If you’ve ever turned on the radio in the middle of the night and heard free-flowing discussions of ghosts, Bigfoot and crop circles, you’ve probably tuned into Coast to Coast AM. The long-running paranormal radio program stretches for five hours, seven nights a week. It has been the country’s most popular overnight radio show for nearly 30 years, and it has Amarillo roots.
The program was created and hosted for decades by Art Bell, who got his start in the local radio business in an unusual and illegal manner.
While serving as a medic in the Armed Forces, Bell started a pirate radio station in his barracks at the Amarillo Air Force Base. For a time, KMED, as Bell dubbed the unlicensed station because its disc jockeys were all medics, was one of Amarillo’s most popular frequencies. It operated commercial-free in the early 1960s, without approval from the Federal Communications Commission. Complaints from the city’s commercial radio stations brought KMED to an end, but the experience served as the starting point for one of the most unique careers in broadcasting history.
Origin Stories
Arthur William Bell III was born on June 17, 1945, at the family hospital at Camp LeJeune, the massive Marine Corps base in Jacksonville, North Carolina. His parents were both Marines. His father, Arthur William Bell Jr., came from a well-to-do family in Stamford, Connecticut. He served as an officer in the Marines during World War II, surviving the six-month long campaign on Guadalcanal in the Pacific Theater. Bell retired from the Marines as a colonel. Art Bell’s mother, Jane Lee (Gumaer) Bell, served in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve.
“Trey,” as Art’s mother called him, was the oldest of three siblings. The family moved frequently during Art’s childhood, which he characterized as chaotic. The family lived in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland during Art’s youth, following the dictates of the elder Bell’s career. His parent’s marriage was contentious to the point that friends referred to the couple as the “Battling Bells.”
As a youngster, Bell showed great interest in aviation and radio. His love of flight led him to enlist in the Air Force at age 17 with his parents’ permission. He learned the ins-and-outs of radio transmission early in his teens. When he resided in Stamford, Connecticut, a neighbor showed him how to operate amateur, or “ham,” radio, which opened a wide world to him. At age 13, he earned a radio operator’s license from the FCC, enabling him to broadcast on shortwave radio frequencies. He spent his early teen years tuning into radio broadcasts from as far away as continental Europe, Russia and Japan.
In 1962, Bell enlisted in the military, completing eight weeks of basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Bell attended medic school briefly at Air Force Bases in Mississippi and Alabama before settling into an 18-month stint in Amarillo. He found the work in medicine at the Amarillo Air Force Base rewarding. He enjoyed interacting with army doctors and counting them as colleagues.
However, not long after arriving in Texas, Bell went through a serious health scare after discovering a growth under his left shoulder blade. The growth was surgically removed, but one of his doctor friends told him he had six months to live. Bell soon learned this was merely ribbing. The growth was benign.
Chasing Storms and Radio Frequencies
Bell loved Amarillo’s landscape, often venturing beyond the surrounding grasslands into the desert. In later years, he settled near Las Vegas and cited his time in Amarillo as the beginning of his infatuation with the landscape.
Bell’s best friend on the Amarillo base was Lyn Whitlake, a fellow radio enthusiast. Whitlake hailed from Nebraska and had a passion for weather, particularly severe storms. Whitlake would later change his name to “Rob Robin” and become a well-known weatherman in southwest Louisiana, working primarily at KAOK television in Lake Charles.
Whitlake was a storm chaser before there was a term for the activity, and converted Bell into a storm chaser during their time in Amarillo. They drove across the Panhandle and often up into Oklahoma in pursuit of tornados and severe thunderstorms, using an 8 mm camera to film the storms in hopes of selling the footage to local television stations. Bell conceded in his memoir, The Art of Talk (1999), that they probably would have chased storms anyway just for the thrill of it, even if there hadn’t been a financial motivation.
During his hurry-up-and-wait base life in Amarillo, Bell figured out another way to amuse himself.
“One day, I was bored. I missed using my ham radio, which had been my passion for many years,” Bell wrote in The Art of Talk. “Just for the hell of it, I started poking around the base to see what I could find.”
In the barracks, he located a Heath Kit Variable Frequency Oscillator device, which could be used as a radio transmitter on the AM frequency. Bell and Whitlake put it to work, launching their careers in pirate radio.
The duo sat in Bell’s room and started playing cuts from his collection of 45 records, commenting on news events of the day in irreverent fashion, and even providing a weather report. Another friend, Paul Gerrard, became a third disc jockey on the impromptu station. Each disc jockey covered a two-hour shift each evening.
“Most of the guys loved it. They tuned in their radios and every night for quite some time they got music without commercial interruption,” Bell wrote in his memoir.
It didn’t take long for Bell’s superiors to get wind of his pirate radio station. The unit’s commanding officer called Bell and Whitlake in for a meeting to discuss the matter. Bell assumed that was the end of the station, but the meeting went quite differently than he expected.
His commanding officer said he didn’t want them broadcasting from the barracks, perceiving it as a potential source of disorder. Instead, he told them he would contact the base’s Military Amateur Radio Station unit and ask him to give the three enlisted men space to do their broadcasts. Typically, MARS operations on bases consisted of communications with other military installations and official communications for base personnel. Bell’s commanding officer had no professional context for understanding what was happening at his facility.
“Neither the commanding officer nor anyone else for that matter had any concept of commercial broadcasting, what was legal or illegal. They just wanted to get the situation handled,” Bell wrote in The Art of Talk.
The next day, Bell, Whitlake and Gerrard started building an illegal pirate radio station in the base’s MARS building.
From Amarillo to Okinawa
Bell and his crew built a complete studio in two rooms, equipping it with a soundboard, turntables, microphones and all manner of noisemakers for on-air silliness. They gained access to a military-grade radio transmitter and erected a 300-foot-long antenna. The station could be heard not only on the base, but across Potter County, including the entirety of the city of Amarillo, which had approximately 137,000 residents in the early 1960s.
Listeners discovered KMED rapidly. Unlike the city’s commercial stations, KMED was an ad-free home for the popular music of the day. KMED remained on the air for more than a year. The end came when the annual Arbitron radio ratings were released for the Amarillo market. Like Nielsen ratings for television, Arbitron was based on what people report listening to during the course of their days.
As it turns out, KMED had become one of the city’s top-rated stations. The city’s commercial radio stations protested to the FCC, and Bell’s commanding officer shut down the pirate station immediately.
Several months after KMED’s demise, Bell was transferred to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where he treated soldiers who had been wounded in Vietnam. Bell would spend several months “in country,” serving at a medical facility in Da Nang, where he had even closer contact with casualties from the growing conflict.
Bell mustered out of the armed forces in 1966, beginning a two-decade-long odyssey as an itinerant radio engineer and disc jockey.
For a time, Bell served as a disc jockey at KSBK in Okinawa, Japan, the only civilian English-language radio station in Asia at the time. While at KSBK, Bell broke a world record by remaining on the air for five straight days without sleep. He then spent a few years as a disc jockey in Anchorage, Alaska, along with several other markets across the continental United States.
He continued building pirate radio stations wherever he lived, setting up shop illegally in several markets during the intervening years.
Nighttime Callers
By the late 1970s, Bell found himself transitioning into the increasingly popular talk radio format, delving initially into politics and the events of the day. Listeners appreciated the open forum Bell provided for discussing controversial topics such as foreign policy and gun control.
It was during the late 1980s that Art Bell found the niche that made him famous. In 1988, he took over the overnight slot at KDWN in Las Vegas, a 50,000-watt station that could be heard across large stretches of the American West. Bell’s program, known initially as West Coast AM, delved increasingly into the paranormal—a longtime interest of Bell’s which rarely got airtime anywhere else. Discussions of UFOs, the occult and crop circles
became the coin of the realm on his program. Guests and callers alike, many of them making wild claims about extraterrestrials, cryptozoology and conspiracy theories, created a highly theatrical radio program that functioned more as a source of entertainment than edification.
Bell was not an activist for the ideas expressed on the show. Instead, he positioned himself as a presenter of ideas that would otherwise not find a platform, anticipating the Wild West of podcasts and social media. As much as anyone, Art Bell was the father of the free-flowing, democratized digital public square that has come into being over the past quarter-century.
Bell never screened his callers. Instead, the calls came directly to the host, who was also the show’s producer and engineer. Every night, Bell demonstrated that a large audience existed for seemingly fringe ideas, and that audience was ready to participate in the creation and evolution of these ideas.
After developing a large and loyal Las Vegas area audience, the program went into syndication, rechristened Coast to Coast AM. It became the nightly soundtrack for millions of insomniacs, shift workers and over-the-road truckers. By the late 1990s, Bell’s program could be heard on more than 500 radio stations in the United States and Canada. In 1997, the Associated Press called Coast to Coast AM the country’s most popular late-night radio show. Bell reached as many as 15 million listeners each evening.
In addition to his standard fare of alien abductions and hauntings, Bell situated the show firmly within the context of current events. During the show’s 1990s heyday, as the news cycle shifted, topics jumped from the militia movement to apocalyptic cults to Y2K.
Bell introduced Coast to Coast AM each evening as taking place in the “Kingdom of Nye.” Nye County, Nevada, to be exact. Bell had set up shop deep in the Nevada desert, more than an hour west of Las Vegas near Death Valley. He hosted the program in a trailer next to his modest home in Pahrump, Nevada, population 12,000.
Locals protected Bell’s privacy, refusing to reveal his whereabouts to curious fans who came to town. Bell and his wife Ramona took long walks in the desert, just as he had with Lyn Whitlake decades earlier in Amarillo. The couple was known to pick up the garbage they found to keep the landscape pristine.
Bell hosted the original Coast to Coast AM from 1988 until 2002. Coast to Coast AM remains a late-night radio staple, overseen for many years now by George Noory. From 2003 until his death in 2018, Bell returned to the air periodically, hosting weekend editions of Coast to Coast as well as other iterations of his signature program.
Bell died on April 13, 2018, just short of his 73rd birthday. Ten years earlier, Bell had been inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2008, acknowledging an influential radio career that got its start in Amarillo, Texas.
