KLEB Golden Meadow

Official site = www.kleb1600.com

KLEB Golden Meadow is one of the stubborn survivors of French radio in the deep bayou country. It began as KLFT, a modest daylight AM station that, in the late 1950s, carried French music, religious programming, a women’s talk show, and local advertising in French. After a change in ownership, KLFT became KLEB in 1963; Buddy Miller later explained the call letters as “little eagle broadcasting,” a play on owner John Egle’s name.

Photo from Arceneaux’s first visit to KLEB in 2023

The station’s modern identity runs through Miller. His weekday morning Hot Sauce Express follows a 5:30 a.m. French rosary and gives KLEB what sister station KANE largely lacks: a daily block of living French radio. From 6 to 10 a.m., Miller plays traditional Cajun songs along with French-language music from France and Canada, but avoids zydeco. His between-song talk is entirely in French, while most news and commercials remain in English. Raised in Golden Meadow by French-speaking grandparents, Miller does not polish the language into a neutral broadcast French. He speaks “the way everybody around here speaks,” which makes the show less a museum piece than a local habit still surviving on the air. Even listeners who cannot understand him tell him they love hearing it.

Jerry Gisclair gives the story its owner-engineer hinge. Raised in Galliano, he entered broadcasting after doing telecommunications work in the Air Force, acquired KLEB in 1998, and later added KANE, building the Coastal Broadcasting Radio Network. His original KLEB vision was strongly local: Cajun music, sports, and south-Louisiana service. Katrina tested that service. After the 2005 storm, KLEB stayed off for weeks, but Gisclair got KLRZ back within twenty-four hours. With phones down, the station became a lifeline, airing messages to Grand Isle about generators, medicine, supplies, and police notices. Power crews even used the studio as headquarters. The storm also marked a turning point: the full Cajun format never really returned, but KLEB kept enough French in the morning to remind listeners where they were.