WOAN According to
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) records, WREC's origin dates to station WOAN, which consolidated with WREC in 1930, making WREC the oldest radio station in Memphis, going on the air a year before
WMC. WOAN was first licensed on November 21, 1922, to "Vaughn Conservatory of Music (James D. Vaughn)" in
Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, operating on the "entertainment" wavelength of 360 meters (833 kHz). Its callsign was randomly assigned from a sequential roster of available
call signs.
WREC WREC was first licensed on January 17, 1924, owned by electrical engineer and radio dealer Hoyt Wooten. The original call letters were also randomly assigned, from an alphabetical roster of available call signs starting with "K", which were normally only issued to stations located west of the Mississippi River. KFNG operated from a 10-watt transmitter in Wooten's father's home in
Coldwater, Mississippi. (Some station histories report a start of broadcasting activities by Hoyt Wooten in September 1922.) In 1925, the station adopted its current WREC call letters, and later moved to
Whitehaven, Tennessee, now a part of Memphis.
Consolidation of WREC and WOAN WREC began sharing the 600 AM frequency with WOAN. In 1929 the two stations began joint operations, with WREC moving to studios in the basement of the
Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis, where it would remain for over 40 years. In 1930, the two stations were formally consolidated with the joint call sign of WREC-WOAN. On May 15, 1933, after the
Federal Radio Commission requested that stations using only one of their assigned call letters drop those that were no longer in regular use, WOAN was eliminated and the station reverted to just WREC. WREC was an
affiliate of the
CBS Radio Network. It carried CBS dramas, comedies, news, sports, soap operas, game shows and
big band broadcasts during the "
Golden Age of Radio." In 1956 WREC added a TV station,
CBS affiliate WREC-TV 3 (now
WREG-TV), and in 1967, it put an FM station on the air at 102.7, WREC-FM (now
WEGR). Wooten sold his stations to Cowles Communications in 1963, earning a handsome return on his original investment. As network programming moved from radio to television in the 1960s, WREC switched to a
full service,
middle of the road format of popular adult music, news and sports. In the 1980s, it began reducing music shows and replacing them with talk shows, until the transition to full time talk was complete in the 1990s. In 1996,
Clear Channel Communications acquired WREC and WEGR. Clear Channel changed its name to iHeartMedia in 2014. ==Programming==