Tag Archives: Martin Karant

Heritage Federal

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hfpen

Courtesy of Carl Swann.

Heritage Federal Savings and Loan Association, 110 East Center Street, started out in 1930 and meandered on until 1981, when somebody kicked off a flurry of acquisitions (read all about it here).  It officially lost the name in 1995 when it was acquired by First American National Bank, now part of Regions Bank.

The logo, which is partially cut off in this shot, is a symbolic Minuteman haloed by, guess what, 13 stars.  Heritage, get it?

One snowy evening, around 1957 or 1958, as I was sloshing my way down to the library, which was then on the corner of East Center and Shelby Streets, I saw Martin Karant doing a live remote in the big window at Heritage Federal.  He was soliciting money for some organization.  I walked in and volunteered to help (I was quite young at the time).  I stood outside, in the snow, for a half hour or so and offered a canister for people to put coins in.  In those years, there were quite a few people out walking around downtown in the evenings, shopping and so forth.

WKPT Ad

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ad

This 5-column, 3/4-page ad ran on July 21, 1968, in the Kingsport Times-News.  I found it when I was going through an old scrapbook.  Look!  Not a syndicated show in sight; although, the stations did run some NBC and religious programming on the weekends.

I always liked the NBC logo.  The microphone is a stylized RCA 44-BX (bi-directional).  The WKPT-AM studios used these, since the installation of the equipment after the fire* was supervised by NBC.

*The WKPT studios burned on September 7, 1948, according to the Kingsport Times-News (I misread that date. It was 1946.  When I enlarged the page, I saw that it was a “6”, not an “8”, but it was a kind of skeevy 6, at that).  The new studio, with all new equipment, opened in ’48.

Midnight Sun

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midnightsun

Forty-six years ago, I began the first permanent rock show on WKPT-AM.  John Dotson had “Sounds of Summer” the previous year, but it ended when he went back to school or left town or something.  It was a good show and broke the Easy Listening hold on that staid, NBC-affiliated station.  So, I swooped in the next year, ditched “Teenage Terrace”, (which I had been on when I was in high school, from 5:00 to 6:00 pm, as I recall, with Marty running the board and we students, when we showed up, sitting at the table in the news studio) and had the 6:00 pm to midnight slot all to myself as “The Midnight Sun”.
Since this was before 8-track tapes in cars became widely available, I was a success, as it were, with the kids cruising Broad Street.  Then, the tapes came and I eventually moved into the afternoon Drive Time slot.  The fact that, for the most part, I had to buy my own records for the show and management had the nerve to put something like this cloth sticker out helped me leave it behind.  “Like it is”, my ass.  The phrase was a joke by this time.
The ellipse is 4″ on the horizontal axis and 2-1/2″ on the vertical.