Bailey & WKXL

"It was a golden opportunity," said Warren Bailey of his decision to sell WKXL-AM of Concord just 18 months after he acquired it. "When someone offers you nearly three times what you paid for your business and asks you to stay around to run it, you can't do better than that," he said.

Gordon Humphrey, the former United States Senator, New Hampshire State Senator and two-time gubernatorial candidate, and his business partner George Stevens, a veteran of the radio business, paid $830,000 for the station. Bailey will serve as station manager under a long-term contract. The transaction did not include WKXL's sister station, WTPL-FM, which Bailey will continue to lease and operate under a local management agreement with the Vox Radio Group.

"We did not put the station on the market," Bailey said. "Gordon Humphrey and his group approached us." He said that "the financial backing of the new owners will enable us to take WKXL and its affiliates — WFEA in Manchester, WTSV in Claremont and WNHV in the Upper Valley — to the "next level". When many stations are run by computers and "most are pinching pennies," Bailey continued, "we're expanding, we're hiring. even though news, talk and sports is the most expensive format on the dial." He said the station's popular morning program, "AM New Hampshire," would soon be paired with an afternoon counterpart.

Bailey, the long-time voice of WLNH-FM in Gilford and founder of the WLNH Children's Christmas Auction, acquired WKXL in 2002 from Vox, which had promptly jettisoned much of its local programming after purchasing the station from its six employee owners in 1999. "It was dead," said Bailey, who quickly set about broadcasting local news and sports. Under his management WKXL became the flagship station for both Arnie Arnesen's popular afternoon talk show and the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, the state's new minor league baseball team. Bailey said yesterday that one of the former owners of WKXL, Dick Osborne, the voice of the University of New Hampshire Wildcats who was recently inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, would return to do play-by-play for 12 Fisher Cat games this summer.

Discounting concerns that Humphrey, an outspoken conservative, would hitch the station to his political wagon, Bailey said "this is not about politics. It's an investment in a very, very profitable enterprise."

Bailey still lives in Laconia.