June 25, 1988 – The Oregonian/Peter Farrell
Sad news: Victor Ives is ready to sign an agreement that will return old-time radio station KVIX (1290 AM) to David M. Jacks, its former owner. Ives said he is losing money and has fallen behind in his payments to Jacks, who owned the station under the call letters KLIQ.
Under the planned agreement, Ives would continue to operate KVIX for the 90 days it would take for the Federal Communications Commission to approve the transfer of ownership.
“Frankly we don’t know if the old-time radio format will continue after that,” he said. Ives told his staff about the financial problems Thursday.
Ives had owned the KMJK AM and FM stations. He sold the FM in 1987, and turned the AM into KVIX. Its format is heavy with old radio serials and comedies, including the especially popular “Fibber McGee and Molly.” The station is also home to Ives’ Oregon News Network.
Ives dedicated the station to his special interest in old radio and in creating radio programs people would listen to, not just “have on.” In the same spirit, he started “Live at the Heathman” radio theater broadcasts.
His programing was a sentimental favorite, but not a business success. He said the station was losing $10,000 a month, a deficit that would be bearable, he said, if expected additional money had come through. “There might be an eleventh-hour white knight,” he said, that would bring the station new financing before the 90 days are up, “but frankly I don’t see one on the horizon.”
Besides the limited appeal of the KVIX format, Ives went into the AM radio business at a time when many listeners have moved to FM; several Portland AM stations without FM partners are in some degree of financial difficulty, operating either with marginal profits or at a deficit.
MORE ON KBMS: Christopher H. Bennett, owner of KBMS (1480 AM), can’t understand the fuss about the firing last week of the station’s morning disc jockey and the resignation of his general manager.
Bennett, who publishes newspapers and a magazine and owns a radio station in Seattle, denies Carnell Foreman was fired for talking on the air about a T-shirt offer, as both Foreman and Leon Harris, the former general manager, had said. Harris has since reiterated that Bennett did order the firing when Harris told Bennett that Foreman had told listeners about the shirts.
Bennett said that for legal reasons he could not say why Foreman was fired. But, he said, radio people are fired all the time in Portland. True.
Bennett resents any implication in a column last Saturday that he was not interested in the problems of drugs and street youths, an area in which he said he had a positive record. Harris, while taking care not to overstress the point, had said it was unfortunate that a positive role model had been taken off the air. I’m sure from both the tone and substance of what he said that Harris did not mean to say Bennett was uncaring about youth and crime; I certainly didn’t.
KBMS went on the air April 26 as Oregon’s first black-owned station. Bennett sees last week’s column as an attack rather than an observation about developments at what is, at the moment, one of the more interesting radio stations in town. KBMS is the former KAAR, which went off the air in financial difficulty, and KBMS’s urban contemporary format would seem to be one of the last niches available in Portland AM radio.
Bennett said Harris, general manager at both the Portland Observer and KBMS, did a good job, but perhaps the dual roles overtaxed him. “I did not anticipate him having the problem of making the adjustment” to radio, the same transition Bennett had made in Seattle. He said what Harris saw as limits on his authority came about because Harris was new to radio. “I knew he didn’t have any radio experience, but I knew I did.”
Bennett plans to affiliate KBMS with a network, but will retain a live format: “I could have gone satellite and avoided all these personnel problems.” He also said that within a few weeks KBMS would expand its Sunday gospel music program from six to 12 hours a day, and the station would add to its news and community service.
Bennett made another point, and it is a good one. When he came to Portland, he said, he found quite a lot of blacks with radio talent but not radio jobs. Why, he wonders, didn’t some of the city’s 30 other radio stations hire them?
January 24, 2025 at QZVX
Lou Robbins says:
Victor Ives also hosted Old-Time radio features on Golden West’s KVI/Seattle.