In 1958, atop Mt. Wilson overlooking Los Angeles, Saul Levine built a radio station almost solely with his own hands.
He used a rented tractor to clear scrub brush from a patch of land so remote that the U.S. Forest Service leased it to him for $350 a year. With the help of a carpenter, he built a shack to house his broadcast equipment -- mostly secondhand -- and a bare-bones studio.
The antenna was placed atop a flagpole.
His station went on the air in February 1959, with selections from Franz Lehar's operetta "The Land of Smiles."
"It was just by chance the first album I grabbed," said Levine, a lawyer who had dreamed of having his own radio station since growing up in rural Michigan. "But it was how we felt."
Today that classical music station, now known as K-Mozart, or KMZT-FM (105.1), is worth at least $100 million and perhaps much more, according to analysts. But only if Levine would give it up. And he's not about to.
Levine, 80, still comes into the office -- a modern three-story building in West L.A. -- every day. It also houses his other station, KKGO-AM (1260), which plays pop standards.
He oversees every aspect of the stations' operations, including advertising sales and on-air personalities.
In an industry that has gone corporate, Levine is one of the last of a breed: the independent radio station owner.
Other independent owners -- particularly in classical music radio, which has a limited, aging audience -- long ago accepted offers from industry giants that snapped up FM stations in lucrative markets.
"The amount of money he could get is insane," said Brenda Barnes, president of USC Radio, which operates the other classical music station in L.A., the not-for-profit KUSC-FM (91.5).
In fact, Los Angeles is the only city in the country that still has more than one full-time broadcast classical music station, according to research done for an upcoming National Endowment for the Arts report.
Analysts say the broadcast license for the station -- which Levine originally had acquired for about $25 -- is particularly valuable because of the station's range.
KMZT would be restricted under current Federal Communications Commission rules to a power output of 680 watts. But because it was founded before those rules went into effect in 1962, the station can operate at almost 18,000 watts.
