A few weeks ago in this space, I wrote about various experiences working in radio stations over the years.
“Dead air” is a time when a record finishes and nobody is there to cue up the next one; it happens whenever there is a malfunction in the automated operating system or whenever an announcer just doesn’t know what to do next.
Montgomery’s oldest radio station, and the fourth-oldest in Alabama, only has dead air now. Permanently. The station at 1440 kilocycles on the dial that began its life as WSFA, spent most of its time as WHHY, and ended as WLWI has signed off for good due to low ratings.
As of last Saturday, March 15, 2025, one of Alabama’s oldest radio stations fell silent.
1440 AM began on April 30, 1930 as WSFA-AM. The call letters mean, “With the South’s Finest Airport” and live on today as the call letters of WSFA-TV 12.
AM 1440 may be the most storied broadcast frequency in Montgomery history. The original owner, Montgomery Broadcasting Company, was managed by future Alabama governor Gordon Persons. The radio station was the starting point for country music legend Hank Williams, who used to perform on WSFA with his Drifting Cowboys starting in 1936. The Speer Family of gospel music also started out on WSFA. Both Williams and the Speers moved on to Nashville after a few years, but 1440 AM gave them their start.
In 1957, Holt-Robinson Broadcasting Service purchased WSFA and changed the historic callsign to WHHY, to match their other properties: WHSY in Hattiesburg, WHNY in McComb, and WHXY in Bogalusa. This was the beginning of the rock n’ roll era, and WHHY was ready. Legendary disc jockeys like Joe Hagler were breaking local hits by artists such as Clarence Carter before they became famous nationally.
In the late 1960s, WHHY-AM 1440 developed a partner FM station at 101.9 mHz and called it Y-102. Operations moved from the Frank Leu Building in downtown Montgomery (imploded in 1997) to a house on Norman Bridge Road in south Montgomery. At the time, the number-one station in the area was The Big BAM, WBAM-AM 740 – but WHHY’s powerful AM/FM combination began to really give WBAM some serious competition once Larry Stevens came to town.
Everybody has somebody they listened to, looked up to, emulated – or, at least, tried to emulate. For those of us who grew up in the Montgomery area during the 1970s and 1980s, the radio personality was Larry Stevens.
Larry Stevens was the Program Director of WHHY-AM 1440 and Y-102 FM. Now, WHHY had been around for decades, of course, before Larry Stevens came along – but it was under his leadership that the station became the top-rated in this market and a model for all others to follow. They were everywhere: grand openings, high school pep rallies, reporting on severe weather, you name it. Larry and his “Waking Crew” aired weekdays from 6:00-10:00 a.m. and, for many, provided the soundtrack of our lives.
Other personalities on WHHY included Kris O’Kelly, Bill “The Birdman” Thomas, Mark Thompson, Lanny West, and dozens more who made Top 40 radio exciting and memorable. James Spann and Rich Thomas, later known as the preeminent meteorologists in Alabama, once worked at WHHY. The news department featured Jim McDade, Jimmy Carter, and more – led by the legendary Robert Charles, who ended his newscasts with the line “the moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on!”
WHHY-FM, or Y-102, became the focus station around the mid-1980s and the AM began transitioning away from Top 40 into oldies and talk radio formats. Y-102, with a powerful 100,000-watt signal, could be heard everywhere from Birmingham to Dothan and was the dominant radio station in the market for the 1980s and 1990s.
Coincidentally, it was in 1993 that Holt-Robinson decided to sell WHHY-AM & FM to Thomas Duddy – right at the time that popular music tastes were moving away from rock n’ roll to hip-hop and country. Larry Stevens and his morning crew departed for rival WMXS-FM (“Mix 103”), and for fans of Montgomery radio, it was the end of an era in the summer of 1996 when the legendary Y-102 changed call letters – and formats. First, the station played an active rock format and called itself “Live 101.9” for a short time; then, after stunt programming with a computer reading jokes, In 1996, WHHY became WJCC and “Cat Country 102”.
None of this helped the ratings, and in 1999, Cumulus Broadcasting purchased WHHY-AM and WJCC-FM. By the fall of 1999, the heritage callsign WHHY and the Top 40 format was back on Y-102, while AM 1440 had new call letters: WLWI-AM.
WLWI-AM 1440 began broadcasting a news/talk format to the Montgomery area and featured nationally syndicated talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage. All Montgomery Biscuits baseball games were carried on 1440, as well as local call-in shows featuring Kevin Elkins and Caleb Colquitt.
In this past 25 years, it seemed that Cumulus cared less and less for AM 1440. While other news/talk stations such as WACV-FM 93.1 saw their audience growing exponentially during this period, WLWI-AM 1440 was barely even promoted anymore even though they had some top-tier talk show talent on their airwaves.
In their final Arbitron ratings book, WLWI-AM 1440, once the giant of Montgomery broadcasting, registered at a 0.7. Cumulus pulled the plug. After 95 years, 1440 AM had something nobody alive has ever heard: dead air.
Michael Bird is a music teacher at Faulkner University.
