta Fun Stories

in 1973 it was my vision to create the first Contemporary Christian Music Radio Station in the United States. This is the back story of how it got started. This is the story of KBHL 95.3 in Lincoln, Nebraska.
It’s just like it was yesterday Friday April 20th, 1973. My wife was driving that big white and red topped Buick and we were just east of Council Bluffs, Iowa on Interstate 80. We were headed to my parent’s home in Illinois for the Easter Weekend. I can still see the clouds in the sky inviting me to dream as we were heading east.

Always wanting to listen to the radio, I was playing with the radio searching for some music. We were driving away from the radio station signals that I was familiar with and my mind starting to drift to “what if?”

As I was dealing with the “what ifs,” we had lived in Lincoln, Nebraska for the last two years. KOLN/KGIN-TV Lincoln, Nebraska had hired me to be a TV-Director in 1969. By 1971 my wife and I had ingrained ourselves in the community and we created an Advertising Agency, and we were on our own.

So here we are driving in a void of radio signals, and I got to thinking … why isn’t there a Contemporary Christian Music Radio Station playing the music of the young artists that were expressing their faith in a medium I could identify with? That was the “what if”

As we kept heading east, the vision became clearer to me. I set out me on an adventure to create a Contemporary Christian Music Radio Station with a format like that of my idol radio station WLS the great 890 in Chicago for the next seven years.

KBHL-FM 95.3 was granted the right to commence broadcasting by the FCC in Lincoln, Nebraska on March 5, 1975.

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