WWTC (1280 AM, "The Patriot") is a long-standing, yet often troubled and unlistened-to radio station serving the Twin Cities region. Despite its issues, the station spawned two of the area's major television stations and had some very innovative and unusual periods in its history. Today, it is owned by Salem Communications and broadcasts a talk radio format that has stemmed the frequency's slide towards oblivion.
The station began as WRHM in 1925, and was part of NBC's Blue Network. It was purchased in 1935 by Twin Cities Newspapers, a company representing the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Minneapolis Tribune, and changed its call letters to WTCN at that time. The station remained an NBC Blue station through the network's selloff, becoming an American Broadcasting Company (ABC) affiliate in the 1940s.
The station had an experimental frequency modulation transmitter by 1939. W9XTC at 26.05 MHz operated for several years, but by 1944 was only being activated intermittently. Area station KSTP also experimented with the medium around this time, as did WCCO.
WTCN-TV began broadcasting on channel 4 on July 1, 1949, becoming the second modern station in the state after KSTP-TV took to the air a year earlier. However, the station merged with WCCO radio on August 17, 1952 and soon changed its call letters. This TV station switched to the CBS affiliaton of its parent company.
WTCN quickly applied for a new license for channel 11, but had to negotiate with WMIN for the frequency. The two stations arranged to share the broadcast day, alternating every two hours. This became the area's third station, and kept the WTCN call sign until 1985 when it became known as WUSA. The TV station was merged and sold to the H.M. Bitner Group in 1955 and cycled through several owners, including Metromedia and Gannett, before eventually becoming an NBC-affiliated station in approximately 1979; it is now known as KARE. Prior to the station's current studio location in Golden Valley, its studios were in the Calhoun Beach Hotel on Lake Street.
The AM station, which was twice located in the Wesley Temple office building in downtown Minneapolis on East Grant Street, immediately next to Wesley Church, and also on 2nd Avenue a few doors down from WCCO-AM, eventually changed its call sign to WWTC. It had a number of formats, including the distinction of being the Twin Cities' first all-news radio station, when it adopted the format in the mid-late '70s. In 1979, WWTC switched to an oldies format known as the "Golden Rock" and achieved its highest ratings in years. With a number of quirky DJs such as "Ugly Del" Roberts and Steve "Boogie" Bowman , the station managed to win an audience in spite of management screw-ups left and right. During its days as the "Golden Rock," WWTC might have been the only Twin Cities station with an attorney on staff moonlighting as a disk jockey. Paul Bergstrom, who practiced law by day in St. Paul, worked a late-night shift for a time in the late '80s under the name Max Adams (the name was derived from those of his two young children). Because of his extensive knowledge of the format's music, Bergstrom was originally brought in by a friend on staff to help build the station's music library. Following a collapse after a few years, the station went through a long string of format changes, and briefly flew the call sign KSNE when the format became a sort of easy listening format. The call letters stood for "Sunny," and were retained when the station changed to an ill-fated automated "all-weather" format in late 1985 or in 1986. The weather format didn't last long and after the bad weather passed, the station became known as "The Breeze," an early and more diverse form of what is now known as "Smooth Jazz"; 1280 served as the flagship station and origination point of a network of Breeze stations around the country.
In the early 1990s, the station reclaimed the WWTC call sign and became known as "Radio Aahs" and transitioned to an unusual format: made by children for children. This also provided a modicum of stability for a while, and the station became the flagship of Children's Broadcasting Corporation. Children's Broadcasting eventually came to own several radio outlets and had its content reach a network of 29 stations across the United States (Aahs World Radio) by about 1996. Disney was working with the station around this time as a marketing partner, and ABC co-opted the format, launching Radio Disney. KQRS's 1440 AM signal was renamed to KDIZ. WWTC could no longer compete, and the format was discontinued in 1998.
For a short period, the network became known as "Beat Radio," hosted by area DJ Alan Freed. Freed, in addition to having worked at WWTC during its "Golden Rock" era and during the station's "MetroRadio" period in the mid '80s, had previously set up a pirate radio station in downtown Minneapolis broadcasting dance music and which had garnered a positive response from the public but was shut down by the FCC after operating at 20 watts for a few months. Freed played electronic dance music across ten of Children's Broadcasting's stations between the shutdown of Radio Aahs in February and the final approval of a buyout of WWTC in October. In 2004, he joined XM Satellite Radio to progam three of its dance channels.
The 2000s decade brought the station's newest incarnation, "The Patriot." Some old hands of the station including Del Roberts once again took to the 1280 AM frequency (however, Roberts died in 2003).
Area author Jeff Lonto wrote a book about the station in 1998, Fiasco At 1280 (ISBN 0966021347), which covered many of the screwups during the 1980s. Somewhat unfortunately, it was published just before the financial crisis of that year, so it doesn't include that part of the station's story. In 2002, the former Children's Broadcasting owners (who now operate Intelefilm ) won a court case against Disney, and were awarded $9.5 million. Payments totaling $12.4 million, including $2.6 million in interest, were finally handed out in 2004.
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