A radio station that had served the northeastern Twin Cities metro area has returned its license 73 years after it first signed on.
On Sept. 21, an attorney for Endurance Broadcasting sent a two-sentence letter to the FCC surrendering the license of KLBB/1220 (Stillwater). No reason for the decision is mentioned in the letter.
The FCC formally deleted the station’s callsign on Sept. 23.
The move comes four years after Endurance sold the station’s longtime transmitter site near Brick Street and Ramsey Avenue in Stillwater. A housing cooperative was built on the site.
Shortly before the station turned off the Brick Street facility, Endurance owner Dan Smith told the Pioneer Press that it was difficult to run an AM radio station on the fringe of the Twin Cities.
KLBB returned to the air at very low power from downtown Stillwater in 2019, relaying a NOAA Weather Radio signal. Over the past several years, the station filed a series of requests for extension of the FCC special temporary authority to use the temporary 20-Watt facility, documenting efforts to find a new tower site and raising the possibility that the station might be sold. Nothing ever came to fruition.
KLBB also had an unbuilt construction permit for an FM translator on 107.5, which expired last year.
FCC records indicate St. Croix Broadcasting first signed on WSHB/1220 with 250 Watts, daytime only, in 1949. It upgraded to 1kW daytime only in 1958 and again to 5kW daytime only in 1963, remaining at the Brick Street transmitter site all along. It added pre-sunrise authority (6 a.m. sign-on) of 361 Watts in 1961 and nighttime power of 254 Watts in the 1980s.
The station changed its callsign to WAVN in 1956, WVLE in 1983, WTCN in 1985, WIMN in 1993, WEZU in 1997, WMGT in 2003, and finally KLBB in 2006. The last callsign was adopted after 1400 (St. Paul) dropped the “Club” Nostalgia format in 2005, prompting several KLBB personalities and managers to join 1220 and merge their efforts with a similar format that had aired on the station since 1993.
Though it offered local programming for the St. Croix Valley not available on other stations and its 5kW daytime signal could potentially reach millions of people in the metro, KLBB had to compete with dozens of other stations for listeners and could not be heard outside Stillwater after sunset.
Here’s how WIMN sounded in 1994:
Here they are as WEZU in 2002, an era when the station was also carrying a regional show by market veteran Ruth Koscielak:
From 2004, here’s WMGT:
KLBB, as recorded from the web in 2012:
And finally, the station’s sign-off in 2018, recorded from the web, with a message from Endurance owner Dan Smith:
RadioTapes.com has a couple of recordings of WAVN in 1982 as well as recordings from the KLBB era.