An enlarged yearbook photo hangs in the studios of KTCU of the station’s most significant contributor—Luther Adkins ’49.

His voice never graced the station’s airwaves as a student, yet the fresh-faced youth is celebrated for getting campus radio on the air. In the medium’s 1940s heyday, Adkins turned a group of fellow students “playing radio” in the TCU Radio Club into a campus-wide broadcast and laid the foundation for an FCC-licensed station.

Adkins died in August. He was 87.

In spring 1948, the closest TCU Radio Club members could get to the real thing was practicing their craft over a public-address system that fed into a speaker in an adjoining room. Tired of pretending, club members sought Adkins’ help in starting an actual broadcast. A junior at TCU, Adkins was one of just a handful of students with a paid radio gig—an announcer/deejay spot at KCNC.

Adkins was an active member of the club and hatched a plan to end his classmates’ frustration. He called in a favor from a KCNC engineer who liked to tinker with equipment in his spare time. Adkins secured $500 from TCU to buy a turntable and pay for the supplies his engineer friend needed to construct a plywood console.

The equipment was ready by fall. Absent a transmitter, the engineer instead created a wired-wireless system that could be heard in most campus residence halls and academic buildings. The days of “playing radio” were over. KTCU was on the air.

The fledging station was something of a parting gift from Adkins, who graduated in the spring 1949 as the first recipient of the newly created bachelor of fine arts in radio-television-film. Adkins returned to school briefly the following fall, accepting a $50 stipend to teach an introductory radio course. But his path was as a practitioner, not a professor.  

“It was a good time to be breaking in to radio,” said Adkins, who became program director and then commercial manager at KCNC before leaving in 1951 for WBAP-TV, where he started out as director of religious, public and educational programming, including a religious talk show “Christian Questions.” He later became WBAP-TV’s administrative manager.

In time Adkin’s campus creation became a fully realized radio station, finding a home in the new Fine Arts Building and converting to closed-circuit radio transmission in the 1950s. The station had seven transmitters, allowing students to hear hi-fi music by tuning to 1025 KC’s on any campus radio.

Eight months after the Beatles debuted on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” KTCU received an official FCC license. The station took the airwaves as 89.1 FM (It would be several years before it slid over to its more familiar spot on the dial). Radio content included opera, orchestral arrangements, news updates and live play-by-play of varsity baseball and Wog (freshman-team) football games.

During the 1950s at WBAP-TV, Adkins was promoted to administrative manager and personnel chief. In 1965, he became corporate personnel director for WBAP and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Four years later, he was promoted to director of industrial relations at WBAP and the newspaper.

In 1976, Adkins became vice president and assistant general manager under the newspaper’s new owner, Capital Cities Communications. In 1980, he was named senior vice president of administration at the daily newspaper, a position he held until he retired in 1992 after 41 years.

Adkins also was the face of the newspaper on the boards of dozens of organizations over the years, from the United Way to the Arts Council of Fort Worth and Tarrant County. He led the newspaper’s Goodfellow Fund Christmas charity, helping it raise more than $3 million during his tenure and provide clothes and shoes for about 70,000 needy Tarrant County children.