Early years as KTBC

The station first signed on the air on July 2, 1939.^[2] The original call sign was KTBC, standing for the Texas Broadcasting Company. It was originally broadcast on 1150 kilocycles, with 1,000 watts. It started as a daytimer station, required to go off the air at night.

KTBC was a CBS Radio Network affiliate. It carried the CBS schedule of dramas, comedies, news, sports, soap operas, game shows and big band broadcasts during the "Golden Age of Radio."^[3]

Johnson family ownership

KTBC was acquired by the family of future President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1943, the future First Lady, known as Lady Bird Johnson, invested an inheritance of $17,500 to purchase KTBC.^[4] She improved the station by hiring new on-air talent, found commercial sponsors, kept all the financial accounts, and maintained the facility. Using her formal name, Mrs. Claudia T. Johnson served as manager, and then as chairman of what later came to be known as KLBJ for some four decades. (In later years, the president and Lady Bird's children ran the media company.)^[5]

Although Mrs. Johnson was the owner in papers filed with the Federal Communications Commission, then-Congressman Lyndon Johnson used his influence with the FCC to permit KTBC to relocate to AM 590, a better frequency, increasing its coverage area and broadcasting around the clock with nighttime authorization.^[4]

The Johnson family put Austin's first TV station on the air in 1952, Channel 7 KTBC-TV. The co-owned station 93.7 KTBC-FM (now KLBJ-FM) signed on the air in 1960. In the 1950s, as network programming moved to television, 590 KTBC began playing middle of the road (MOR) and easy listening music, while still airing CBS News on the hour.

Selling the TV and radio stations

In 1973, the Johnson family sold KTBC-TV to the Times Mirror Company, a newspaper and broadcasting company that published the Los Angeles Times and the Dallas Times Herald. Channel 7 kept the KTBC call sign.^[6] Today KTBC is owned by Fox Television Stations. The radio stations' call letters were changed to KLBJ and KLBJ-FM, to match the initials of former President Johnson, who had died earlier that year.^[7] The AM station continued its format of MOR music with news, talk, and sports. The year before, the FM station had switched to a progressive rock sound.

In 1997, KLBJ-AM-FM came under the ownership of the LBJS Corporation.^[8] The new company was a merger of LBJ Broadcasting, which by this point also owned KAJZ, with Sinclair Telecable's two stations in the market: KROX-FM and KGSR.^[9] 590 KLBJ had already shifted from MOR music to an all-talk format. 93.7 KLBJ-FM continued its album-oriented rock format.

At the time, Sinclair Telecable Inc. was a minority stakeholder in the stations, with LBJ Holdings Co. as the 51-percent controlling stakeholder. In 2003, the Indianapolis-based Emmis Communications acquired the controlling stake in the stations;^[10] the $150 million sale, completed on July 1, marked the Johnson family's exit from broadcasting.^[11]

On October 30, 2009, 590 AM began simulcasting its programming on FM translator station K259AJ at 99.7 MHz. That gave listeners in Austin and its adjacent suburbs the opportunity to hear KLBJ's programming on FM.

In June 2019, Emmis announced that it would sell its controlling stake in the Austin cluster back to Sinclair Telecable for $39.3 million. KLBJ-AM-FM operates under the licensee name "Waterloo Media".^[10]