For the past three decades, Bill Ingram has been the calming voice amid the traffic turmoil, broadcasting crucial traffic reports to people in the greater Houston area from the Christian music radio station – KSBJ 89.3. Over his long-standing career that spans four decades, Ingram, a resident of Tarkington Prairie, has earned a place in the Texas Radio Hall of Fame.
Ingram grew up in the Houston area and got his start in the radio broadcasting industry through his father, who started giving his son editing tasks on reel-to-reel tapes when he was a young teenager.
“My dad had a studio in our house the whole time I was a kid growing up. When I was in the sixth grade, I told him I wanted to work in radio, too. He started taking me by radio stations where he worked, you know, to meet people he knew and to let me see how everything worked,” Ingram said. “Then he would show me how his studio worked. He would even give me assignments to work on this or that. He left me tapes to edit. Sometimes he would tell me that he needed me to go out and interview someone or do a radio spot.”
One of his toughest edits as a novice was to clip a 2:45 minute Beach Boys song, Surfin’ USA, into a short 30-second clip.
“My dad said, ‘I don’t want to hear the edits.’ I was freaked out. Here I am in the sixth grade, you know, and he gives me a grease pencil, razor blade, splicing block and tape, and said, ‘Do it,'” Ingram said. “It took me two weeks but I did it. He gave me an A on that one because it took such a long time. Everything with my dad and the radio was a test. I am glad for it because it made me a really good editor.”
His editing skills came in handy at most of his early radio jobs with Ingram becoming the “go-to guy” for editing. He had that edge until the invention of electronic editing.
“Back in the real old days of radio, you had the tape that rolled over a record head and a playback head. You would mark it on the playback head. Then you would take your grease pencil and mark where you needed to cut. Then you’d run it and roll it until you were ready to make the next cut, and you’d mark that,” he said. “Then you would take the tape and put it into a splicing block, cut it in half where you were going to edit. Then put the two back together with a slight overlap and cut where you wanted a clean cut. I did it every day so I wouldn’t forget, but that skill isn’t even used in radio today.”
He attended schools in Aldine ISD, living on “the wrong side of the tracks in Humble,” according to Ingram. After high school, he got his first job in radio at the age of 19.
“A disc jockey named Phil Parr gave me a chance at KSPL in Diboll, Texas. It was a small job, a part-time job because it was just for the Christmas holidays, but it was big to me because it got me on the air,” Ingram said.
From Diboll, he took a job at Channel 26 in Houston in the days before it became a Fox affiliate.
“It was KDOG at the time. This was in 1976 and 1977. Capt. Harold’s Theater of the Sky was probably the most popular show they had. I worked for the all-night show. We were the first TV station in the Houston area to offer all-night TV, as I remember. Everyone else signed off around midnight. You always knew it was time to go to bed when they signed off at midnight with the playing of the National Anthem,” Ingram said. “It was a big deal when we started staying on the air all night. Our format was old B movies like King Kong and the Creature From the Black Lagoon.”
One night, after being thrown into a position behind the camera, Ingram decided that TV was not the format for him.
“Our cameraman had gotten sick, so they threw me the headphones and said, ‘You’re the camera guy tonight.’ So, there I am, learning a new skill on the spot. It was an experience I never care to live through again. I was not crazy about television as it was. I went right back to radio after that because it was a different kind of stress,” he said. “With television, it just wasn’t as fun for me. Radio is fun. People who work in radio are generally fun people because they enjoy what they do.”
After KDOG, Ingram said he had to work at a few “real jobs” for a while. He worked for a Western Auto store, drove a truck for Lone Star beer and, for six short weeks, he worked in air conditioning and heating.
“They weren’t the kinds of jobs I wanted. I decided that I would even rather be in television than work those ‘real jobs,'” he said.
Around that time, a job opening became available at KJCH in Cleveland, Texas. It was a station owned by Jesse Howard and operated by Steve Sadler and Glen Dodson.
“Glen and I became very good friends. It turned into a full-time gig. Tommy McDaniel bought the station shortly after I went to work there in the summer of 79, I think. Tommy was a trip. I still keep in touch with him. He’s a good guy. He had his ways and a lot of people didn’t agree with him, but he and I never had problems. He always treated me well and he fixed it to where I had free gas for my vehicle. He also paid my rent and gave me a salary. It wasn’t a lot but I didn’t need a lot at the time,” Ingram said.
When the station sold in 1984-85, it was time for Ingram to relocate again and this time it was to College Station to work for WTAW radio, which underwent call sign changes in later years.
“WTAW radio stood for Watch The Aggies Win. It was the original AM radio station they put on the air in 1922. It’s one of the oldest radio stations in Texas. That’s why it originally had W call letters. That was before the 1934 FCC rule changes that made everything east of the Mississippi River start with a W and everything west of the Mississippi start with a K,” Ingram said. “I loved working for WTAW because of all the history. It was really cool.”
After a year or so, he took a new job with KFRD in Rosenberg, Texas.
“You basically have to travel around and live in different communities when you are starting out in radio. Because you are out in public so much, you also have to be the face of the radio stations much like TV anchors are the face of a TV station. You have to be identifiable and memorable; otherwise, they will get someone else to do it,” Ingram said. One of the more memorable people he met while in Rosenberg was the late Mike Edmonds, who with Anita Martini, hosted the Martini and Edmonds Sports Talk Show.
When KFRD underwent a shift from an English-speaking radio station to a Spanish-speaking station, Ingram and several others were given their walking papers.
“They first told us they were changing the programming to Swahili Disco, but then said, ‘No, we’re kidding. We are changing it to Spanish and your services are no longer needed,'” he said.
Ingram had already started communicating with Jim O’Neill at Metro Networks’ traffic service.
“I had been talking to him about a year and he was trying to make room for me there with him. Metro Network did traffic reports for 30 radio stations and five TV stations in the Houston area at the time,” he said.
Until a slot opened up for him, Ingram was given busy work at Metro, doing one radio feed per hour, one traffic report per hour.
“Do you know how boring that is? But they gave me other things to do. I made police calls and fire calls, and all that, so it gave me something to do to actually help everyone else,” he said. “On the weekends, I was working with Andy Waldrop, who was doing KTRH traffic. He’s the one who taught me how to do traffic. Andy would just talk with such ease and get the traffic information out there to motorists, and I would think, ‘I can do that.'”
Back then, traffic reporters did not rely on the Internet and had to know all of the major roadways in their area.
“My job was to know the highways. I had to memorize every highway in America. We had road maps that would overlay. It was all manual. It was very primitive, but we got pretty good with it. The first year I anchored a traffic report, we even got an award for being the best service for truckers,” he said.
When things came to an end at Metro Network for Ingram, he sent out tapes – a type of audition – to all the people he knew in radio.
“I’ve been in this business forever and I know everybody. Nobody called. Not one call. This was 1997. I got down to the point where I had one tape and one resume left, and I didn’t know a soul at KSBJ,” he said. “I went by KSBJ. I didn’t even know the program director and I said to the person at the front desk, ‘Please see that your program director gets this.’ The next day, I got a call. They didn’t have anything full-time but it was a steady job, six days a week. I took it in the hopes that it would become full-time.”
Eventually it did. Ingram believes God had a plan for him and just needed time to work it out. Today, he provides valuable information to commuters twice daily – between the hours of 5:30 and 9 a.m. and 3:30 to 7 p.m.
“People love KSBJ because it’s positive. It’s an uplifting Christian radio station. I think people are so sick of the negative. They are starved for something positive and I think that’s what KSBJ does so well. We offer hope,” Ingram said.
Bragging on the station, Ingram added, “KSBJ was rated the number one Christian radio station in America by Nielsen Ratings. That was big news. The thing is, we don’t do this for ratings because we don’t sell airtime anyway. We are a non-commercial station. But we look at it like this, the more people listening to our radio station, the more people are being fed with the love of Jesus Christ and something positive. That’s a very good thing.”
Great article! Nice to see his face behind the interesting voice!