Saturday, October 14, 2006

The David Lawrence Studio, A Very Classy Recognition For A Deserving Guy


The Kansas City Star's Aaron Barnhart:

It would be one thing if WDAF morning man David Lawrence were having a studio named after him at Entercom Radio's decrepit old headquarters in the KC suburb of Westwood, Kansas. But this is quite another: At a gala Wednesday night to christen Entercom's splendid new, 65,000-square-foot all-digital facility in nearby Mission, the studios of WDAF-FM were named for Lawrence, a man who was the No. 1 morning man in Kansas City for most of his 25 years on the early shift. Entercom CEO David Field flew in from Philadelphia and joined hundreds of other guests at the party, which doubled as Lawrence's goodbye and the ribbon cutting on the $12 million renovation that turned a three-story office building into the new home of the city's market leader in radio. Lawrence just moved into his spacious WDAF-FM studio this week; on Friday, he's moving out (as reported earlier, he's retiring).

Let me say this about the old Entercom broadcast center in Westwood: What a dump! It was meant to house three stations. In the end, after the 1996 Telecom Act allowed Entercom to go on a shopping spree, it had shoehorned in WDAF-FM, KUDL-FM, KYYS-FM, KBRZ-FM, KQRC-FM, KSRC-AM, KMBZ-AM and the classical station, which operated out of a modified closet because that's all there was left.

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