Updated: Tuesday, Dec. 7, 1999 at 01:11 CST
By John Austin
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
GRAND PRAIRIE -- Ken Dowe scans his computer monitor like a jet pilot flying on instruments.
Eying the multicolored grid, Dowe cocks his ear toward the speakers piping KKDA/104.5 FM's afternoon show into his office, briefly critiques it, then continues chatting. People pop in and out, the phone rings, Dowe keeps talking and massaging the station's music log.
"I'm a real multi-tasker," Dowe says with a grin.
Multi-tasking notwithstanding, as chief operating officer of Service Broadcasting Corp., Dowe has had one key mission during the past 6 ½ years: Turn a radio also-ran into the No. 1- rated station in the Southwest's biggest, richest radio market.
Doing that has meant ignoring consultants who told him to fire the staff, change the call letters, forget the urban- contemporary format and start from scratch. It has meant pitting an operation based in an old house in Grand Prairie against a raft of corporate- owned radio giants. Perhaps most intriguing, putting K104 on top has meant targeting a young black audience in a market where African-Americans are the third-largest demographic group.
But Dowe and his team have done it. K104 convincingly nailed the No. 1 position for the third consecutive quarter in the latest Arbitron ratings. It has been either first or second since spring 1996.
Under Dowe's direction, K104 not only beat its major competitor but drove it out of urban music altogether.
Two years to the day after he arrived, Dowe says, "They left the format. That was the goal."
Of course, given the sales momentum of rap and R&B music, it is no surprise that K104 is hot. But listeners might be surprised to learn that the wizard behind the urban hits flowing out of K104 is not some hip young brother from around the way. Rather, he is a white 58-year-old Highland Park resident who often listens to country and classical.
At first, Dowe raised a few eyebrows in the community.
James Price, chief executive officer of After Dark Concepts, operates several area clubs that cater to African-Americans. He says he was dubious about a white man with no urban-radio credentials programming a station with a core audience that is black.
But watching Dowe made Price change his opinion.
"He believed in everybody and brought out the best in everybody," Price says. "Basically, he's a man of his word, and that's hard to find in this business."
Dowe gives short shrift to the suggestion that making K104 a consistent success was a personal achievement. Instead, he praises the station's Skip Murphy & Company morning show, program director/music director Skip Cheatham, the station's staff and the station's owner, Hymen Childs.
Tweaking the computer to put Ideal's Get Gone in the heavy-rotation "Q" category on the log, Dowe moves his other hand gently to show how the music should "porpoise" up and down, day and night.
"I'm just conducting the orchestra," Dowe says. "I'm just the maestro."
But Dottie Dowe, his wife of 38 years and the mother of the couple's two now-grown children, sees the music man differently.
"He's like a miner," she says. "He knows how to find the treasure."
Dowe first struck treasure as a teen-ager in the early 1960s, riding a streak that transformed him from a poor boy in the Mississippi Delta working $55-a- week radio jobs to a San Diego morning deejay.
But en route from the South to his first California job, Dowe drove through the Fort Worth- Dallas area.
"I thought, `One day I'm going to live there,' " he says. "Dallas radio was so exciting. To me, Texas was so exciting."
And it was in North Texas that Dowe first made it big.
It was about 1963 that he got a call from KLIF/1190 AM boss Gordon McLendon, Dowe says.
"That was a dream come true," he says.
McLendon put him on the air at 50,000-watt powerhouse KLIF, and Dowe forever abandoned his dream of becoming a fighter ace. Though he did eventually learn to fly, Dowe decided to make his living on the airwaves instead of in the Air Force.
"I walked away from college," Dowe says, recalling that McLendon insisted on hiring only those who were "highly intelligent and certifiably insane."
"My education," he says, "began with Gordon."
An innovator who made post-World War II radio rock, McLendon linked Top 40 and early versions of all-news and easy-listening formats to a host of promotional tricks and took his stations to the top. And once he hit Dallas, Dowe scored, too.
"I don't think I ever paid for a meal," Dowe says, recalling the era when airplay on KLIF was often a prelude to a national hit. "We were like the Cowboys."
The job came with perks such as introducing the Beatles when they played Dallas, as well as frequent opportunities to fly to Cowboys games with the players.
Ex-Cowboy Peter Gent even based the young radio hotshot and his Southern belle wife in his novel `North Dallas Forty' on Ken and Dottie Dowe. Dowe hastens to add, however, that it is a loose interpretation.
It was also during those years that Dowe created a fictional character of his own. Listeners knew her as Granny Emma, but the wisecracking old lady was none other than Dowe. Some fans are still convinced that Granny Emma was another person. But Dowe did it all with just one microphone and a quick flip of his head. He can still fall into character as Granny Emma on demand.
"It was a total rip off of Jonathan Winters' Maude Frickert," Dowe says with a chuckle. "Her standard line was, `I may be old, but I've got gold.' "
Dowe was beginning to bank some gold of his own, but McLendon wouldn't make him a program director or put him in radio sales.
Dowe quit. McLendon relented, and Dowe eventually became his executive vice president.
Dowe cannot praise his former mentor enough, but a former colleague, Michael Spears, who is now operations director at KRLD/1080 AM, says Dowe is approaching the McLendon level.
"On a scale of one to 10, he's about a 17," says Spears, who was with Dowe when he launched Dallas' KNUS and made it one of the groundbreaking FM rock stations in the country during the early 1970s. "He's in the league with the McLendons. . . . He was a real risk-taker and inventor of formats."
Another former Dowe hire, Infinity Radio President Dan Mason, concurs.
"Ken is a highly creative individual who has unique talents that he has demonstrated over and over," he says. "He creates exciting radio."
Dowe needed all the creativity he could muster when he decided to return to an industry he had grown tired of. After taking a battery of psychological tests, he realized that owning the stations he had assembled after McLendon retired did not give him the creative outlet that had drawn him to radio.
So he was enjoying a tennis- playing sabbatical when Childs prevailed on him to tackle the marginal K104.
"How far down were we? Bad," Dowe says. "It was casually programmed. I'm not going to libel anybody, but I've got a real good idea why some of those records were played."
Still, it wasn't long until Dowe, who moved his office into the rear of the studio complex, where he could be close to the talent instead of the front office, was back in his element, working in what he calls "a black, abstract art."
Though some former employees "had to take the 3:10 to Yuma," as Dowe says, he made the station a hit with many of the employees. And while he consciously made the station "blacker," the personalities often remained the same. Their roles just changed.
"He looked at it and gave everybody a role to play," Cheatham says, referring to K104's morning show. "They are a great morning show. When they got here, they were not a great morning show."
Meanwhile, back at the controls, Dowe is multi-tasking and dreaming of new formats and stations.
"It's like an airplane," he says, reflecting on how to make a station flow smoothly. "If you can fly one, you can fly 'em all."
Turbulence, however, appears minimal.
"I might as well be retired," he says. "All I do is what I want to do and get paid very well to do it.
"I do it for fun," he says. "I really do it for fun."
John Austin, (817) 548-5418
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