The origins of WHB's format are the stuff of legend. The most common version has Todd Storz, scion of the Omaha brewing family and executive of KOWH sitting in an Omaha bar or cafe in the early 1950s.

He and another station executive noticed how the customers, with perhaps 70 songs to choose from in the jukebox, still played the same 10 or 12. Why not a station that played music like that, the same popular songs again and again, instead of slipping in the occasional hit between the block programming that television was succeeding with?

The truth is simpler that that, says George Armstrong, former executive vice president of the Storz group and general manager of WHB, the Storz flagship station from 1954 to 1967.

"Top40 was not a blinding revelation in a bar," he says.

The format of playing popular hits, discerned through research with surveys and record store sales was refined in Omaha over two years, Armstrong says. It was only after the Storz group acquired a second station, WTIX in New Orleans, that the format found a name.

Armstrong arrived in New Orleans and found another local station, a network affiliate, that filled the time between the end of soap operas and the start of network news with music. "The Top 20," the station called it.

"I had an independent station," Armstrong says, "and I simply thought that if 20 was good, 40 was better. We called it the Top40 and when we bought WHB, we stuck it in."

The Storz group acquired WHB from the Cook Paint and Varnish Co. on June 14, 1954, Armstrong remembers. It was a week or two later, he estimates, when Kansas City first heard an afternoon "Top40" show that counted down the popular hits in reverse order.

The next month, Elvis Presley recorded "That's All Right" in Memphis, Tenn. And by 1958 when the nation's disc jockeys met in Kansas City and the term "Top40" had taken on a life of its own. Top40 meant a lot of Elvis.

"All our stations had humongous ratings before anybody ever heard of Elvis," says Armstrong, now retired in Omaha. "We'd come to the conclusion that playing the popular his was the best way to be successful."

For the full publication about WHB Top40 history, see Brian Burnes' Kansas City Star article, published June 5, 2003, entitled "KC Station Pioneered Top40 Format 50 Years Ago".

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