General Information
WTOE is the oldest station in the Toe River Valley, and is part of the Mark Media group, based in Burnsville, NC. The station programs oldies, with a focus on music from the 1960s and 1970s, delivered by ABC Radio Networks' Unforgettable Favorites format. A live, local morning show featuring Steve Murphy (Murphy in the Morning). Other dayparts feature Unforgettable Favorites personalities.
The station is an affiliate of ABC and the North Carolina News Network. Local news is presented during morning drive and and noon, along with typical small-town station fare (i.e. obituaries, community announcements, a "swap shop" and public affairs programming). Mitchell High School sports are featured during the fall and winter.
History
WTOE signed on the air December 24, 1955 from studios and transmitter atop Chalk Mountain, just west of Spruce Pine. It was originally owned by Toe River Valley Broadcasting, headed by Thomas N. Cooper. Mr. Cooper owned the Carolina Theater and Tri-County Drive-In Theater in Spruce Pine.
The original license allowed for broadcasting on 1470 Khz. in the AM band with 1,000 watts of power. The station's original transmitter was a modified military rig that was on a Navy ship prior to being pressed into broadcast service. Ironically, the transmitter was located in the station's control room (which I'm sure made for some hot summer days!). The station programmed a variety of music, featuring mainly country & western artists and easy listening favories, and hosted several religious programs both through the week and on Sundays.
In the late 1970s, Mr. Cooper turned day-to-day operations of WTOE over to then-general manager Roger Garland, who modernized the sound of the station, adding in soft rock music and debuting a format that had a short run in area radio, but has appeared in several iterations since then: Rockin' Country. WTOE mixed music of the two genres during its broadcast day. American Top 40 was introduced to the audience and the station saw more youth interested in its programming.
Alas, the Rockin' Country experiment was not to last, for in 1982, Garland flipped WTOE to a full-time country format, based on the theme "Take Me To The Country," a Mel McDaniel song that was popular at the time. 1982 also marked the debut of network radio on WTOE, as the station joined the CBS Radio Network, ditching the AP wire service that had been with the station since its inception.
1982 was also the year that Mr. Cooper passed away, and control of Toe River Valley Broadcasting was given to his sister, Ironee Beach, who lived in Florida. She served as absentee owner of WTOE for the next few years.
In 1984, another fateful decision was made, when WTOE abandoned the country format for a straight adult contemporary presentation (a surprise at the time given the rise of the country format). The decision was made one morning when Garland went into the studio with a quarter and told the staff that the coin flip would decide the format of the station. He asked them to call the flip. They did "heads" and the quarter came up that way, so the change was made. Actually, Garland had been planning on a format change, but hadn't decided on a date. He used the coin flip to decide the date. The staff retrieved the coin, framed it and it hung in the WTOE control room for several years afterward.
In 1985, Toe River Valley Broadcasting sold WTOE to WTOE, Incorporated, which was headed by banker Jack Dobson, industrialist Carroll Rogers and sawmill owner Fred Boyd. The three took over ownership of the station in November, 1985, just as FM radio was beginning its rise in popularity as those stations increased power and coverage area. WTOE stayed with the adult contemporary format and CBS news through the rest of the 1980s.
In 1987, with the advent of the FCC's "post-sunset power" rule, WTOE began broadcasting for 2 hours past dark with 45.9 watts of power. This allowed the station to stay on the air until 10:45 p.m. in the summer months and 7:15 p.m. in the winter months. A year later, the FCC granted nighttime authority to formerly daytime-only stations on many frequencies at their assigned post-sunset powers, so WTOE began broadcasting nightly until 11 p.m. Mitchell High School "Mountaineer" football and basketball broadcasts were added in 1988, and they continue to this day. Affiliations with college sports networks (UNC, NC State, Duke and Wake Forest broadcasts) were also added, and the station also joined the North Carolina News Network (NCNN) during this time. WTOE also began airing re-runs of the famous "CBS Radio Mystery Theater" nightly from 10:00-11:00 p.m.
Despite the ratings successes the station was seeing with the additional broadcast time and new programming, WTOE, Incorporated was faced with declining ad revenues as local economic conditions deteriorated and agency business increasingly went to the large FM stations. So, the company made the decision to sell their operations and , in the fall of 1991, WTOE was purchased by Mountain Valley Media, a division of Mark Media of Burnsville, NC. New owners J. Ardell and Remelle Sink changed the format of the station to an oldies-based, live-assist adult contemporary format from Broadcast Programming International, featuring music from the 1950s and 1960s with a few new songs mixed in. The NCNN affiliation was continued, but sports broadcasts were reduced to just high school contests.
WTOE continued in this manner throughout most of the 1990s, but the decision was made to re-locate the studios from Chalk Mountain to the WKYK studios in Burnsville, NC and leave the transmitter in place. The move occurred in 1998, along with a switch to satellite-delivered programming, which is where WTOE is currently at today.
WTOE Personalities
Here is a listing of air personalities who worked at WTOE. If you know of someone who should be added (or you can provide biographical information on any of these individuals, please contact us.
- Jim Bannon
- David Biddix
(currently Webmaster, Mayland Community College, Spruce Pine, NC) - David Bryan
- Mary Burleson
- Dave Doar
- Jacque Dobson
- Roger Early
- Joe Ferguson
- Beth Hoyle
- Bruce Ikard
- Rhonda Jarrett
- Clayton Lattimer
- Greg Ledford
- C.M. McMann
- Gary "Mountain Man" McMahan
- Mark Peterson
- Rick Stevens
- Alan Tinney
- Bruce Tolley
- Phillip Wiseman
