[3] Clifford Hedberg, owner of KMRS in Morris, Minnesota, applied for KBEW's original construction permit; in August 1962 the FCC approved the application for a 250-watt daytime-only station.

Listeners within the 45-mile radius of KBEW's signal enjoyed daily staples such as Information Please (a two-part program of recipes and homemaking tips, followed by a call-in segment that invited listeners to comment on subjects of local interest), Barter Time, (a free service that advertised used items for sale),[9] and Welcome Travelers (which featured interviews of motorists who were passing through Blue Earth on US Highway 16 en route to the Black Hills and Yellowstone National Park).

In his autobiography Hedberg recalled how the station navigated this difficult situation: "Reports from Dallas were slow to be updated, so we were left reading the same bulletins over and over until it was verified that Kennedy had died.

At news of his death, I phoned the local Catholic priest and asked if he would come to the station and conduct a service on the air; we should have taped it so we could replay it instead of reading the same, stale AP copy over and over again.

It wouldn’t have been right to turn back to music or our other normal programming, so we were really in a bind without a network affiliation – we couldn’t cover big breaking news like I felt we should.