Cajun Radio History

KAPB Marksville sits on the northern edge of Acadiana, where the border between Cajun country and central Louisiana begins to blur. The station went on the air in 1954, part of the same postwar growth that gave many small towns their own local signal. In Elizabeth Roberts’s late-1950s survey, KAPB was the only station in its immediate region with French programming. Its early manager, Willie Bordelon, hosted The Cajun Hour in the afternoons, mixing French news and music, while the station also carried ten minutes of French prayers each morning. KAPB is also small-town radio in the old sense. Laborde uses voice tracking, but feeds his remote family DJs lunch…