Thursday morning, March 6, started like any other day for Greg “The Hitman” Williams. He woke up, did his job, and had no idea what was coming when he jumped on a Zoom call while waiting at his doctor’s office.
What was coming was a digital dismissal and he was the human toll.
He admits he was “blindsided” by this unexpected end to what had been a successful, nearly 25-year run as the top DJ at the top radio station in the Wichita market. He didn’t see it coming.
The fact that he wasn’t being fired, but that his job was “being eliminated’ didn’t lessen the blow a bit. He compared it to “getting hit with a punch. You didn’t see where it came from and all you know is that you’re knocked out.”
Hitman’s Story
That knockout punch will more than likely bring an end to the historic run at KDGS-FM. Since 2000, he’s been Wichita’s morning-drive-time radio star.
With a long line of female co-hosts, he’s been the star, lead personality and consistent name brand of the “Hitman and (fill in the blank) Show” on KDGS, POWER 93.5, Wichita’s most popular station that plays hip-hop music. His was the longest running No. 1 morning-drive show in the market.
But more than an on-air personality, Hitman was also the station’s program/brand manager, a management position that put him in charge of the station’s programming, marketing, and overall brand strategy. In that position, he worked to ensure audience engagement, revenue growth, and a consistent station identity.
He also served as program/brand manager for KEYN, a classic hits station that’s another one of six Wichita-based stations owned and operated by Audacy, a leading national, multi-platform audio content and entertainment company.
His Beginnings
For Hitman, serving as brand manager for KEYN was like coming full circle. He worked at the station for two years in the early ’80s. It was his first full-time radio job. It was where he honed his skills, built confidence, and took the first major step toward his future success in the industry.
However, his first radio job was working an overnight, weekday shift at Wichita AM Top 40 station KLEO. He was just 17, and was given a rare opportunity as a teenager and an equally rare opportunity as an African American.
Back then – and still – African Americans didn’t work at traditionally White-formated Top 40 stations.
Radio still has a “self-imposed color line,” says Hitman. “Traditionally, if you’re African American, you do Urban Radio and it (Urban Radio) traditionally pays less than Top 40.”
Not to say he followed the money, but Hitman’s next job was a brief stint at a country station in San Diego before being recruited back to Wichita in October 1983 to work for KKRD, another Top 40 station.
He didn’t expect his time there would be an almost straight 17-year run. He left for one year in 1995 to help transition 93.9 from an Urban Adult Contemporary station to POWER, but returned due to what he called “bad ownership.”
Leaving Top 40
In early 2000, Hitman finally left Top 40 behind when the new owners of POWER came calling. The station was in the midst of a major controversy and they needed help “righting the ship.”
Earlier that year, The Community Voice received an on-air recording of POWER disc jockey Kid Chris telling a younger listener to take a gun to school as a way to end a brewing controversy.
The Voice’s story about the recording caught fire and the community responded angrily. There were organized protests against the station, the Wichita City Council passed a condemning resolution and as a result, KDGS could barely sell any commercial spots.
Despite the Kid Chris controversy, there was a lot of love for the station because it was playing a mix of music that included a lot of hip-hop, and it was a format that was missing in the market. When Chris was ousted and a new team was rumored to be coming, there was a lot of concern the station’s format would revert back to something more traditional.
As part of the new station reveal, for three days in a row, the station played nothing but the song “I Got the Power” by Snap.
“I really wanted to pound it into people we were still going to be POWER,” Hitman said. When the station went on the air, Hitman’s message to the community was, “I’m gonna tell you guys we love you, because we know you guys love us and we never told you we love you back.”
That was the start of an amazing 24.5-year run.
Building a POWERhouse
At POWER, Hitman adopted several strategies that catapulted the station to the top.
One was having a strong local and community focus.
“Great radio stations are local, a station that’s really serving their community. I’ve always believed that,” said Hitman.
So he worked hard to live by that policy, including adding a local community issues show that ran for six years, “The Community Voice Radio Show,” hosted by The Voice editor-in-chief Bonita Gooch and then-school board member Michael Kinard.
While other major radio chains were serving up the same music and programming to all of their markets as a way to save money, POWER’s owners supported allowing Hitman to control management of the station’s music.
“That was a unique component of all of our brands and I made every effort to make the station sound as much like Wichita as possible,” said Hitman.
Another strategy Hitman implemented was projecting a “fun, energetic and exciting” station.
Recognizing people were up against a lot of pressures in society and in their lives, he wanted the station to be an escape for people from their everyday problems.
“They didn’t want to hear problems from us,” recalled Hitman. “They wanted to listen to us and have a good time.”
In another move made just before the pandemic, Hitman pushed the owners to fully embrace their hip-hop roots.
“I think ownership did not want to implicitly come out and say hip-hop,” said Hitman, but with a little nudge, they gave him the freedom to make that programming move.
It was a wise move since hip-hop has grown into the No. 1 contemporary music choice of young adults, the market they were targeting.
To pull it all together, Hitman said he didn’t work just 9 to 5; instead he gave whatever it took. He wanted the station to be right. He wanted it to be good.
The result: POWER has consistently been the No. 1 music station in the market and Hitman’s show also maintains a position as the top morning-drive-time show in the market.
Controversy
Hitman had a rather charmed career at POWER, except for an incident that blew up almost two years ago.
An employee Hitman had recently fired accused him of making homosexual advances. The employee went on to proclaim he was fired because he rebuked HItman’s passes.
The former employee went to the local CBS affiliate, KWCH Channel 12, with the unsubstantiated story and they picked it up and ran with it.
“They did it for the headlines,” said Hitman, “and they beat the living sh$t out of me for three days with lies. But after the investigation was done, and all of it was determined untrue, they never said a word about that.”
Hitman said what disappointed him even more was the lack of support he received from the community.
“What was disheartening to me is that the people that stabbed the hardest and the deepest, personally, in my opinion, were my own people,” he said. “I felt like the community I’d given so much to, fought so hard for, brought so many special things that the city had never experienced before, and to have my community turn on me like that. Even now, it’s still disappointing.”
“You don’t get to be a guy like me, having the profile that I have in this community, and move around this community and be that kind of person and it just comes out after you fire somebody. It just doesn’t happen,” he continued.
He recognizes that no matter what the facts are, he’ll never be able to convince some people that it wasn’t true, but he said the fact that the company didn’t terminate him then, because they knew it wasn’t true, should speak for something.
Why Was He Let Go?
On the same day Hitman was let go, Audacy laid off between 250 and 300 employees across the company as part of “cost-savings restructurings,” reverberations from Audacy emerging from bankruptcy restructuring last September.
Like Hitman, the list included a number of long-serving employees, many of whom – due to their longevity – were probably among their respective stations’ highest paid employees.
Hitman developed a successful model for Audacy to follow, something they probably plan to follow with less expensive employees. Besides, they’re aware hip-hop listeners in Wichita have no place else to turn.
What’s Next for Hitman?
Although now in his early 60s, Hitman said he won’t be retiring – but exactly what he’ll do next, he still hasn’t decided.
Unless it’s an awfully great offer, his next steps won’t be back on air.
Over nearly five decades in broadcasting, he’s developed a lot of skills, and has lots of connections, both of which he could use going forward. For now, he’s going to take a little time off, relax and enjoy life … and not get up at 4 in the morning.
