Before it became a rock institution, the frequency now known as Rock 100.5 The KATT spent over a decade playing country music under the call letters KJAK, co-owned with an AM daytimer and surviving suspicious fires and a bank takeover along the way. Nothing about that first act suggested what the station would become.
Everything changed on September 16, 1976, when the station flipped to a 24-hour progressive rock format under the temporary name "FM 100-The Cat." The FCC made it official on Christmas Day that year, granting the KATT call letters. Dallas radio consultant Ira "Eye" Lipson, who had worked at Dallas's KZEW, picked the name, and Oklahoma City had never heard anything like it: a rock station with no interest in sounding like Top 40.
The station's original air staff, including Stan Tacker, Traver Hulse and Jim Stafford rotating morning duties before Linda "Gabby" Goldfarb joined, built something bigger than a playlist. KATT personalities took to calling Oklahoma City "Zoom City" on air, a nickname tied to the station's role promoting concerts and pushing new rock music into the market before anyone else would touch it. The cartoon cat mascot that came with the name ended up on bumper stickers across the state, the kind of merchandise people kept long after the sticker itself faded.
The station has changed hands since, moving through Citadel Broadcasting before landing with current owner Cumulus Media, and its format tightened from the free-form rock of the late 1970s into the structured mainstream and active rock sound it plays today. The current morning lineup of Rick Walker and Brad Copeland carries on a tradition of live, local rock radio personalities that stretches back to the station's first year under the KATT name.
Nearly fifty years after that Christmas Day call sign approval, The KATT still runs on the same basic idea that built Zoom City in the first place: rock that hits harder than whatever else is on the dial.