Louisville Times Article - August 14, 1975

 

WKLO Morning Man Bill Love:
It's Love In The Morning
 

Outside the window, a delivery truck hisses quietly down the street, wet from an early morning rain.

A man in shapeless green workclothes heads home from the night shift. Two young women in platform shoes clatter on the sidewalk.

Inside, Big Bill Love is at work, talking. He's the early morning disc jockey at WKLO, working the 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. slot. At times, it seems like he's working on an assembly line, carefully following a script -- a hit record, then a weather report, two more records, then the news, then an oldie-but-goodie, and so on. In between he talks to listeners, telling the time and where the traffic jams are, and sometimes making them laugh.

Big Bill was born in Scott County, Kentucky, but he tells it better himself: "I was born at Finnell Pike, that's F-i-n-n-e-l-l Pike, born in a farmhouse. It's a national shrine now, they have a Howard Johnson's there.

"When I was little kid growing up we didn't have a lot of entertainment, but we did have a radio and I used to listen a lot. Where other kids would play with little toy guns and cars...I used to make little toy microphones. I built a TV camera one time out of some toilet paper rolls and and old box. I made a tripod for it and pretended I had my own TV show.

"Things went off from there. In Paintsville there's a radio station. (Paintsville is the town nearest to Finnell Pike.) That's where I started out...I got sidetracked for a while. I wanted to be a big college football star and a pro star, but I gave it up. I played football for six years and all I got was hurt."

After Paintsville, Big Bill worked at several other stations before coming to WKLO 4 1/2 years ago.

"The morning show is the big one," he explains. "That's when the most people are listening. It's very difficult to watch TV in the morning. It's just impossible to be in the bathroom and shave and everything and have the TV going."

But he does have competition in the morning from other radio radio stations.

One of his toughest competitors is WAKY's Bill Bailey, the self-styled Duke of Louisville, famous for his abrasive personality and his caustic monologues.

Bailey leads Love in the ratings, But the gap has been closing since Big Bill Love took over WKLO's morning show. A recent survey showed Bailey with an average quarter hour total of 23,600 listeners to Love's 19,300. (WAVE and WHAS led with 28,800 and 27,600 respectively.)

In contrast to Bailey, Big Bill is smooth and less controversial. He philosophizes, "When I was a kid I used to sit around with my little tape recorder and I'd take a song and I'd cut out a part of it, you know, splice it out. If I had a mistake, I'd splice it out and put it back together again. And I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if life were like that and you could run back and do it over...splice out what was wrong and put in the good stuff.'"

Big Bill has an answer for the bad stuff in life, though. He says, "I'm gonna just keep playing my hits and not worry about it."