WMBM (1490 AM) is a

radio station Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radio ...

broadcasting a

gospel Gospel originally meant the Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was set out. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words an ...

format. Licensed to

Miami Beach, Florida Miami Beach is a coastal resort city in Miami-Dade County, Florida. It was incorporated on March 26, 1915. The municipality is located on natural and artificial island, man-made barrier islands between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, the ...

, United States, the station serves the Miami area. The station is currently owned by New Birth Broadcasting Corp. Inc. and features programming from

Westwood One Westwood One is an American radio network There are two types of radio network currently in use around the world: the one-to-many (simplex communication) broadcast network commonly used for public information and mass-media entertainment, and ...

History

WAHR

WAHR signed on the air October 31, 1954. Owned by and named for Alan Henry Rosenson, the station aired a continuous music format. Rosenson owned WLRD (93.9 FM), which changed its call letters to WAHR-FM in 1956. The manager of the station hired a young man, Larry Zeiger, to perform miscellaneous clean-up tasks. When one of the station's announcers suddenly quit, Zeiger was put on the air; Simmons suggested that Zeiger's last name was too ethnic, so he became

Larry King Larry King (born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger; November 19, 1933 – January 23, 2021) was an American television and radio host, whose awards included 2 Peabodys The George Foster Peabody Awards (or simply Peabody Awards or the Peabodys) program ...

. King would become the station's sports director, leaving in 1958 for WKAT.

WMET

Rosenson sold WAHR-AM-FM to Community Service Broadcasters in 1958. After the $150,000 purchase, the new ownership—most of which hailed from

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...

—changed the call letters to WMET, continuing a format emphasizing news, sports and adult music. WMET eventually became a full-time Spanish-language outlet, the first in South Florida. In 1961, the owners of daytime-only station WMBM (1220 AM), Florida's first black radio station—which in turn had just absorbed the call letters and some talent of the previous WMBM at 790 AM—agreed to a deal with Latin Broadcasting Company to swap facilities. The deal was finalized and announced in March 1962; Consolidated Communications, which owned WMBM, paid $253,000 to acquire the WMET-AM- FM facility.

WMBM

On April 3, 1962, the WMET intellectual unit moved to 1220 kHz, and 1490 (and 93.9 FM) received a relocated WMBM. WMBM went on to develop a large and popular history as Miami's premier AM station for

rhythm and blues Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated in African-American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly ...

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...

and programming targeted to an

African-American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American ...

audience. Noted jazz broadcaster

China Valles Charles Lomba "China" Valles (November 5, 1925 – December 17, 2014) was an American jazz radio broadcaster. Jazz authority and broadcaster He was a noted jazz authority and prominent jazz personality in South Florida for several decades. Over t ...

had a popular show on the station. In its 1960s heyday, the station attempted a Thanksgiving turkey giveaway which clogged the

MacArthur Causeway The General Douglas MacArthur Causeway is a six-lane causeway that connects Downtown Miami to South Beach via Biscayne Bay in Miami-Dade County. The highway is the singular roadway connecting the mainland and beaches to Watson Island and the ba ...

with drivers from Overtown seeking free turkeys. Motivational speaker Les Brown was a disc jockey on WMBM. In 1992, Eddie Margolis bought WMBM from his father. After a failed half-Haitian, half-gospel format, the station flipped to talk in 1993 and briefly adopted the call letters WSBH. On March 10, 1995, the station returned to a gospel format, as it had for much of the 1980s, and the WMBM call letters.

References

External links

FCC History Cards for WMBM
{{Miami Radio MBM Radio stations established in 1955 Gospel radio stations in the United States 1955 establishments in Florida