K-Breeze kaput, vamoosed, gone to Sugarland...twang, twang

Local radio as we know it in Brazosport finally has been put out of its misery.

The only AM station in town has moved its transmitter up to Sugarland.

Not a lot of people noticed since the station had switched to Spanish language religious programming & regional Mexican music some four years back.

We lamented that development in this post in 2003 and solemnly removed the station from the van's radio memory (though we did check back in once in a while thinking maybe they changed back to English, which was stupid.)

Longtime deadenders around here said KBRZ-AM was a dandy little local station in its day. It had a morning show where they'd talk to local people on the phone trying to answer trivia questions and such, it'd do live remote broadcasts, and you could even get a bit of local news. They'd play locally produced music too, they say.

The music was of the country-western genre, and, if disaster struck, as it always does sooner or later, with a hurricane or a plant blow-up emergency, they'd do their best to hold your hand, electronically speaking.

The name K-Breeze was thought up by Chuck Dunaway, a Houston radio legend who did time at KBRZ before he hit it big in the Bayou City at KILT, and during the years some other radio noteworthies passed through Brazosport -- Danny Boze of KIKK fame was "Danny Dee" at KBRZ, and the late Richard Dobbyn worked there too for a time before movin on to become the crazy newsman for KIKK.

We weren't here back in those days, so we can't shed a lot of light on those times, but we do remember listening to local weekly newspaper publisher John Toth, formerly of the Houston Chronicle, going on the air once a week to talk about local politics in his trademark Hungarian accent. By the time we got to Brazosport, the radio station had moved its operation from a studio in Freeport out to its transmitter site in Oyster Creek, which looked more like a bait camp than a radio station (except for the huge antenna, pictured here, pointing skyward.) ... Ah, memories.

That all changed when local KBRZ owner Jim Payne sold out for $700,000 to an outfit called Aleluya Christian Broadcasting.

The English speaking radio audience, naturally, turned to the Houston stations, or maybe the rock station at Alvin Community College, unless we're unaware of any English speakers who decided they'd take a crack at becoming bilingual by listening to sermons in Spanish.

Anyway, it's all over now.

KBRZ has moved its transmitter to Sugarland and reportedly is upping its formerly weak 1KW signal to 5KW.

The FCC would do well to put Brazosport down for a new AM (or FM) station the next time it auctions some more of the public airwaves cause we right now we got nuttin' -- not even a Spanish-speaking station.