In 1990, Tom Kwiatkowski was paging through the Lake Geneva Regional News when he came across a legal notice announcing that there was an FCC license available for a radio station in Lake Geneva. “I never read the legal notices, but for some reason, that day it caught my eye,” he says. He responded to the ad, and asked the advice of a friend who owned several radio stations in Illinois, who connected Kwiatkowski with an FCC attorney and a radio engineer. “I made two phone calls and the ball was rolling,” Kwiatkowski says.
On June 6, 1994, WLKG-FM went on the air for the first time, with the nickname “Lake 96.1.” It was an auspicious day for a debut — the country was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. So, for his first interview on the new radio station, Kwiatkowski chose Gunnar Anderson, a D-Day veteran living near Lake Como. The first song played on Lake 96.1 was Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It.” From the start, WLKG played music in a format known as “adult contemporary.” It also quickly established itself as an important presence in the community, broadcasting live from the Walworth County Fair, Venetian Fest and other popular local events, while also sending its staff out on “Prize Patrol” shifts at local businesses.
General Manager Nancy Douglass has been with the station for 22 of its 30 years. She says that, since its beginning, WLKG has done a great job of balancing the local interest while sounding like a station in a much larger market. “We consider ourselves a southeast Wisconsin radio station,” she explains. “[Our signal] covers all the way to I-94 in Kenosha and west to Janesville. With a small-market radio station, you have to be super relevant and in tune with local events, politics, everything. Then you have to factor in the fact that we’re competing with four large markets … we’re right in the middle of it. We have to sound like a large-market station, and maintain that local relevance. We’ve managed to do that all these years.”
Looking to the future, Kwiatkowski says that he and Douglass have a succession plan in place for her to eventually take over ownership of the station. “Most of my friends retired 20 years ago, and here I am still working!” he laughs, though he points out that he has mostly stepped away from on-air work.
To commemorate WLKG’s 30th anniversary this summer, Douglass says that on June 6th, they will have Kwiatkowski back on the air with current deejays Mike Mason and Eric Paulson to share stories about the radio station’s early days. They’ll also play special songs that have had meaning or relevance to the station throughout the years. And the annual summer promotion (which still includes the Prize Patrol!) will be themed around the station’s landmark anniversary. Douglass says she’s excited to celebrate with listeners this year. “In a small market, we get emails and messages and Facebook comments from everyone,” she says. “[Listeners] really just like interacting.”
