Baby, if you’ve ever wondered … whether there’s a real radio station called WKRP in Cincinnati, there is now.
A station formerly known as “The Oasis” bears the call letters made famous by the 1978-82 sitcom as of Monday. The station, 97.7 FM in the Cincinnati area, aired the WKRP theme song for six hours straight early Monday morning before the changeover became official.
The station will play classic rock and pop — music that viewers might have heard snippets of in episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati. Gary Sandy, who played program director Andy Travis on the series, recorded a series of promos for the station.
“We play essentially the same music that they played on WKRP,” station owner Jeff Ziesmann told public radio station WVXU. “It made more sense for us to do this than any other station in town.”
WKRP in Cincinnati also starred Howard Hesseman, Tim Reid, Loni Anderson, Gordon Jump, Jan Smithers, Frank Bonner and Richard Sanders. It ran for four seasons on CBS; a spinoff/sequel, The New WKRP in Cincinnati, ran in syndication in the early 1990s and featured several cast members reprising their roles alongside some new characters.
The WKRP call letters have been used by a handful of real radio stations in the past, though never in or near Cincinnati. They most recently belonged to a nonprofit, low-power FM station in Raleigh, North Carolina. That station put them up for auction in a fund-raising effort earlier this year, and Ziesmann’s Grant County Broadcasters won the bidding.
The 97.7 FM frequency also has some pop cultural cachet. It was formerly home to the influential modern rock station WOXY-FM, also known as 97X. Its late 1980s tagline was immortalized in the movie Rain Man, with Dustin Hoffman’s character repeating “97X — bang! — the future of rock ‘n’ roll” several times in one scene. The WOXY call letters now belong to belong to a station in suburban Dayton, also owned by Ziesmann.
