PEORIA, Ill. – After nearly eight decades on the air, a Peoria heritage station will soon go silent.
Sister station AM 1290 WIRL will shut down on March 31st at noon. All current programming from AM 1290 will continue to air on Freedom 95.9.
WIRL first came on the air in Peoria in 1948. The station has been home to a variety of music formats, news, and sports, but WIRL’s heyday came in the 1960’s and 1970’s when it served Peoria as a Top 40 station.
Midwest Communication’s Vice President and General Manager Mike Wild says WIRL was struggling to maintain an audience when the company’s predecessors, JMP Media, purchased the station back in 1999. He says that led to not being able to raise enough revenues to keep up with the costs to maintain the station.
Wild says the costs were eventually too much to overcome, which led to the decision to shut down WIRL. But he says there are no job losses that will occur as part of the move.
Former WIRL DJ and general manager Wayne Miller says he first learned about the news when out to lunch with station management in October, describing it as a “kick in the stomach.” He says that’s been due to his association with WIRL in various forms since 1973.
Miller will have the honor on March 31st of pushing the button to close WIRL for good. From now until then, Miller is hosting a retrospective show that will cycle on repeat, along with a goodbye message from the station.
“We added some interviews that I had got on the phone with various people that had been there over the years,” Miller said. “And then we also mixed in a lot of music, old commercials, all kinds of things.”
The tribute show began airing on WIRL at 7:00 A.M. Monday. Miller is joined by another former WIRL personality and DJ on the show, Scott Robbins. Other personalities to join Miller include Robyn Weaver, Lee Malcom, and Gene Conrad.
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