Dear Editor:

Really enjoyed Joe Vaughan's article on KCKN (August, page 16).

When we put KUDL-AM 1380 on the air on May 4, 1953, KCKN was a powerhouse. Wayne Stitt, Eddie Clark, Buddy Black, and, later, Mark Foster were great—but they certainly would not have played anything like Little Richard.

I must nit-pick Vaughan a bit on dates. He mentioned that in 1951 rock & roll came along. Not precisely correct. By 1953, KPRS was playing rhythm & blues, which, with its danceable beat, was very popular with teens. But it took people like Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, and others to evolve it into rock & roll, and that did not come until perhaps five years later.

When Storz took over WHB and stole most of the great deejay talent in KC (including the KUDL program director, Peter Tripp), those of us who were left had to find a new niche. WHB would not play any real R&B artists, but relied on singers like Pat Boone, so at KUDL we decided to move more toward the KPRS music lineup.

One Sunday morning in 1955, or perhaps even 1956, I was on the air at KUDL when I was visited by a couple of KU students I knew. I gave them a big box of new records I had not yet had time to audition and asked that they pick out some record I could debut on the air.

After a couple of hours they handed me Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti." I listened to it on a monitor and knew that our station owner, Dave Segal, would consider it too wild. But we had been running a promotion called "Make it or break it," inviting listeners to phone the station and tell us to "make" or "break" a new record. I aired "Tutti Frutti" and the calls overwhelmingly wanted us to "make" the record. That gave us incentive to let out all the stops, and we did, including playing some of the great blues artists of the day.

You may be interested to know that the call letters KCKN live on in Roswell, N.M. The station plays country music and calls the station "Kickin' Country."

—Sam Bradley, Las Cruces, N.M.