The station was first licensed, as KGIO, on November 11, 1928, on a frequency of 1320 kHz, and began broadcasting on December 3, 1928. The original call letters were randomly assigned from an alphabetical list of available call signs, and were changed to KID on February 16, 1929. In March 1941, most of the stations on 1320 kHz, including KID, moved to 1350 kHz, with the implementation of the
North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement. In 1950, KID changed to its final frequency 590 kHz. In October 2007, a deal was reached for KID to be acquired by GAP Broadcasting II LLC (Samuel Weller, president) from
Clear Channel Communications as part of a 57-station deal with a total reported sale price of $74.78 million. What eventually became
GapWest Broadcasting was folded into
Townsquare Media on August 13, 2010; Townsquare, in turn, sold its Idaho Falls–
Pocatello stations to Rich Broadcasting in 2011. In its final years, KID simulcast its programming on two FM stations,
KIDJ in
Sugar City (serving Idaho Falls and
Rexburg) and
KIDG in
Pocatello. They served to fill in gaps in the AM station's nighttime signal. KID operated at 5,000 watts during the day, but was required to drop to 1,000 watts at night.
Shutdown KID had long operated from a three-tower site in
Iona, Idaho. A single tower beamed the transmitter's full power during the day, while at night power was fed to all three towers in a directional pattern to protect other stations on 590 AM and adjacent frequencies. The station went off the air in November 2021, when a farmer accidentally clipped the guy wire for one of its towers and brought the tower down. Rich Broadcasting president and namesake Rich Mecham later told The
Post Register that he only learned about the collapse when one of his employees drove by and noticed one of the towers was down. The station returned to the air in 2022 under
special temporary authority operating at 1,000 watts around the clock. Rich Broadcasting applied for an insurance settlement in hopes of rebuilding the fallen tower. However, after spending almost a year hammering out the terms, Mecham received a letter from Arthur Clark, who owned the property that KID was leasing for the transmitter, stating that he had collected an insurance payment as well. Clark also claimed that he owned the transmitter site, and would not replace the fallen tower since Rich Broadcasting was at the tail end of its lease. and the FCC deleted it on March 3. The station's former schedule continued to air on KIDJ and KIDG under the "KID Newsradio" branding. ==References==