First air date 1959 Facility ID 56716 City of license Mobile Owner Cumulus Media Branding WGOK Gospel 900 | Class B Frequency 900 kHz Format Gospel music Area Mobile metropolitan area | |
 | ||
Broadcast area Mobile metropolitan area Power 1,000 watts day
380 watts night Callsign meaning WG OK Group (original owners) Sister stations WBLX-FM, WXQW, WDLT-FM, WABD | ||
WGOK (900 AM), "Gospel 900") is a radio station serving the Mobile, Alabama, area with a Gospel music format. The station is under ownership of Cumulus Media. Its studios are on Dauphin Avenue in Midtown Mobile, and its transmitter is northwest of downtown.
Contents
History
The radio station in the early 1960s was located at 900 Gum Street right in the middle of a swamp. The station was part of the largest chain of Black radio stations in the country called The OK Group. All of the stations in the OK Group had an OK at the end of their call letters. There was WGOK in Mobile, KYOK in Houston, and WBOK in New Orleans for example. There were other OK stations in the cities of Memphis, Tennessee and Baton Rouge, Louisiana among others. There was one White station in Alice, Texas with the OK reversed. It was called KOPY.
Starting around 1959, the station WGOK was managed by Robert Irwin Grimes, Jr. He had been a radioman in the Navy, had served at Pearl Harbor on the USS Enterprise and was there in Hawaii on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked.
In the early 1960s disc jockeys had names like Topsy Turvey, Miss Mandy, and the Reverend A. J. Crawford. The station was very popular and played rhythm and blues records as well as gospel records.
Currently, it plays Gospel music.
Ownership
In 1999, the station was acquired by Citadel Communications Corp. (Lawrence R. Wilson, chairman) from Fuller-Jeffrey Broadcasting Co. Inc. (Robert Fuller, president) along with sister station WYOK for a reported sale price of $6 million.