Herb was hired by several Salt Lake City-area stations, including KCPX, where he played jazz for the late night audience; and a new station, KANN in
Ogden, Utah, where he did the afternoon drive segment. In 1962, Herb joined
KSL first doing afternoons, and then in April 1963, becoming the station's morning show disc jockey, a shift he held throughout the rest of 1963. Despite being in a very visible shift, Herb was puzzled that KSL signed off at midnight, even though it was Utah's most powerful station; its booming 50,000-watt
clear channel signal reached most of the western half of North America. He knew how successful Ben Hunter's program had been, and he believed there was a similar late night audience in Salt Lake City that was not being served. On February 11, 1964, Herb's late-night show aired for the first time. It was an
open-mic call-in show, initially known as
The Other Side of the Day, and later named
Nitecap in a contest for a new name held among listeners early in the show's first year. In 1975, the show was picked up by the
Mutual Broadcasting System and was first heard nationwide on November 4 of that year. The show became the first
nationally syndicated call-in talk radio program. One of the stations that carried the show was Mutual affiliate
WHAS in
Louisville, a 50,000-watt "flamethrower" like KSL. The two stations' combined signals brought
Nitecap to nearly all of North America. Jepko's groundbreaking 1975 debut on Mutual is often cited as the show that launched the nationally broadcast talk-radio format that allowed for the rise of such hosts as
Larry King,
Phil Donahue and
Jim Bohannon. Ironically, when Jepko's Mutual contract was terminated on May 29, 1977, he was replaced first by the husband and wife team of
Long John Nebel and
Candy Jones and then in January, 1978 by Larry King. Reportedly, Mutual had offered Jepko a chance to continue his program if he would become more controversial and try to attract a younger audience, but he adamantly refused, feeling he had an obligation to his existing, largely older and rural, loyal listeners.
The Herb Jepko Nitecap Show was idiosyncratic, never focusing on any single topic. Carrying a laid-back atmosphere inherent to its then-unusual 12:00 a.m. – 6:00 a.m. time slot, the show consisted entirely of listener call-ins: any subject the listener wished to talk about, no matter how trivial, was allowed, and the only forbidden topics were politics and denominational religion. Later, as the show became more popular, callers were limited to one call every two weeks of no more than 5 minutes. Jepko would run a music box known as "Tinkerbell", which played a rendition of the song "
Never on Sunday", to indicate that the caller's time was up. The majority of Jepko's listeners were elderly, shut-ins, long-distance truckers and invalids, but many were also
night owls and
insomniacs who enjoyed hearing a friendly voice in the middle of the night. Talk radio hosts were frequently abrasive, sarcastic and impatient, but Jepko, who was affectionately called "Herbie" by his listeners, was known for being warm, friendly, patient and thoroughly non-controversial. In 1965, he told an interviewer that he hoped his show would contribute to "good will and understanding", and that his listeners would feel they were part of a family. ==Jepko and the Nitecaps==