WAHR signed on the air October 31, 1954. Owned by and named for Alan Henry Rosenson, the station aired a continuous music format. Rosenson owned WLRD, which changed its call letters to WAHR-FM in 1956. The manager of the station hired a young man, Larry Zeiger, to perform miscellaneous clean-up tasks. When one of the station's announcers suddenly quit, Zeiger was put on the air; Simmons suggested that Zeiger's last name was too ethnic, so he became Larry King. King would become the station's sports director, leaving in 1958 for WKAT.
WMET
Rosenson sold WAHR-AM-FM to Community Service Broadcasters in 1958. After the $150,000 purchase, the new ownership—most of which hailed from Cincinnati—changed the call letters to WMET, continuing a format emphasizing news, sports and adult music. WMET eventually became a full-time Spanish-language outlet, the first in South Florida. In 1961, the owners of daytime-only station WMBM, Florida's first black radio station—which in turn had just absorbed the call letters and some talent of the previous WMBM at 790 AM—agreed to a deal with Latin Broadcasting Company to swap facilities. The deal was finalized and announced in March 1962; Consolidated Communications, which owned WMBM, paid $253,000 to acquire the WMET-AM-FM facility.
WMBM
On April 3, 1962, the WMET intellectual unit moved to 1220 kHz, and 1490 received a relocated WMBM. WMBM went on to develop a large and popular history as Miami's premier AM station for rhythm and blues, gospel, jazz and programming targeted to an African-American audience. Noted jazz broadcaster China Valles had a popular show on the station. In its 1960s heyday, the station attempted a Thanksgiving turkey giveaway which clogged the MacArthur Causeway with drivers from Overtown seeking free turkeys. Motivational speakerLes Brown was a disc jockey on WMBM. In 1992, Eddie Margolis bought WMBM from his father. After a failed half-Haitian, half-gospel format, the station flipped to talk in 1993 and briefly adopted the call letters WSBH. On March 10, 1995, the station returned to a gospel format, as it had for much of the 1980s, and the WMBM call letters.
