Hold on to those Thanksgiving turkeys! WKRP is coming to Cincinnati—for real this time. "I cannot, by contract, tell you when. I cannot tell you who. But I can tell you, direct to the camera, WKRP, after 48 years, is coming to Cincinnati," DP McIntire, who runs the media nonprofit that is auctioning the famous call letters, told the AP. "Book it! It's done!" The call sign was made famous by WKRP in Cincinnati, a CBS television sitcom that ran from 1978 to 1982. It made stars of actors like Loni Anderson and Richard Sanders, whose bumbling newsman Les Nessman reported on a Thanksgiving promotion gone bad when live but flightless turkeys were dropped from a helicopter.
McIntire remembers watching the show's first episode—featuring disc jockeys Dr. Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) and Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid)—in the living room with his parents and older sister. "And at the end of the 30-minute episode," he said, "I got up and I proclaimed, 'I'm going to be in radio. And if I ever have the opportunity, I'm going to run a station called WKRP.'" McIntire said he got his first on-air job at 13 as a news anchor at WNQQ "Wink FM" in Blairsville, Pennsylvania. Fast forward to 2014, when his North Carolina-based nonprofit acquired the call sign from the Federal Communications Commission. Stations in Dallas, Georgia, and Alexandria, Tennessee, previously bore the letters.
McIntire laughs as he recalls his chat with a woman in the agency's audio division. He had two sets of call letters in mind. She told him he needed a third. "Being the jokester that I am, I said, `Well, if you need three, and if it's available, we'll take WKRP,'" he said. "And 90 seconds later, she came back and she said, `Mr. McIntire. Congratulations. You're the general manager of WKRP in Raleigh, North Carolina.'" WKRP-LP—101.9 on the FM dial—went live Nov. 30, 2015. The LP stands for "low power," a class of station created to serve more local audiences that didn't want mass-market content. LPFM is restricted to nonprofit organizations like his Oak City Media, and it's definitely local.
Like the WKRP of television, McIntire and his partners set out to be "irreverent." One of their offerings is a two-hour show called "Weird Al and Friends," focusing on the satirical works of Weird Al Yankovic. They even had an annual Thanksgiving turkey giveaway. But don't call PETA—they hand out gift certificates to a local grocery store. "We don't toss them out of helicopters," he said with a laugh. After 10 years on the air, the 56-year-old McIntire decided it was time to pass the reins. They put out a call for bids to use the call letters on FM and AM radio, as well as television and digital television. Whatever the buyers do with the call sign, he hopes they will be true to the show that inspired it. "It has a special place in the hearts of an awful lot of people," he said. "And we have been very, very, very proud to have been a steward of that legacy."
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