KIT (AM)

KIT (1280 kHz) is an AM radio station broadcasting a news/talk format to the Yakima, Washington, United States, area.

The transmitter and broadcast tower are located in southern Yakima along West Washington Avenue near the railroad tracks.

[3] KIT was first licensed, as KFEC, on October 2, 1922, to the Meier and Frank Company department store in Portland, Oregon.

The call letters were changed to KIT on March 22, 1929,[5] and the station left the air in Portland and signed on in Yakima, the next month.

On March 28, 1941, it moved to its present frequency of 1280 kHz as part of the implementation of the North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement.

One of the first NBC programs to reach the west coast was the broadcast of the 1927 Rose Bowl Game from Pasadena, California, with announcer, Graham McNamee.

Being a dirt farmer during the depression, which required sweating, plowing, and staring at the rear end of a horse all day, and after cleaning up and after eating dinner, what a pleasure it was to sit down and relax, and to listen to KIT and the great radio comedians, and for free.

And since, at the time, there were no FM or television broadcasts, no Internet, no CD players, no IPods, and the like, AM radio was king, and KIT was there, right in the middle of it.

Periodically, KIT, and the other Central Washington radio stations, would go off of the air so the bombers could not use the signals to pinpoint their bomb dropping locations, as they did at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his "Fireside Chats," broadcast from the White House in Washington D.C., used NBC and KIT to reassure the public that everything was safe and under control.

NBC radio affiliates, including KIT, had the tough decision to eventually lessen, or eliminate, their network connections in order to maintain their profit structures.

About 2-3 inches of heavy ash fell on the area causing a widespread problem of dust, making vehicle travel on the roads come to virtually a stand still.

Other on-air staff who participated included Brian Teegarden, Dave Hansen and Derek Allen, but it was the late Al Bell who was remembered by the community years after the eruption.

[citation needed] GAP Broadcasting, owned by Skip Weller, purchased the station in early 2008 from Clear Channel Communications.