It is possibly the most famous radio promotion in history. And as WKRP General Manager Jeff Ziesmann tells Radio Ink: “Everyone, from the minute we signed on WKRP, has been demanding the return of the turkey drop. Now, they will have their wish.”
Immortalized in the 1978 WKRP in Cincinnati episode “Turkeys Away,” Mr. Carlson’s Thanksgiving promotion goes wrong when he and Herb Tarlek drop live turkeys from a helicopter onto unaware onlookers at the fictional Pinedale Shopping Mall as Les Nessman reports from the ground.
Nearly 50 years after the line “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly” first aired, WKRP became a real station. On May 4, Randy Michaels and Jeff Ziesmann flipped their Cincinnati, Dayton and Northern Kentucky station The Oasis to WKRP. They got the call letters, held for 12 years by Oak City Media’s 100-watt LPFM in Raleigh, NC, after its GM, D.P. McIntire, auctioned them as a fundraiser for struggling LPFMs…