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WTAW Interview
Bill Hicks | WTAW & Bryan Broadcasting General Manager
Tom Turbiville | WTAW Radio Host
Laura Quezada | Transcriber
00:00:00 Dick Bolin (DB)
College Station, Texas, April 24th, 1947, Dick Bolin talking. Here's the latest news from the
Associated Pre…
[Unintelligible news broadcaster speaking]
00:00:11 Speaker 2
Aggies win 74-72! Here's your ri...
00:00:16 Speaker 3
…1620 WTAW.
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00:00:18 Tom Turbiville (TT)
This is WTAW, the First 100 Years, I'm Tom Turbiville. In 1957, a group out of Waco bought
WTAW from Texas A&M for $35,000. In 1961, John Hicks bought it for $125,000. How’d he
get the money? Well, John's son and current owner Bill Hicks tells us.
00:00:41 Bill Hicks (BH)
Uh, as a side business, he helped a home builder in Dallas build houses. And I- I say he helped
him build houses; h e was the finance guy. So, what he would do, and this was in his spare time if
he had any, as a buil- builder would build these 20 homes in this tract development, and he'd
send every one of the buyers to my dad who'd put together the mortgage package, get them
financed to buy that house. I think the number at that point in time in the 40s and 50s was he was
making $100 a house and he did literally hundreds, if not thousands of those kinds of deals. And
he saved every dollar of that to eventually buy a radio station.
00:01:24 (TT)
And he started in Port Arthur.
00:01:27 (BH)
And he bought KOLE radio station in Port Arthur, Texas. So, in 1959, my dad abandoned the
radio rep firm, Raymer and Company, and ended up in Port Arthur, Texas with his first radio
station. And we as kids, we're bundled up in, uh, one of those woody station wagons, left Dallas.
My mother was in tears because she had no idea what my dad was doing. I mean, he left a
$15,000 a year job.
00:01:53 (TT)
And it sure worked out okay for WTAW, the First 100 Years.