WTPA is a commercial American radio station that broadcasts a Haitian Creole-language talk format. Licensed to St. Pete Beach, Florida, with studios and a transmitter in St. Petersburg, it serves the Tampa Bay area.
History
Originally owned by Holiday Isles Broadcasting Company, the station signed on the air as WILZ on December 4, 1957, from its studios at 7500 Boca Ciega Drive in St. Pete Beach. Its initial programming format consisted of nostalgic pop music featuring "all time favorites from 1925 to the present." One of its disc jockeys in the early 1960s was Elmo Tanner, the former singer and whistler with the Ted Weems Orchestra. In 1969, Millbeck Broadcasting bought the station, maintaining the nostalgia format but adding New York Mets baseball. The station subsequently changed its format to Top 40 as Z16 and, in 1973, changed to an oldies format as Solid Gold 16. In 1975, WILZ was bought by Gene Danzey, a former General Manager for WTMP in Tampa, who retooled the station as WRXB, the region's first black owned station. Danzey would later sell the station in 1996 to Rolyn Communications, Inc. A transfer was requested to Metropolitan Radio Group in 1996, but that transfer was not completed until 1999. In 2000, Gary Acker died, and control of the station passed to his estate, which was overseen by Mark Acker. In 2007, the station was sold to Walter Kotaba's Polnet Communications. Past announcers at WRXB included Jim Murray, Rob Simone and Sister Dianne Hughes. WRXB also featured state legislatorWengay Newton with a weekly community program, along with Pastor Brian Anderson's The Voice of the Village and Undignified Praise and Worship, produced by Richard Guess. Other announcers included Ivan Summers and Tony King hosting TK's Midday Cafe. On August 20, 2009, WRXB had its first major format change in more than 30 years when it switched to 24-hour gospel programming. Gene Danzey died of respiratory failure on May 29, 2012. The station went off the air on November 14, 2017. Effective September 26, 2019, Polnet Communications sold WRXB and translator W241DH to Sam Rogatinsky's Gulf Coast Broadcasting for $165,000. The station's call sign was simultaneously changed to WTPA. At that time, the newly renamed station began broadcasting Haitian Creole programming as Radio Nouvelle Lumiere, modeled after Rogatinsky's WPBR in West Palm Beach.
