WING

• 1. Introduction

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  WING first went on the air on the evening of the 4th of June, 1924, from a studio inside a former hotel on East Third Street in downtown Dayton, Ohio. Before that broadcast, the station had been licensed just days earlier under the call letters WDBS to a small company called the S.M.K. Radio Corporation. It was the first full-time commercial radio station in Dayton, and it would go on to outlast the hotels, the theaters, and the downtown storefronts that once housed it. How does a fledgling AM signal survive for more than a century? And what does it say about a city that its radio history is wrapped up with aviation, Top 40 jingles, a future Hollywood voiceover star, and a hall-of-fame combat reporter? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Station Finds Its Name

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  Stanley M. Khron, Jr. ran the S.M.K. Radio Corporation from 39 East Third Street, and he inherited call letters that had been assigned to him at random from an alphabetical list kept by the Department of Commerce. He made the best of it, adopting the slogan "Watch Dayton's Broadcasting Station" to give WDBS a reason for being. By early 1925 he had changed the calls to WSMK to match his own initials and pushed the transmitter power up to one thousand watts.

  The Federal Radio Commission arrived in 1927 and immediately complicated life for broadcasters everywhere. Stations were issued temporary authorizations starting on the 3rd of May, 1927, and told to file formal license applications by the 15th of January, 1928, to prove they met the standard of "public interest, convenience, or necessity." On the 25th of May, 1928, General Order 32 notified 164 stations, WSMK among them, that the commission could not find that continuing their license would serve the public. The station pushed back and won. Later that year, on the 11th of November, 1928, General Order 40 reshuffled transmitting frequencies across the country. WSMK landed on 570 kHz.

  The name that would stick came in 1939, when Cincinnati businessman Charles Sawyer bought the station from Khron. At the suggestion of a man named Jack Snow, Sawyer changed the call letters to WING, a nod to Dayton's deep identity as a center of aviation history. That name change planted the station's flag in a story larger than any single owner.

• 3. Scatman, the Lively Guys, and Top 40

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  Actor, dancer, singer, and musician Scatman Crothers got his professional start at the station during the WSMK era in 1932, a detail that tends to surprise people who know him only from his later Hollywood career. His time in Dayton came during a period when the station was still finding its voice.

  That voice sharpened considerably in the 1940s and 1950s. Charlie Reeder anchored the mornings with a program called "Sunny Side Up," and Gene "By Golly" Barry brought an evening program he called "Swingin' With Wing." Barry stayed through the 1960s, when the station was owned by Air Trails Broadcasting, later renamed Great Trails Broadcasting, and became Dayton's first official Top 40 station. It was also the flagship of that chain, with sister stations WIZE in Springfield and WCOL in Columbus running the same format.

  By 1960 WING had moved its studios to a showcase-window storefront at 128 West First Street in the Talbott Tower building. That space became known affectionately as "WING Island." A weekly "super hot hits" survey was printed and distributed to record shops across the Miami Valley. The on-air roster tightened into a stable of personalities called the "Lively Guys," a name possibly borrowed from WSAI's "Good Guys" in Cincinnati. That roster grew to include Lou Swanson, Jerry Kaye, Ken Warren, Big Jim Quinn, Dave Parks, Al Morgan, Goldie, Bob Holiday, Ritchie "Duke of Dayton" Allen, Jerry "Big D" Dennis, Don Robertson, Dan Clover, John Alexander, Alan Sakalas (who went by "Mel Waukee"), Mike Duff, and Chuck McKibben. McKibben later worked as a producer for Mel Blanc in Hollywood.

  The news department matched that ambition. Rod Williams, later inducted into the National Broadcasters Hall of Fame, headed the news staff and won a commendation from the Ohio General Assembly for his combat reporting in Vietnam. A young Doug Ritterling began his WING newscasting career at 17 years of age. Randall Carlisle went on to fame at CKLW. Mark Giangreco became a sportscaster on NBC. Kathy O'Connor is remembered as Dayton's first female news reporter.

• 4. Steve Kirk and the Sound of an Era

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  Steve Kirk arrived from Cincinnati's WSAI and joined the WING morning slot starting in 1966. He stayed until well into the late 1980s, making his run from 1967 to 1992 the longest of any "Lively Guy" outside Gene "By Golly" Barry himself. His signature was a telephone "put-on" bit and a collection of screwball on-air gags. His self-introduction became part of the station's identity: "Hi-ya gang...Kirkie here...ha-chi-chi-chi-chi-chi!"

  The jingle packages behind him were equally deliberate. In the mid-1960s WING used a high-energy package produced by PAMS Productions in Dallas under the banner "High Flying WING." In the early 1970s the station switched to the Drake "rum-pum" Boss Radio jingles featuring the Johnny Mann Singers, the same package that the legendary CKLW in Windsor, Ontario had used during the late 1960s and 1970s. Wolfman Jack aired late at night in syndicated form through the 1970s.

  By 1968 the news format had evolved from the old top-of-the-hour "rip and read" wire service model, which had been replaced in 1965 by a tone chord simulating an electronic telegraph key sounder, into the Drake-inspired "20-20" News format, airing at twenty minutes before and after the hour. World news actualities came from Metromedia Radio, a predecessor of UPI Audio Network, which bought the news-feed service in 1971.

• 5. The FM Tide and Adult Radio 1410

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  FM rock stations began pulling Top 40 listeners away from AM in the mid-1970s. WING responded by softening its sound to adult contemporary under the banner "Adult Radio 1410." Kirkie kept his morning slot; John Alexander took mid-days; John King and Terry Dorsey joined in the afternoons.

  King and Dorsey built a following with comedy sketches and mock ads for a fictitious establishment called Babs Knieiven's Bar and Grill of New Carlisle, along with bits about Hiney Wine and a current-events spoof called "The King and Dorsey Report." The bits kept listeners even as FM competitors WTUE and WDJX in nearby Xenia pressed in.

  It was also during this period that Great Trails acquired an FM sister station, purchasing WCTM-FM in nearby Eaton from Stanley Coning and renaming it WJAI. The station was branded "WJ-93," a name inspired by the Florida sport of jai-alai. One of its first female on-air personalities was Kim Faris. She was soon followed there by Nancy Cartwright, who would go on to a successful voiceover career.

  The jingle diet at WING through the 1970s and 1980s included PAMS' "Energy One" and "Music and More," TM Productions' "You," and several series from JAM Creative Productions: "I'd Rather Be...," "The Best Show," "The Best Show 2," and "Good Time Radio." During the years WING aired American Top 40, the show carried TM jingles until 1983 and JAM jingles from 1984-1987.

• 6. The End of the High-Flying Era

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  By 1984 the Top 40 format had moved entirely to the Eaton FM sister station, rebranded that year as WGTZ "Z-93." John King went with it to mornings; Terry Dorsey joined on a tape-delayed basis from a station in Texas where he was working at the time. WING itself became a live oldies station from around 1985 until October 1990, when it switched to a satellite oldies format during daytime hours.

  Steve Kirk eventually departed for a brief stint at Beavercreek's WYMJ-FM "Oldies 104," then retired and moved to Florida. Great Trails Broadcasting sent WING Program Director Rob Ellis and DJ Jason Roberts to Columbus's WCOL-FM to install an oldies format there. WCOL-FM stayed oldies until Nationwide Communications acquired it from Great Trails.

  Gene "By Golly" Barry, the personality most synonymous with the station's peak years, died in 2001. In the fall of 2006, former newsman Bill Nance and Z-93 alumna Kim Faris organized a reunion party of WING's past and present air personalities at the Holiday Inn near Dayton Mall. The event included a special memorial tribute to Barry. Bill Nance and Retha Phillips were both inducted into the Dayton Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2007. Charlie Reeder received the same honor that year.

• 7. Sports Talk and New Ownership

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  After a stint as a CNN Radio affiliate in the 1990s and time carrying various network talk programs, WING found its current identity in sports talk. The station now airs ESPN Radio and serves as the Dayton affiliate for Ohio State Buckeyes football and men's basketball, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Columbus Blue Jackets.

  Ownership passed through several hands. Radio One acquired the station's previous owner, Cincinnati-based Blue Chip Broadcasting, in 1999. On the 17th of May, 2007, Philadelphia-based Main Line Broadcasting announced it would acquire Radio One's stations in the Dayton and Louisville markets. Main Line took formal control of the Dayton stations on the 14th of September, 2007. Main Line Broadcasting was then acquired by Alpha Media in 2014. Alpha Media merged with Connoisseur Media on the 4th of September, 2025.

  Mark Neal served as program director from April 2006 to January 2018. Justin Kinner has held the position since February 2018 and hosts the station's afternoon drive program, The Justin Kinner Show. Keith Byars, a name familiar to Ohio sports listeners, co-hosts Sunday Morning Tailgate with Kinner and has his own Monday program. The station still transmits at 5,000 watts from its transmitter site on David Road in Kettering, the same location it moved to in 1960 when the FCC authorized the power upgrade.