PRESERVING RADIO HISTORY ACROSS COLORADO

Archives: People

  • Jesse Slusser

    Jesse Slusser was the first person on the KOA payroll, and he stuck around for 36 years. If you ever tuned in to 850 KOA between the 1920s and 1960, Jesse was the man keeping the signal on the air.

    KOA’s first employee

    Jesse joined KOA right at the beginning of the station’s history and became its chief engineer. Broadcast Pioneers of Colorado lists him as KOA’s first employee.

    His tenure covered huge changes in radio technology, from high-power AM broadcasting and network radio to far more sophisticated studio and transmitter systems, as KOA grew into a major Denver institution.

    Retirement and legacy

    Jesse retired from KOA in 1960 after 36 years as chief engineer. That makes him one of the foundational technical figures in Colorado broadcasting and a direct human link between KOA’s earliest days and the modern postwar era.

    Sources

  • Bill Kleronomos

    Bill Kleronomos (c. 1951–November 13, 2012) was the engineer who kept KBCO on the air. If you tuned in to 97.3 from Boulder in the late ’90s and 2000s, his work is why it sounded right.

    KBCO and Clear Channel

    In 1995 Bill took over as chief engineer at KBCO. When the station became part of Clear Channel, his responsibilities grew to cover the company’s Denver engineering team.

    Early HD Radio

    Bill had a hand in Clear Channel’s first HD Radio rollout. Mike Irby, who led engineering and IT for Clear Channel Denver, said he had collaborated with Bill before relocating to Denver, and described him as a key driver of that first HD push.

    Ham radio and legacy

    Outside the station, Bill was a ham radio operator with the call sign KD0HG. Colleagues remembered him as someone who was always glad to help fellow engineers and stations. When he died at age 61, tributes poured in from across Clear Channel and the broadcast-engineering world.

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  • Darren McMullen

    Darren McMullen is a Denver broadcast engineer, the kind of person who keeps your favorite station on the air without ever being on it. If you tuned in to KEZW, 105.9 or 99.5 in Denver, his work was behind the signal.

    Clear Channel and Entercom

    Darren worked in engineering for Clear Channel’s Denver radio operation and served as chief engineer at KEZW 1430 AM. He later worked for Entercom in Denver as chief engineer for KALC 105.9 and KQMT 99.5 before 2019, covering studios, transmitters, remote broadcasts and increasingly networked broadcast systems.

    This is a short page built from contributor information. If you worked with Darren or have more to add, we’d love to hear from you.

    Sources

    • Colorado Radio Archive contributor information — identifies McMullen as a Clear Channel and Entercom engineer and as chief engineer for KEZW, KALC and KQMT before 2019

  • Mike Irby

    Mike Irby is one of the people who make sure KOA, 94.1 and the rest of iHeartMedia’s Denver stations actually reach your speakers. Radio engineering has been his work since 1985, and he rose to become the top technical executive for the company’s Denver stations.

    Before Colorado

    Early on, Mike worked engineering and IT jobs in Dallas, Phoenix, Houston and Tucson, with a stretch at Continental Electronics before he moved into engineering leadership at Clear Channel. In 2007, while heading engineering for Clear Channel’s Tucson stations (KRQQ among them), the company named him its West Region Medium Market Engineer of the Year.

    Denver

    Late in 2010 he became Clear Channel’s chief engineer in Denver, overseeing a group of eight stations. He was director of engineering and IT by 2012, and once the company turned into iHeartMedia he became vice president of engineering for iHeartMedia Denver. That covered KOA, KRFX and the company’s sports, music and talk stations, along with every studio, IT system and transmitter site that supported them. He was also president of SBE Chapter 32.

    Super Bowl 50

    In February 2016 Mike wrote about how his team handled iHeartMedia Denver’s Super Bowl 50 coverage. For a full week, KOA, KRFX and Denver Sports 760 broadcast shows from Radio Row, and KOA aired its game-day broadcast from Levi’s Stadium, with all of it originating from the San Francisco Bay Area. He walked through the gear, connectivity, RF coordination and logistics involved.

    Working with Denver’s engineering greats

    After longtime KBCO chief engineer Bill Kleronomos died in 2012, Mike spoke of him as a key member of the Denver engineering crew, recalled working with him from before Mike’s own move to Denver, and credited his contribution during Clear Channel’s early HD Radio rollout. Professional records still show Mike as iHeartMedia’s vice president of engineering for the Denver region.

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  • Michele Grove

    Michele Grove is the head engineer who keeps Bonneville’s Denver stations running. If KYGO, KKFN or KOSI sounds clean on your radio, she deserves a good share of the thanks.

    What she looks after today

    As of 2025, her territory is KYGO 98.5, KKFN 104.3, KOSI 101.1 and KEPN 1600. That covers studio systems, networking, the tech behind remote broadcasts, and the transmitters. One of her projects was installing a GatesAir Flexiva transmitter rated at 30 kW at Green Mountain in Lakewood.

    She has spent more than 30 years in broadcast engineering, including work alongside former SBE president Barry Thomas. She is also candid about the state of the trade: radio’s demands keep shifting, there aren’t many younger RF engineers coming up, and being a woman in a field long dominated by men is part of her story.

    How she got into it

    At 16 she was a high schooler interning at KIMN 950. She had figured she would be on the air, but engineering won her over. She helped out on KYGO remote broadcasts, repaired gear, and eventually took part in building studios.

    Two stretches at KYGO, with a long detour

    Raising her family meant a break from radio. She returned to KYGO in the early part of the 1990s and developed there under head engineer Brad Hart, staying for around 20 years. A 2008 record shows her as a Lincoln Financial Media engineer for KYGO, KQKS, KKFN, KEPN and KRWZ.

    After that came about ten years of Freelance work, Westwood One and Entercom. She says those years sharpened her information-technology skills, just as radio engineering was moving toward networks and software.

    In 2022 Brad invited her back to KYGO. He retired soon afterward, and she stepped into his role as head engineer.

    Sources

  • Gary Nakashima

    Gary Nakashima is a longtime Colorado broadcast engineer, and if you’ve tuned in to KYGO or other Denver stations over the last few decades, his work has been behind what you heard. He spent years as assistant chief engineer next to Brad Hart through the Jefferson Pilot and Lincoln Financial Media eras.

    Early Colorado days

    The 1987 Broadcasting Yearbook lists Gary as chief engineer of KFTM-AM 1400 in Fort Morgan, then owned by Lovcom Inc. He later worked at KYGO in Denver. In a 2007 remembrance of broadcaster Joe Rateau, Gary recalled working with him for about a year and the two of them heading to Wax Trax to buy records for the station on the KYGO account.

    Jefferson Pilot and Lincoln Financial

    By the 2000s he was assistant chief engineer for Jefferson Pilot Communications’ Denver radio stations, working with chief engineer Brad Hart, and a 2006 Radio World profile noted how the pair mentored younger engineers. When the stations became Lincoln Financial Media, Brad was director of engineering and Gary stayed on as assistant chief. Together they designed and documented the move of the company’s five Denver stations, KYGO-FM, KJCD-FM, KQKS-FM, KEPN-AM and KKFN-AM, into a new consolidated facility of about 30,000 square feet, and wrote a detailed technical article about the move.

    Later Denver work

    Gary stayed with the Denver cluster afterward. A 2013 reception report for KRWZ-AM 950 records him, then assistant chief engineer, personally answering with an electronic verification, and public professional records later place him with Bonneville Denver, which operates KYGO, KOSI and KKFN. By his own account, he retired in 2024.

    In Gary’s own words

    Gary shared some more of his career with the archive, and it fills in a lot of the picture. At KFTM in Fort Morgan he also worked on the air, up through 1987. From 1987 to 1988 he worked weekends at KAZY-FM in Denver, where he was known unofficially as “the Nak on the Rock” because the station billed itself as “the Rock of Denver.”

    At KYGO-AM he worked alongside Joe Rateau, better known to listeners as Jockey Joe, and at some point moved to nights. In 1989 he went into engineering, mostly affiliate support, at what became Jones Radio Networks and is now Westwood One. In 1998 he moved to the engineering department at Clear Channel Satellite Services, and in 2001 he came back to Jefferson Pilot Denver as assistant chief engineer. In 2024, after 48 years in broadcasting, he retired.

    Sources

  • Brad Hart

    Brad Hart is the engineer behind a big chunk of what Denver listeners heard on KYGO and its sister stations for roughly 50 years. Industry accounts describe a career at KYGO that long, which makes him one of the most enduring technical figures in modern Denver radio.

    Chief engineer in the Jefferson Pilot years

    By the early 2000s Brad was chief engineer for Jefferson Pilot Communications’ Denver stations. In 2003, when KQKS-FM 107.5 upgraded its sound processing, Telos/Omnia named him as the cluster’s chief engineer and quoted him on the station’s new Omnia-6 processor. A 2006 Radio World profile paired him with assistant chief engineer Gary Nakashima, and a young chief engineer credited both with helping him build his own career.

    A new home for five stations

    After Jefferson Pilot became Lincoln Financial Media, Brad was Denver’s director of engineering. He and Gary documented the move of five stations, KYGO-FM, KJCD-FM, KQKS-FM, KEPN-AM and KKFN-AM, into a single new plant of about 30,000 square feet, replacing an aging early-80s Jefferson Pilot facility and ending years of running from two sites. Their published technical account preserved the planning, studio construction and reasoning behind the move.

    Bonneville and mentoring

    Brad stayed a major figure through the Bonneville years, and in 2019 NAB committee records listed him as a member of its Radio Technology Committee. He also trained the next generation: Michele Grove, who started hanging around KYGO engineering as a teenager, credits him as a major mentor. She returned to KYGO in 2022 after Brad offered her a job, he retired shortly afterward, and she became chief engineer.

    Sources

  • Barry Walters

    Barry Walters kept a Denver FM cluster humming for more than ten years. If you tuned in to KXKL, KIMN or KWOF in the 2000s, his engineering is part of why they sounded the way they did.

    Denver radio engineering

    A July 2011 report in Radio World described Barry as, until recently, the chief engineer for the Wilks Communications stations in Denver, a job he held after spending 11 years with the operation. The same report noted that he did contract engineering work as well. A 2013 industry directory has him as chief engineer of KXKL-FM 105.1 under Wilks Broadcast Group. The Wilks lineup in Denver also took in KIMN-FM 100.3 and KWOF-FM 92.5, and the engineers running a cluster typically looked after every station in it.

    Moving to automation support

    Barry left his Denver post in 2011 to join WideOrbit’s radio automation support team in Coppell, Texas. He was one of several new specialists the company announced while building out what it billed as the biggest radio automation support group in the business. Having been both a cluster chief and a contract engineer, he arrived with genuine station-level experience.

    His place in the lineage

    Those roughly 11 years in Denver predate later Wilks engineering leaders Mark Smith and Barry Thomas, which makes him another link in the technical history of those stations.

    Sources

  • Barry Thomas

    Barry Thomas (November 11, 1962 – December 6, 2018) was one of those people you never think about when your favorite station sounds great, because he was the reason it did. He put in more than 35 years in the business, and Denver was where he spent the last stretch of it.

    How colleagues saw him

    People who worked with him described a forward-looking engineer and a generous mentor, someone who handed out what he knew freely, even to people who had nothing to do with his employers. Barry was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2008, and through years of treatment he kept working full time. He died at home in Denver on December 6, 2018, at age 56.

    The Denver years

    In August 2013 Barry relocated to Denver as director of engineering for Wilks Broadcast Group, which meant overseeing a 21-station group. He was also the hands-on chief engineer for the company’s Denver FM signals: KIMN 100.3, KXKL 105.1 and KWOF 92.5. That chief engineer seat had belonged to Mark Smith, and for roughly a month the two overlapped while Barry got up to speed. Thomas Media Systems & Design, his own contract engineering company, kept going on the side, with attention whenever his calendar allowed. In 2015 Radio World included him in a story on broadcasters exploring drones for jobs like tower inspection. Later he became director of engineering at KSE Radio in Denver, and in 2017, still in that job, he was voted back onto the SBE board.

    The path that got him there

    Barry was born in Dillon, South Carolina, and went to the University of South Carolina. His first broadcasting work was also in South Carolina, including Broadcasters’ General Store and WNOK AM/FM. He eventually moved up to vice president of engineering at Westwood One, then co-founded StratosAudio and served as its chief technology officer, helping develop patented technology meant to let FM listeners interact with what they were hearing as it happened. After that he spent six years at Lincoln Financial Media as VP of engineering, handling both the technical work and the capital budgets for fifteen AM and FM stations in four markets ranked among the top 25.

    A leader in the engineering world

    His membership in the Society of Broadcast Engineers began in 1986. Over time he served on the national board and as treasurer, and in 2007 the membership chose him as the 25th person to lead the organization as president, a role that lasted through 2009. Outside the SBE, he chaired the NAB Radio Technology Committee and the RBDS Subcommittee of the National Radio Systems Committee. He held CPBE, DRB and CBNE certifications, and he shared credit on five U.S. technology patents. In 2011 Radio World gave him its Excellence in Engineering Award.

    Sources

  • Merwin Smith

    Merwin W. Smith (1928–2016), “The Tune Smith,” was one of the voices of mid-century Denver. If your parents or grandparents listened to Denver radio in the 1950s, they probably heard him, and some of them may have seen him on the first Denver TV station too.

    Starting out

    Merwin grew up in Northern Colorado and began his radio career in 1948 at KYOU in Greeley. In 1953 he joined KFEL in Denver, which was tied to pioneering KFEL-TV Channel 2, Denver’s first television station, and he’s remembered as one of the early announcers seen on Denver TV. When KFEL-AM was sold in 1954 and became KIMN, he was there for the early KIMN days, still going by “The Tune Smith.”

    KLZ news

    He later joined KLZ, one of Denver’s dominant news operations. A 1957 ad for KLZ’s nighttime news named Merwin alongside Warren Chandler and Dick McMahon on the news staff, and he himself recalled going to work at KLZ radio in 1956.

    A voice for the Talking Book program

    His career lasted roughly 40 years across radio and television in Buffalo, New York, and Denver. He also became a prolific narrator for the Library of Congress Talking Book program, recording 465 books for blind and print-disabled readers, and earned the American Foundation for the Blind’s Alexander Scourby Narrator of the Year Award and a Didymus Award for that work.

    Family

    His son, Mark Paul Smith, followed him into broadcasting and spent about 44 years as a Denver-area engineer. Merwin died in 2016 at age 88.

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