KRBA-AM Radio Station
Lufkin, Angelina County, Texas
Marker Inscription
By the 1930s, radio had become an established medium for commercial advertising. In 1938, commercial radio came to Angelina County when Redland Broadcasting Association received the first license in the area. Station manager Darrell Yates financed, built, and launched KRBA-AM on May 3, 1938 with the understanding that he would assume full ownership from investors in five years. Programs were initially only broadcast during the day and the station operated at a frequency of 130 kilocycles at a 100-watt power level. KRBA originally operated from Cash Drug Store in downtown Lufkin. Since 1948, broadcasts have originated from 121 Cotton Square and the transmission site has been at what is now 2105 Spence Street. Early KRBA programming included broadcast news, drama, music, and sermons. The station also covered sports, beginning with Lufkin Panther football in 1938. During World War II, the station employed a number of women to take the place of male employees. By the 1950s and 1960s, new programs included "The Song and Dance Parade," a prelude to rock-n-roll programming, and "Tunes and Tempos," which introduced African-American radio to local audiences; Spanish programming began in the late 1960s with "Sabado Alegres." ? Through the years, the station has made a major impact in the area. KRBA-AM has sponsored a number of charitable activities in Lufkin. The station has also served as a launching pad for a number of noted radio and broadcast personalities. Today, under the direction of Yates Media, historic KRBA continues to be directly involved in community and regional events, and continues to serve the public as a viable broadcasting institution into the 21st century. (2009)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Commercial radio reached Angelina County in 1938, when the Redland Broadcasting Association won the area's first license and station manager Darrell Yates built and launched KRBA-AM from a Lufkin drugstore. Broadcasting news, drama, music, sermons, and Lufkin Panther football, the station adapted with the times — hiring women during World War II, previewing rock-and-roll, and introducing African American and Spanish-language programming in the 1950s and 1960s. It broadcasts still, a fixture of East Texas life into the 21st century.
Why it matters
KRBA charts the arrival of broadcast media in small-town America and radio's role in reflecting a community's changing racial and cultural makeup.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the 1930s, radio had grown from a hobbyist's curiosity into the beating heart of American daily life. Families gathered around a single set in the evenings, and advertisers had discovered that a voice in the living room could sell soap, cars, and cigarettes better than any newspaper page. What began as scattered experiments had matured into a full commercial medium with networks, sponsors, and stars.
But in 1938, much of small-town and rural America was still waiting for its turn. The big signals came from far-off cities, fading in and out across the pine woods of East Texas. Angelina County, with Lufkin at its center, was lumber-and-railroad country — a working community that had never heard a local voice come out of the speaker.
That was the year that changed. When commercial radio finally reached the county, it arrived not as an outpost of some distant network but as a homegrown enterprise, built by local money for local ears. The timing placed Lufkin squarely in the great wave that carried broadcasting into the corners of the nation just as the Depression was easing and the world was tilting toward war.
People & events
The story turns on one determined man, Darrell Yates. When the Redland Broadcasting Association secured the first radio license in the area, it was Yates, as station manager, who financed, built, and launched the station — with the understanding that he would buy out the investors and own it outright within five years. It was a bet on himself and on his town.
KRBA-AM went on the air on May 3, 1938, broadcasting only during daylight hours at a modest power level from a spot inside Cash Drug Store in downtown Lufkin. From that drugstore came news, drama, music, and sermons — and, that very first year, the crackle of Lufkin Panther football, a tradition that bound the station to the community's Friday nights.
The station moved with the times as much as any institution in town. During World War II, with men away in uniform, KRBA hired women to keep it on the air. In the 1950s and 1960s came "The Song and Dance Parade," easing listeners toward rock-and-roll, and "Tunes and Tempos," which brought African American radio to local audiences; by the late 1960s, "Sabado Alegres" opened Spanish-language programming. In 1948 the operation settled into new quarters, and it has broadcast from Lufkin ever since.
Its place in the American story
KRBA is a window onto how broadcasting actually spread across America — not all at once from a few coastal towers, but town by town, license by license, through the nerve and capital of local people. Thousands of communities got their first local station in exactly this way in the late 1930s, and each one became a new kind of town square.
What makes the station's history especially telling is how faithfully its schedule tracked the country's changing face. The wartime hiring of women mirrored a national transformation of the workforce. The arrival of rock-and-roll, African American programming, and Spanish-language shows traced, in the space of a radio dial, the widening of whose voices and whose music belonged on the public airwaves.
A small-market station like this one did quietly what the medium did everywhere: it turned strangers into a listening public, gave a community a shared clock and a shared conversation, and reflected — sometimes ahead of the surrounding culture — the many kinds of people who called the place home.
If you visit
There is no grand monument here — this is a working town remembering a working institution. Standing at the marker in Lufkin, the thing to do is imagine the sound: a single local voice reaching out across Angelina County for the first time, reading the news, calling a Panther football game, filling a Sunday morning with a sermon.
Let the marker send you into downtown Lufkin on foot. Picture the early broadcasts coming from inside a drugstore, back when a radio station could share a roof with the soda fountain and the prescription counter. The layers of the town's history — lumber, rail, radio — are all within a short stroll.
If you're threading East Texas on a road trip, this is a fine stop to pair with the region's timber and small-city heritage. Tune your own car radio as you pull away and remember that a broadcast tradition took root right here, and — remarkably — never stopped.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Darrell Yates
Themes & tags
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