In 1940 Todd passed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) amateur ham radio license examination, and set up his receiver and transmitter on the third floor of the family home.
Robert H. enrolled Todd at the prestigious Choate school in Connecticut, hoping that his son would pay more attention to academics than to radio.
In 1942, he transferred to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where he put an unlicensed AM station on the air, though it was quickly shut down by the FCC.
In mid-April 1949, Robert and Todd Storz announced their purchase of KOWH-AM and its FM companion outlet KOAD from the owners of the Omaha World Herald.
For the first two years under Storz management, KOWH followed industry practice and offered a varied “conglomeration of programming” that resulted in only four percent of Omaha homes listening even once to the station in a sample week.
By mid-1951 however, KOWH began to turn around as Todd observed that audience ratings rose when recorded music was played but declined when talk shows were aired.
By the fall of 1953, all of KOWH's programming was being produced in-house, featuring local announcers, recorded popular music, and a wide array of promotional jingles.
In an era when network and local radio were relying on a more staid variety of short programs designed to appeal to a specific slice of the available audience for a finite amount of time, the Storz operation offered a single program type—recorded hit music—during all of its broadcast hours.
Ratings showed that KOWH's music appealed to the largest percentage of audience of any independent (non-network) radio outlet in the country.
Playing popular music, and repeating the top-selling (“Top-40”) hits most often, was the main engine driving KOWH's phenomenal audience growth.
Doing so would distance him from his failed marriage, remove him somewhat from his father's close scrutiny, provide him with a fresh location more in keeping with a modern, upbeat corporate identity, offer hoped-for relief from a persistent sinus condition and migraine headaches, and bring him closer to the woman who soon become his second wife–station WQAM's receptionist.
The coroner's report cited “pulmonary congestion and edema” and “marked coronary and aortic narrowing” as the probable causes.
After years of declining audiences and revenues, the six Storz AM stations were sold between April 1984 and September 1985 for prices far below what they would have fetched during their heyday under Todd's guidance.
Not often acknowledged in the Origins of rock and roll, Storz' station, and others which adopted the Top 40 format, helped to promote the genre: by the mid 50s, the playlist included artists such as "Presley, Lewis, Haley, Berry and Domino".