KEEL (710 AM, "101.7 FM & 710 KEEL") is an American radio station broadcasting a News Talk Information format. Licensed to Shreveport, Louisiana, United States, the station serves the Shreveport area. The station is currently owned by Townsquare Media and features programming from Compass Media Networks, Premiere Networks, Radio America, and Westwood One, and airs Louisiana Tech games. Fox News updates are carried at the top of every hour. Its studios are shared with its other five sister stations in West Shreveport (one mile west of Shreveport Regional Airport), and the transmitter is in Dixie. Marie Gifford Wright A native of Cordell in Washita County in western Oklahoma, Marie Gifford (1917–2004), later Marie Wright, launched a career in radio in the 1940s in Oklahoma City. In 1945, she relocated to Shreveport and became the first woman manager of a local radio station. In 1962, she was named general manager of KEEL and KMBQ (formerly KEEL-FM, now KXKS-FM). From 1965 to 1975, she was vice president of LIN Broadcasting; when the company became the expanded and reorganized Multi-Media Broadcasting, with newspaper and television holdings as well as radio, Gifford continued in the vice presidency from 1975 to 1980. In 1970, Gifford became the first woman to run for mayor of Shreveport on a platform of downtown revitalization and civil rights. She was defeated in the Democratic primary by municipal utilities commissioner Calhoun Allen, who then prevailed in the general election over the Republican mayoral choice, Edward Leo "Ed" McGuire Jr. (1914–1983), a Massachusetts native and a member of the Caddo Parish School Board. In 1988, Wright was named recipient of the "Women Who Have Made a Difference" award. Former State Senator Virginia Shehee, who served with Wright on the boards of the Shreveport Symphony and the Strand Theatre, said that Wright's fight for equality had a major impact in Shreveport. In 1979, Gifford married Harold Arthur Wright (1907–2012), an entrepreneur originally from Moultrie County in central Illinois, who owned the former Whatleys, Wills, and Wright appliance centers in Shreveport, Monroe, and Jackson, Mississippi. History The station originated with the call letters WDAN, licensed on May 19, 1922, to W.G. Patterson and Glenwood Radio Corporation, a Shreveport radio equipment dealer. The first broadcasts were made from Centenary College in Shreveport using a 10-watt transmitter. By July of the same year Patterson and his associates moved the station to a new location, increased