Original Call Letters: WRKT

Originally Licensed: Jun 22, 1959 

Original City of  License: Cocoa Beach 

Original Frequency: 1300

Origin of Call Letters: Sound like; RocKeT tie in with Cape Canaveral

Original Power: 500 watts daytime

Original Location: 425 W. Orange Ave.

Original Format: MOR 

 
From Pete Wenk;  It (WRKT) actually originated as a 500 watt daytimer, with studios on the causeway in Cocoa Beach..." "...The upgrade to 5,000 watts day and 1,000 watts night took place in the spring of 1965, while I was working there, along with Mark Manucy (Engineer), Bill Baker, formerly of WPDQ and WTIX, Duane Nigh, who later went to WEZY(-AM 1480), and Dick Price, who was one of the funniest guys on the planet (God knows what ever happened to him.  The last we saw, he had married some gal with a bunch of kids and was headed north to Alaska in a broken down converted school bus).  Jack Newsom was the Sales Manager, and, oh, yes, Mercer Livermore was there, as well.  The station at the time was owned by a fellow named C. Sweet Smith ("Jonesy"), who was the son of an influential local congress critter, and he continued to pour money into the thing, in spite of the fact that he could never catch WKKO, kind of amazing in view of the fact that we were full time and they were daytime.  Smith was the fellow who sold the station to Bucks County Radio. In 1981 WRKT was programming country music. But by 1985 faced with mediocre ratings, and new competition from WWKA-FM 92.3  and WHOO-FM 96.5,  management decided to adopt a ''classic hits'' format. Classic hits is an updated oldies format, a blend of Top 20 tunes from the '50s, '60s, '70s and, occasionally, the '80s. No one else in Brevard County was doing it. ''It gets down to how you can carve out your own little area and take advantage of it,'' said program director Allen Jackson. ''You may not end up with a giant, killer-number radio station -- like in double digits -- but our whole idea is to end up with a sampling of the best of all the other radio stations.'' Jackson told the Orlando Sentinel. 

Thanks to Fred King       click for full sized view

WRKT Memories From  "Brother Dave" Vasser
I was on WRKT AM-FM from February of 1974 until October 1974 when Chet Pike owned the station.  He had a boat called the MISS WRKT.  It was a big Bertram boat. My air name on WRKT and for lots of other stations thereafter was "Brother Dave" and I started doing nights at WRKT and was production director.  I eventually moved to PM drive.  The program director at WRKT at that time was Benjamin Hill who went to KIOA in Des Moines after leaving WRKT and then moved into TV and retired a millionaire.  Music director and mid days was Merv Pilgrim who went to BIG WAYS and into record promotion after BIG WAYS before leaving the business to run a video rental and appliance store in his hometown of Cleveland, Ga. Jim Sumpter did mornings and went from WRKT to WLCY in Tampa/St. Pete where he had a very long run.
After I left WRKT I spent seven years in Charleston SC at WTMA, WWWZ, WCSC and WQSN before moving to the Charlotte NC area in 1980 where I worked at Z-100, WFOX, WROQ, WABZ, WZKY and some other stations around Charlotte before finishing my radio career with a 14 year run of the Brother Dave Show on Magic 96.1 FM in Charlotte. 
The way I got to WRKT was through Benjamin Hill who had worked part time in news at WRFC in Athens GA where I was doing nights.  Ben's dad owned the local newspaper in Cocoa and I guess that is how Ben got the WRKT PD job.  Ben hired both me and Merv Pilgrim from WRFC in Athens to join him in Florida.  
When I arrived WRKT, the FM was AOR and WRKT-AM was Top 40 with all live jocks on both stations.  Shortly after I got there they went 24 hours and began simulcasting top 40 on both stations combining the staffs from both the FM and AM, moving me to PM drive. 
I enjoyed WRKT.  I was 19 years old at the time I went there and turned 20 while working there.  Although the station was probably licensed to Cocoa Beach and we said "Cocoa Beach" on the legal ID's, the WRKT AM & FM studios were never in Cocoa Beach when I worked there.  The station was actually in Cocoa on a mostly dirt road called Pluckebaum Rd in a concrete block building I called the "Radio Ranch" because there was nothing else but cows and horses and old abandoned orange groves out there. It was so remote it was almost spooky at night.  You couldn't drink the tap water because it was loaded with sulfur. The engineering department where the transmitters were located was down the entire left side of the building where the transmitters and racks were lined up.  Engineering had video cameras set up (rarer in 1974 than today) to scan the meters on the transmitter so the station would be legal.  The camera resolution was so low that you couldn't actually read the meters off the video monitor, but the FCC rules just said you had to be able to see the meters.  I remember Merv Pilgrim made a pot of coffee once with that awful tap water and everyone who drank coffee that morning had "the runs" for a while after that. We had great Top 40 programming and did lots of remotes from right on the beach in Chet Pike's old motor home that we converted into a mobile studio.  Also at this time WRKT AM and FM had one of the most dedicated engineers I ever worked with named Ron Schrader who had worked for NASA during the booming 60's doing some sort of electronics work.  He really knew electronics.  But he and I always disagreed over audio processing.  He was a very good engineer though it was just preferences.  He would only buy Collins brand equipment for some reason though, probably because he used Rockwell/Collins radio stuff in the military and at the Cape and was used to working on it.  Everything was Collins at WRKT AM/FM except the Ampex tape recorders  which were the old 350's and the RCA 77DX mics which were everywhere except in FM control where they had a big EV665 or some such dynamic.  The channel Air/Audition switches on the Collins boards went UP AND DOWN instead of Left to Right as I was used to at about every other station where I worked during that era until slide pot boards became the fashion. The station did very well in the ratings the spring book that I worked there.  The area wasn't quite as booming as I expected as Apollo was over and there was no shuttle yet, the Cape was basically a ghost town and I got out of there first chance I had.  I lived in a neighborhood called College Park on South Stetson Drive in Cocoa.  The house had 3 bedrooms in a nice neighborhood and the rent was $185 a month.  Wow!  I remember there were two salesmen at WRKT who where brothers when I got there!  One was named Ron Burgess who was your typical 1970's "Herb Tarleck-esqe" radio salesman, but his brother Rick was more of a regular Joe kind of guy and I liked him.  Ron was the tanned good looking and popular one.  There was also a bookkeeper whose name I can't recall and she embezzled a bunch of money from the books.  Ron Burgess and the embezzling bookkeeper ran off together with a bunch of Chet's money!  I don't know if Chet Pike ever caught up to the sneaky duo or not, nor do I know exactly how much they stole from him.  But it must have been a substantial amount.  Rick Burgess stayed and kept working at the station and he was there when I left a few months after the embezzlement escapade. Nobody at the station had any idea what was going on until they both had vaporized and Chet had the books checked. 
I'm amazed Chet Pike lived so long!  He was having some health issues with his heart back then and smoked a lot of cigarettes.  I can still see him tapping one on his watch crystal to pack the tobacco down before lighting up.  I tried to stay away from Chet - and all owners as much as possible until I got into management in Charleston.

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