In 1963, a 13-year-old boy named Ron Schacht landed his first job at a small classical radio station in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania...
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In 1963, a 13-year-old boy named Ron Schacht landed his first job at a small classical radio station in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He was paid $1.25 an hour, a reasonable amount of money for a 13-year-old at the time. But it wasn’t the money that kept him coming back. It was the love of the business. Today, 58 years later, Ron Schacht is still in radio. He owns the Redfield KQKD station 1380 AM and 99.9 FM with his wife, Denise. They operate the station from a small studio in Redfield’s Main Street Plaza. The new full-service station began operation in late April of 2021 and covers everything from local sports and news to talk shows and a wide range of music. It has four full-time staff: Denise and Ron Schacht; General Manager, James Shaman; and Sales Manager, Traci Samelson. The station also has several part-time staff: Ted Price, Ray Dunn and Allen Scott. This is the story of what the Redfield KQKD station offers, how it came to be, and those who made it happen.
Ron Schacht’s story
Ron’s interest in “all things radio” began at a very young age.
“My dad was a commercial artist. My mom was a house wife. I was always interested in electricity and electronics…I vaguely remember it, but my grandmother was deathly afraid of electricity. I would come to the house with light bulbs and extension cords when I was seven years old. She would say, ‘Oh, he is going to burn the place down! He is going to get electrocuted!’” said Schacht, with a chuckle. “My dad got me a crystal [radio] set. A little kit. There was an AM station across the river from where we lived, so no problem, the thing picked up the station from across the river. The crystal set is probably what got me into radio. I can still remember the day I got my first shock. It threw me against the wall. I was seven.”
Schacht went on to graduate with a four-year degree in electrical engineering from Penn State. His class started out with 400 students his freshman year. He was one of only 30 who graduated with a four-year degree.
Throughout college, his love for radio held strong.
“I was the only one that didn’t go into something [that was] ‘big money-making.’ I got all of these big job offers. You could work for AT&T in Design Engineering. You could work for Bell Labs as a Design Engineer. You could work for RCA. One of the fellas that graduated from Penn State with me is the guy that designed the VHS video tape machines. Big money. Big money,” said Schacht. “I said nope, I’m going to stay in radio. Everyone said ‘what, are you crazy?’ These guys were making $1,000 a week and I was making $70 a week. I said, ‘I’m not working. I haven’t worked a day in my life. I get payed for something I love doing.’ Well, it turned out that all of the guys I graduated with (other than one guy that got a job as an engineer with the local power company) lost their jobs. The guy that worked for RCA and designed video-tape machines…that all moved to Japan. Boom, he was out of work. The guy who worked for Bell Labs was told, ‘Well, we’re not going to do that here anymore.’ Boom, he was out of work. All of these guys that made a ton of money for about five or six or seven years had no jobs, and here is old, stupid Ron still making $70 a week. But I was still making $70 a week. I had a job. I have never not had a job. Never.”
Schacht married his wife, Denise, in 1983, and they made their home in eastern Pennsylvania. Schacht did a lot of “climbing towers and fixing transmitters” for various radio stations. He acquired an old transmitter from an FM station one day and set it out on his back porch.
“My wife kept saying ‘What are you going to do with that FM transmitter?’ I said, ‘Someday, I’m going to build a radio station around it.’ The opportunity came in 1989, and we built a radio station in northern Pennsylvania. We did a lot like we are doing here [in Redfield]. We did a lot of community service, public affairs and public service. We broadcast from Red Cross blood drives, fireman’s carnivals…everything. We had a great time and it was quite successful. It was a lot of fun up until 1994,” said Schacht. “In 1994, the FCC deregulated radio and said you could own up to six stations. It used to be you could own an AM and an FM and that was all. Now, they say you can own six. The big money guys came in and they bought up all of the big, high-powered stations. So there was my wife and I with this little radio station. It was doing okay. It was keeping it’s head above water and we were having fun. But once all of the big-money guys came in, we couldn’t compete with them. It was just impossible. We were giving away a sub for lunch every day and these guys were giving away $1,000 every day. So all of our sponsors started baling and going to the other stations. We actually gave the station away to a fellow that worked for us. We said, ‘Here, you can have it. That’s it. We’re done.’ My wife [became] a school bus driver. I went back into just working and doing engineering. Always, with a thought in my mind that, someday, I would find a little radio station in a small town and we would do the same thing with it. Some small town where nobody wants to compete. Where we wouldn’t have to worry about the big guys coming in and battling with us.”
Needless to say, Schacht found that small town dream in Redfield. He and his wife spent many summers riding their motorcycles throughout South Dakota and visiting friends. Denise, who had served in the Air Force and was formerly based at Ellsworth, had quite a few friends in the Rapid City area.
“We took every road across South Dakota,” said Schacht. “I fell in love with a little radio station up in Lemon. It has a little station that is just all by itself. I said I would love to own that. But it never happened…Then this one came up for sale. It was owned by the people in Aberdeen. He said, ‘We were going to shut the Redfield one down, but that town needs a station. We are an Aberdeen group and we are really not interested in spending a lot of time in Redfield. We have got enough to deal with in Aberdeen.’ So we bought it. We built the studio. And my wife and I decided we needed to find sales people and an announcer.”
Other fun facts about Schacht: He has one son who works as a chemist in Shanghai, China. Schacht has been struck by lightning twice in his life, both times on the top of the head. He has hit 14 deer over the years, and he fell through a burning roof while he was a volunteer firefighter.