WLOL (AM)

The first incarnation of WLOL signed on at 1300 AM on June 16, 1940, and was a part of the Mutual Broadcasting System, a national radio network in the United States.

Studios were at 1730 Hennepin Avenue, at Oak Grove Street across from Loring Park, approximately in the current-day airspace over the westbound lanes of I-94 exiting the Lowry Hill Tunnel.

The station took this idea to Schaack Electronics to see if they would sponsor three hours of this "stereo" broadcast experiment on Sunday nights, from nine to midnight, and they agreed.

We tried to pick music that had the best left and right separation, so if you didn't play along and have two radios to blend both channels together the sound from just the AM or the FM broadcast would be muted.

The stations stood to lose some audience due to the sound quality on a single band, but time was devoted to explaining what we were doing.

Sunday nights were not prime time, anyway, and it was thought that the novelty outweighed the risk – but you'd have to be an active listener to get the full benefit of the experiment.

Jim Stokes, a WLOL announcer during that time (1330 AM had a talk format during his tenure), documented some of the period at the Davern Street location, 1972–75, in this commentary.

In January 1980, Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) purchased the station and changed the call letters to KSJN to correspond with their FM property, KSJN-FM 91.1.

The station remained popular until Emmis ran into financial problems in the early 1990s as a result of its purchase of the Seattle Mariners baseball team.

WMNN was sold in 2004 to Starboard Broadcasting, which turned it into Relevant Radio a Catholic religious format and soon restored the original WLOL call sign.

The call sign returned to the original 1330 AM frequency in 2004 (this time, however, it stands for "Our Lady of Lourdes", reflecting Relevant Radio's Catholic mission).