Bridging KOAM with KKOW, Dan Willis [2] hosted the morning slot 6 days a week from 1964 to 2004, administering the Community Calendar (reading obituaries and local events), the morning polka (7:30 daily with birthday dedications, sponsored by Grimaldi's Cash Grain feedstore in Pittsburg), farm commodity reports, and "Trading Post", a live call-in show for individual buyers and sellers at 9:00).

Willis also oversaw many of the live remote broadcasts and emceed events, and he promoted an annual drive to buy Christmas gifts for developmentally-disabled children that were patients in a local care facility.

At its peak in the mid-1980s, KKOW was known in the Pittsburg, Kansas/Joplin, Missouri-area for gimmicks such as 30/30 news and 20/20 weather, the daily Grand Lake fishing report with elderly Oklahoma fisherman/storyteller Lee Jeffries, the giant fiberglass cow on a trailer for remote broadcasts (Burford the Hereford), and the K-Cowboy of the Day.

Typical 1980s sponsors included area businesses such as Cash Grain, Heidrich TV & Appliance, Castagno's, Chicken Annie's, Jim's Steak House, Colaw RV, Bowlus Sporting Goods, Lindberg Pharmacy, and Pittsburg Ford-Lincoln-Mercury, and various funeral homes.

KKOW exercised a Top 40 country format in the 1980s, and heavily promoted popular acts such as the Judds that would come to Pittsburg's Memorial Auditorium to perform.

When KKOW-FM was founded in 1986, most of the younger DJs on the AM station shifted to the FM station (notably Tim "Bones" Wallace and Rob Strand "the Singing Newsman", who co-hosted the weekday morning shift) for handling its album-oriented rock format; from there, the staff dispersed by the late 1980s/early 1990s, with the Freemans' management eventually ending.

KKOW had over the years been modestly successful in Joplin, Missouri, but never dominated the market and remained (to an extent), a station more known for rural listenership geared more for the Pittsburg-Frontenac area of southeast Kansas.

In 2009, KKOW's newly hired general manager fired for stealing a reported sum of over $87,000 from the station to cover compulsive gambling, and was convicted of embezzlement.