University Place

cc Good afternoon, I'd like to say thank you for coming to our program, "The Nostalgia of Radio." My name is Elizabeth Choi, I am an MATC student intern who has been interning here at the senior center this year. I would like to say thank you to the Wisconsin Humanities Council for awarding us this grant to make this program possible. Today I would like to introduce to you Mr. Randall Davidson, who received a bachelor's and master's degree in business administration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. UW-Oshkosh station WRST FM was where he began his radio career and he later worked as a disc jockey and sportscaster at commercial station at WHBY-AM in Appleton. Randall Davidson spent 18 years with the Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison where he was a news producer and the network's afternoon newscaster. He also was the network's chief announcer, training new announcers and filling in on music programs where needed. Most often on "Simply Folk," the network's weekly folk music program. Randall Davidson is currently at the University of Oshkosh as a director of radio service. Let's give a round of applause for Mr. Randall Davidson. ( applause ) >> Well, I'd like to thank everyone for coming out today on this nice spring day to talk a little bit about radio. I'm here primarily to talk about the history of your hometown public radio station WHA. I worked at Wisconsin Public Radio as they said during the introduction for 18 years and kind of along the way became the historian of the network. Mostly because of an interest in history, but lots of times we get questions from listeners about early programs, programs of the past, and I seemed to know where things were in the libraries and I would look them up to answer these questions. And if you know Jean Feraca, one of the talk show hosts of Wisconsin Public Radio, about six or seven years ago she took a year off to write a memoir of her experiences in radio and during the year she was gone I ran into her one day on the street in Madison and she was happy to see because she said, "You've got to get down to the publisher. She said, "They're anxious to talk to you." And I said, "About what?" And she said, "Well, I told them this guy at WHA knows all this history and they want to know if you want to write a book." And so I went down to UW Press, on Monroe Street, and I met with them, and they agreed to commission me to write a history of WHA radio and the network that grew into Wisconsin Public Radio and it's called "9XM

Talking

WHA Radio and the Wisconsin Idea," came out in 2006 and it tells the story, a very good Wisconsin story of how the state and university used radio to benefit people. We have to go back to the early days of the 20th century when the notion of sending messages through the air using radio waves was a cutting-edge technology and this was something that's being studied on university campuses, including Madison. And what was being sent through the air was telegraphic messages, it wasn't voice yet, it was the dots and dashes of Morse code. And industry and the military figured this was only going to be useful for point-to-point messages where you couldn't string a wire, say to a mountaintop or to a ship at sea or a moving train. But they were hobbyists back then, who would listen to these messages through the air. They'd build a homemade receiver and you could listen to these messages right through the air and eavesdrop on them, in essence. And some researchers, including those here at the university, realized there's an efficiency here. You can send one message to many people efficiently and there's no added cost to pick up an additional receptor of the message. The cost is all borne by the person receiving it, there's no extra cost to the production end. There's this real efficiency and that's kind of where the use of the word broadcasting comes in. Broadcasting was a word before radio. If you look up the word in an old dictionary, let's say from about 1900, the word broadcast is in there. It's an agriculture term it means scattering seeds. And it was appropriated by radio as the word for sending one message to many people at once. On this campus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison there was a physics professor named Earl Terry who's the real hero of this story. He got hooked on radio and its possibilities early on as he was studying it. And at the same time that he was studying radio on this campus and other researchers were doing the same, there was this idea in Madison of the Wisconsin idea. This is the notion that a university isn't just for the benefit of the students but it's for the benefit for all citizens. And these two things happened at the same time, the Wisconsin idea and the development of radio kind of happened kind of on parallel tracks at the same time. And this idea was going around campus, this notion of serving people, Earl Terry and his home built radio station that his students built, said, what can we do with this? What kind of message can we send that everyone can benefit from? And they decided to send out the weather in Morse code. And that was something they got from the Weather Bureau, which was in North Hall on campus at that time, they got permission. On December 4th, 1916, this experimental station with the call letters 9XM began sending out the weather forecast in Morse code at 11 o'clock in the morning, Monday through Saturday. For the benefit of anyone who could receive it, the state forecast of Wisconsin. And people as part of the message, they encouraged people to write it down, transcribe this, take it somewhere in your town so everybody can benefit, not just you but everybody. Take it to the general store, to the bank, to the post office, to the fire station, somewhere where you can post it outside and people can see it. We know one town, there was a single radio receiver, a hobbyist had a radio they built, received this message, he'd take it to the telephone exchange, and the operator would ring everybody on the circuit and read them the weather forecast. ( laughter ) And this worked pretty well. To the extent if you knew Morse code. And this was reported at 11 o'clock in the morning, I should mention, it was because 11 o'clock was when the most popular show on radio in 1916 ended.

55 to 11

00 every morning the Navy sent out the time in Morse code. You have to have exact time for navigation, they would do this so ships at sea could synchronize their clocks.

55 to 11

00 central time they would send out the time but hobbyists loved this. High schools would set up receiver so you could get the exact time. Jewelers, in particular, would set up receivers so they could set the watches of their customers.

And so at 10

55 you'd tune into the radio and get the time, then you'd dial down to where 9XM was, get the weather forecast, and that's all the radio you were gonna get that day. That's all there was. So this worked pretty well but you had to know Morse code. And to be sure more people knew Morse code then than probably do now, there were railroad operators and people who worked for the telegraph companies and so forth. But almost immediately they stared experimenting with sending sound through the air. This would be something everybody could use. And experiments took place on campus at the University of Wisconsin, and sending at least the sound of phonograph records, not the human voice, but at least recorded music. And Professor Terry had it to the point where it was working. He could send music through the air pretty well. So he called all his colleagues from the physics department to have a party at his house. And the deans were there and their wives and he said, "For the first broadcast," and this was early 1917. He said, he called down to Science Hall where the radio station was at that time, he said to the operator, we're all ready. And the guy played a record and he received it at home. And to his dismay nobody was impressed. They thought it was some kind of trick. But a woman at the party, thirty-two years later, wrote a letter to our general manager at WHA and said she remembered the music that was played. A song by Ethelbert Nevin called "Narcissus." A classical recording, very recognizable. And I, a few years ago, bought from a collector a 1913 recording of "Narcissus" on Victor Records, which was one of only three commercial recordings available before 1917. We got one from a collector, and it's in a display case at Wisconsin Public Radio now, probably the first piece of music we every played on the radio. And if you look at the Wisconsin Public Radio website they say, they always cite 1917 as their start date because that's when they started broadcasting sound. But then the United States entered World War I, and this new technology radio was kind of an unknown. There was really concern on the part of the federal government that the enemy would get some vital information from the few little meager stations in the United States that were operating. And the rule went down from Washington that you had to dismantle all radio transmitters and all receivers, any, if you had a radio in your home you had to take it apart. You were not allowed to have a radio during World War I. It was against the law. To be sure there weren't that many, you couldn't buy commercial radios then, there were only 12 radios in Madison in 1917. Everyone knew who they were, so it was pretty easy to track down who they were. But Earl Terry wanted special permission to stay on the air, he started doing special experiments with the Navy. And he said I have to have this transmitter running if I'm going to continue these experiments, he got special permission to keep 9XM on the air during the war when almost everybody else was off. And that's one of the claims that WHA has to longevity, being one of the oldest stations is that it was on during the war when everybody else pretty much was off. As the war progressed the experiments became more and more voice broadcasts and less Morse code. By the end of the war, 1919, human voice had been clearly transmitted by the station and they were doing experiments at night, after the middle of 1919, people were able to reassemble their radios and start listening again. So there was an audience out there. They resumed doing the weather forecast, they added the farm markets in Morse code but in night, particularly, they'd do experiments with sound. And anybody from the physics department who could play any kind of musical instrument would find themselves dragged down there. Play your violin on the air, play the harmonica, we want to see what it sounds like. And when they couldn't find a physics professor or a student to play an instrument, they'd play records. And there was no electronic way to play a record then, you just held the microphone in front of the speaker horn of a Victrola. That's how you played a record on the radio then. And one night, we have a story that they were playing the new fight song, "On Wisconsin," on a record as, for testing, testing the transmitter. And they played it, adjusted something in the transmitter, they played it again, and they adjusted something else and they played it again, and they heard from a listener who got tired of this program and they offered to buy the station a different record to go with the "On Wisconsin" record, so even then there were listeners who were listening and also felt free call in and complain about what was going on over the air. ( laughter ) By late 1920, the station had been rebuilt to the point that it was doing a regular evening broadcast of music on phonograph records, primarily for testing, but it was non-coded radio broadcasting on a schedule for the public, which is one of the things you need to have a claim on being the oldest station. By January 1921 they reinstituted the weather forecast at noon. It was kind of a hybrid. They'd do it in Morse code at a regular speed, Morse code at a slow speed, and then they'd just say it three times for people that could receive sound. And that was the broadcast schedule, Monday through Saturday, do those things at noon and that was pretty much it. But by the end of the first month, Friday night, they've added classical music, on records. And pretty soon they added a professor to talk about the music and kind of interpret it. And it's one of the first examples of adult education by radio in the United States. 1921 progressed and in the fall they added the farm markets to the noontime program. The department of markets got involved, so another agency of state government is now involved at the radio station. So there's weather and farm markets and then this Friday night program of classical music. Which had a studio audience. People would go down to Sterling Hall, where the station was by this time, and they'd stand quietly in the hall and take turns peeking in through the door as the professor was talking about classical music over the radio. As 1922 dawned, the station got its call letters, WHA, the 9XM designation was abandoned. It was no longer an experimental station, it was now a fully licensed station. It and the station at the University of Minnesota were the first two to receive licenses for educational broadcasting. At the beginning of 1922, there were only about 28 radio stations in the United States, by the end of 1922 there were 600. It grew like mad over 1922. They added the AM band to expand more frequencies, they started with just two, but even at that, stations had to share. WHA was sharing frequency with stations in Chicago, with a station in Indiana, with stations in Omaha, with stations in South Dakota. They'd have to negotiate with these stations, I want these hours, you can have these hours. At this time entire cities would go silent. On Monday night in Chicago was Chicago's silent night, where all the stations in Chicago went off the air so people in Chicago could pick up these new stations. You can't imagine they'd do that nowadays, a station would agree to go off the air voluntarily for an entire evening and give up that revenue. But back then it was enough of a hobby that people wanted to listen to distant stations. WHA was sharing its frequency throughout the 20s, and every time we get a good one, a commercial station would kind of glom onto their frequency and want to share it with them. And then they'd move again, and then another bunch of stations, it would cause a cascade of moving on the dial WHA had a whole bunch of different frequencies in the 20s, and by 1927, was limited to just two hours on Monday night. That was the entire broadcast schedule for WHA radio in Madison, 7:30-9:30 on Monday night was it. And because they were sharing their frequency so much. And this was just a disaster for the station, they used to have this frequency pretty much to themselves and could broadcast to great distances so Earl Terry negotiated with the federal government and they said, you can have 940 on the dial, at a thousand watts in Madison, but you only have during the daytime. Because at night AM signals bounce and you can demonstrate this tonight, after sundown, tune the radio to 990 on the AM band you'll hear Winnipeg nice and clear. 'Cause the signals are bouncing here. But he wanted to be back on the air with a good signal, they had to abandon nighttime broadcasting. And so he agreed, he signed the papers on April 30, 1929, and it was the last thing he ever did for the station he founded. He went home that night and he died. Fifty years old, rather young, and through bad advice, we don't know why, his wife took all of his research notes, all of his papers, and just put them on the curb, disposed of them. So for my research it was very difficult, very little of his primary writings, other than some of the speeches he gave and some carbon copies of letters, but very little of his voice. Some of the textbooks he wrote, though, are still in print. He was that talented a researcher. In fact, one of them was just reprinted, one on electricity and magnetism was just reprinted a couple years ago. And so unfortunately he died when he did, because in the fall of 1929 is when the station really took off. The programming really took fire, the farm program became really firmly established as a noontime program. The homemaker segments of the farm show were split off as a separate program in the morning. More of the programs started being used, more state agencies got involved. The farm show and the homemaker show were split apart in 1929, they were finally recombined in 1978 to a show called "Wisconsin Here and Now" which was later taken over completely by Larry Mueller, who is still on the air. He is the descendant of the farm and homemaker programming, in fact he teaches, when he was teaching at the UW he was teaching a course called "Farm and Home Broadcasting." He's the descendant of that farm show. There have been only three hosts of that show since 1935. Larry's been on since 1967, he's

still on every weekday at 11

00

to 12

30 hosting his call-in show. Before him, Maury White was the host, he gave up the job in 1967 when he became a dean, but he hosted back to 1950, I met him a couple years ago. And his predecessor, a guy named Milton Bliss, I met Milton a couple years ago as well, about two years ago I met him. Milton at the time was the oldest student on the UW campus. He was 96 at the time. He was host from 1935 to 1950. So not a lot of turnover at Wisconsin Public Radio, you have hosts that stay in for a long time. I'll tell you a little aside about the farm show. This is one of the stock-and-trades of the WHA program schedule, was service to farmers and homemakers with university experts, people you could trust, they're not trying to sell anything. They're there to give you good information. And right before Milton took over his predecessor Kenneth Gapin, they were doing the farm markets and they noticed in November of 1944 that pork prices had taken a big jump. And he though, you know, people are going to be butchering hogs who haven't done it in a long time, or maybe have never done it, we should butcher a hog on the radio. And this got approved, they strung a line from the radio station over to the swine barn on campus, got a livestock -- and then right over the lunch hour, butchered a hog right on the radio. Cut up the carcass, told you how to can it, you couldn't do that today. You'd get calls, you know. ( laughter ) But that was what the show was all about, to present information to rural Wisconsin, same with the homemaker's show, was the best advice in homemaking. Nutrition, child-rearing, budgeting, crafts in the home, things like that. Another couple programs that were very popular in the early days, one started in 1931, the Wisconsin School of the Air. I'm going to ask for a show of hands of people who did School of the Air? A couple, sang along with the radio, drew art with the radio, always get a few. This was started kind of in reaction to the fact that there were about 6600 one-room schoolhouses in Wisconsin in 1931. About 1600 of them had fewer than a dozen students in them, isolated, and one teacher, and how neat it would be to bring in a radio and have a world-class educator present a music class. An art class. A conservation class. A class of literature, to your students. Half the class, all the class, whatever it might be, but by the first year we had ten shows on the air. For all different ages. There were shows for little kids, there were shows for high schoolers, you could have half the class listen, you could have the entire class listen. And we got all kinds of great accolades at WHA for this programming. One in particular, we got a letter from a woman, teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. She went to tune up her radio for "Journeys in Music Land," Pop Gordon, the music show on Wednesday afternoons, and the radio wouldn't fire up. It was burned out. And she didn't want the students to miss. So she had them all stand up, put their coats on, they marched outside and stood by the side of the road until they saw a car go by that had a radio antenna on it. ( laughter ) And they waved them down, and had him come into the parking lot, and they said, can we use your radio for the next half hour? And the guy said, I guess, and he opened the door of the car and the kids stood all around the car and sang along with the radio, and the driver sang along too, she said. So that was kind of a nice story. Also we did a conservation show called "The Field with Ranger Mac." Ranger Mac had been a forester, he was head of 4H in Wisconsin. He got his school kids to plant over 7 million trees over the course of the running of his show. He believed that once you planted a tree you'd always take care of trees. And the students that listened to his show took his advice to heart and planted trees in their schoolyards and on their home grounds, too, at their families farms. There are millions of trees in Wisconsin growing at this time that were planted by his schoolchildren. But he caused some problems, too. Very irate parents showed up at his school and confronted the teacher and wanted to talk to Ranger Mac. And she said, well, he's not here, he's on the radio from Madison. What's the problem? "Well," he said, "I take my kids out hunting every weekend." I guess that meant whether it was hunting season or not. And he said the previous weekend his son had refused to go with him, saying, Ranger Mac says you're not playing fair. Kids had learned over the radio the value of having a hunting season end and conservation of game resources from that program. These shows continued for a long time. When I was in the sixth grade, 1970, my grade school in Neenah, we sang along, even though we had a music teacher, we sang along with the show "Let's Sing" on the radio. The principal would plug his FM radio in his office into the sixth grade classrooms, we had the book from Madison that we took out, and we'd sing along. The host was Norm Clayton, he passed away just a couple of years ago, the other host was Lois Dick, I met her just a couple years ago, she even sang for me when I interviewed her in the studio, it was very nice. And the guy who played the piano was Don Voegeli. Don wrote the theme for "All Things Considered." You hear it every weekday afternoon, that theme you hear for "All Things Considered," he wrote that and gave it to NPR without royalties, so they could use it as the theme for that show. That was a guy who worked at WHA in Madison. The companion to the School of the Air was College of the Air, this was something that really ties in well to the Wisconsin idea. The notion of adult education presenting the riches of the University of Wisconsin to everybody for free. And the timing was really good. They started this in 1933. Social scientists back then were really concerned that there would be an entire generation of young people lost to college because they didn't have any money to go because of the depression. And they thought, we'll put these shows on the air, people can listen to them, not for credit, but just to keep interested in learning. And so maybe when times get better they'll be able to go back to college and they'll stay current with their studies. So the College of the Air got underway in 1933, eventually ten programs as well, morning and afternoon. It's kind of, has a remnant on the air to this day, at four o'clock this afternoon on WHA it's the University of the Air, Norman Gilliland hosts it, along with Emily Auerbach and every Sunday afternoon they bring in a university professor and they talk about their area of expertise for an hour. And you get kind of cutting-edge scholarship for free over the radio, just like in the old days. So there's those four programs and then there's a fifth one, which is also still on, which is "Chapter a Day." And "Chapter a Day," this is the one that caused the most problems for me when I was writing the book because I kind of debunked one of the beloved legends of WHA, that it started in 1927, that it's been on since 1927, and it hasn't been, sad to say. The legend goes that in 1927 a guest didn't show up and in a panic the guy on the air, just to fill the half hour, grabbed a book he checked out of the library and read it for a half hour. And then I guess people wanted to know what happened next in that book, and there you go, there's your program. Unfortunately, the program records from back then aren't terrifically complete, but the ones we have don't have any reference to this programming in it. The first reference I have to a show called "Chapter a Day" was in the summer of 1932. A student named Mary Ann Smith, who had a book called "David's Day" on the air. And when "Chapter a Day" started it was doing just new releases of literature. "David's Day" had just been published. And so that was the book that we believe was the first one read on "Chapter a Day." I bought a copy of it used online and I brought into work when I was still working at WPR and brought it in to Jim Fleming, who's one of the readers, and he read the first paragraph in his "Chapter a Day" voice, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. It was just really neat. But it's actually been on sine 1932 kind of as a summer show, it's been on continuously since April of 1939. So it's still one of the oldest radio shows in the world and what a simple concept to have someone read a book to you, 25 minutes at a time. Carl Schmidt is still involved with the show. Carl's been involved with the station since around 1940 and he still comes up and reads a book now and again for the program. I've watched Carl in the studio. He can read pretty much for about 25 minutes and not stumble. He's probably the best guy in the history of mankind at doing this. He's really, really good. And that show's still on the air, still has a devoted following, and it's a really, really nice thing. If you're gonna hang onto one thing from the past, what a nice thing to hang onto. So those were kind of the lynchpins of the programming schedule. The network, though, it wasn't much of a network in the early days. It was WHA in Madison and then there was this kind of odd station up in Stevens Point, WLBL, the other AM station in the network, you hardly ever hear about them. And for me this was the most fun. There had been no research done on WLBL. So everything I found out was kind of new for everybody to learn. WLBL was also owned by the state of Wisconsin, but not by an educational institution. It was owned by the department of markets, which later became part of the department of agriculture. And its mission was to present farm market programming. That's what their job was, they were there to present farm market programming throughout the day but they have a whole day to fill, they started putting in other things. And by the early 30s had added a program line from Madison, they were carrying some of the Madison programming. Farm show, the homemaker show, School of the Air, College of the Air, they were carrying those in Stevens Point. But doing lots of local programming. WLBL kind of had a different way of looking at service to the public than WHA in Madison did. They would try many, many different things. They had a, we have almost no recordings from WLBL but we have program listings with tantalizing titles, that I would love to find recordings of these shows. They had a bunch of music shows, they had "Hillbilly Selections," which is, they had country music in the 30s, that's really early for country music. "Rumba Time," "Tea Time Dance Party," "South Sea Serenade," and then a bunch of spoken-word programs that you wonder what they were. The "Drink More Milk Club," "Rent Control on the Air," which I think might be listings of vacant apartments. A really strange one called "Postal Oddities," which was a regular show, and my favorite, 9:15 on Saturday mornings, on WLBL in Stevens Point, "Bicycle Traffic Report." ( laughter ) I have no idea, well, I can imagine what this is. If you ran a stop sign on your bicycle in Stevens Point, evidently, you had to face the judge on the radio on Saturday morning. I imagine adherence to bicycle laws in Stevens Point was pretty severe, so a wonderful thing. WLBL carried the Green Bay Packers. Nobody knew this. This was a completely, even the Packers didn't know it. I called the Packers' front office, and they had no record of this. WTMJ in Milwaukee which originated the broadcast had no record of this, I had to send them materials of the history of this. From 1933 to 1938 WLBL carried the Packers and I guess had to block the commercials because they were sponsored by, the -- Oil and Grease Company was the sponsor of the broadcast back then. But in 1933 there were only three radio stations in Wisconsin carrying the Packers. WTMJ in Milwaukee, WLBL in Stevens Point, and a commercial station in La Crosse. That was it. That's how unimportant the NFL was in the early 30s. So WLBL was the other station I should mention also, I got to give thanks to the Educational Communications Board which owns the station now. They gave me permission to get into the building. I called up there, and it's the oldest building of Wisconsin Public Radio stations, 1937. And I called the engineer and I said, "Can you let me in there? I'd like to look around." "Sure," he says. I said, "Was there anything historic in there?" "No. Well," he says, "There's that file cabinet full of stuff from the 30s." Well, like that! So I went up there, and I mentioned this across the hall from my office at Wisconsin Public Radio to Wisconsin Public Television that I was going up there. Well, Art Hackett and a videographer joined me up there because they wanted to see what I was going to find when I opened up this file cabinet. Kind of like Al Capone's vault, you know? Didn't know what kind of treasures there might be. So I got in there, and with the cameras rolling, I opened the cabinet, and one of the first things I pull out is a memo from one of the engineers asking for time off to get his hernia fixed. ( laughter ) So there's a real valuable relic. But there were some valuable things in there. The ECB did let me kind of inventory them and get them out of there, and they're in climate-controlled storage now at the headquarters here in Madison so the record of that station has been preserved. But WLBL and WHA were it for the network, both AM stations, both into daytime only, you couldn't pick up either one of them in the Fox Valley or in Milwaukee really well, or in the southwest or in the far northwest. And there was no money to build new stations but then this idea of FM came along. And here's something that WHA could use. Build FM stations and just kind of relay the signal around this state. Not to have people at all these stations, no studios or programming, just engineers and a transmitter and the station in Madison would transmit over 88. 7, it'd be picked up over the air in Delafield at that frequency, retransmitted at 90. 7 and then be picked off the air in Chilton, they'd retransmit it at 89. 3 and it would be picked off the air in Wausau. And it would go around the state like this. And they did tests and by the time they had the whole network built, by 1952, the tests at the far end up in -- showed that the sound quality up there was just as good as when it left Madison, you couldn't tell the difference and it also gave rights to a special piece of programming. We had engineers there, why don't we use them? Well, we'll have 'em do weather. They'll take turns doing the weather. So in the mornings and afternoons, they'd have the engineers come on, in sequence, and give local conditions. Cloudy skies in Delafield, temperature 38 degrees, or they did how the fish are biting, or how the crops are growing or whatever. And they'd go all the way around to Highland and they'd throw it to the airport in Madison for the weather forecast. And they did this twice a day. People loved this. Vacationers would drive out of their way to find these transmitters, which are in remote locations, to meet these engineers that they'd hear on the weather roundup. And the engineers loved it, they don't get to be on the radio ever, and if you hear some of the tapes, there's reasons why they're not on the radio ever. They have some peculiar voices, but they're fun to listen to. So we had the weather roundup and we had this network of FM stations around the state. The two AM stations are still going. Now everybody in Wisconsin can benefit. They can all hear the service clearly and without static and it can be on at night. FM can be on at night. And now they can do news specials, presidential addresses, they can do nighttime education for working people. They couldn't do that when they were on just during the daytime. So that's kind of the backbone of stations that became Wisconsin Public Radio. There were these eight FM stations, later a ninth, and then the two AMs and that was kind of the network for many, many years. With these five major programs. The farm show, the homemaker show, "School of the Air," "College of the Air," and "Chapter a Day." And then filled in with lots of classical music, lots of public affairs shows, documentaries, things like that. And that's the network that formed the basis of Wisconsin Public Radio. Things have moved on since, we've added more stations, they had to add some more because they went to two program services in the early 80s. They went to one service being mostly talk, and one service being mostly classical and then the NPR newsmagazines. There are now more services because we have HD radio in many of the markets, you can get 24-hour classical here in Madison if you have an HD radio on WRN's digital channel. So there's more to come, there's podcasting, there's streaming of audio, and then the entire enterprise of public television, which sprung up. Kind of built on the backbone of the radio service. A lot of the same programs, a lot of the same people were on both services. I'll give away the end of my book, and then take questions. I couldn't finish this book without addressing that historical marker that's bolted to the side of the building that says "The Oldest Station in the Nation." It always bothered me, even before I was in broadcasting, I went to school in Madison before I was a broadcaster and I see this historical marker and it just seemed kind of squishy. It didn't seem solid, and if it's true, why isn't in all the books, why don't all the broadcasting textbooks say it clearly? And so when I approached this project, I said, I'm gonna take a look at all the research, I'm gonna lay it out there, and kind of give my conclusion and let others draw theirs. But the trick is, you've got to define your terms. That's always the loophole. To be a radio broadcast service, you've got to be first by radio. There were a lot of broadcasting services prior to radio that were on telephone lines. You could essentially get cable radio in your home way back in 1912. Newark, New Jersey had 5,000 subscribers. People would listen to a little earpiece and get programming all day. But that's not radio. So it has to be radio. It has to be non-coded. Can't be Morse code, so that's the second thing. It has to be fully public. It can't be something just through the Army, let's say. And it has to have some kind of radio schedule. Has to have those things going for it. That's the rules. And if you follow those rules it looks pretty clear like WHA's probably the second-oldest continuously operating one in America. KBK in Pittsburgh, which of course gets all the credit, they went on back in 1920 with the election night returns when Warren Harding was elected president. That's their first day of broadcasting. That's pretty clear, there are records, they were on then, it's pretty obvious. We, WHA was clearly on December 3rd, 1921. That's really solid, too. But as I mentioned, there were a couple once-a-week programs of phonograph music on Saturday nights. Which we did for testing, but they were for the public, they're sound, not coded, it's radio, it's on a schedule. And the records I found in the archive seem to indicate that started November 7th 1920, five days later, so we missed it by five days, darn. Neither one of the stations was the first. The first station, and this is new research that's come out while I was writing the book actually. KCBS in San Fransisco, its ancestor station started in 1909 and had a regular program schedule pretty clearly, voice broadcast schedule by 1912. In fact, there was a film made, a silent film made, inside the station in 1912. The founder of the station had a young bride with a baby, who'd just had a baby. She brought the baby in and held him up to the microphone, so people could hear what a baby sounds like on the radio. And so there's, actually there's a frame of film that exists from that. So they were pretty clearly on first, but they had a big gap where they were off the air after the war. They didn't get back on as soon as they could. So it looks like KBK is first, WHA second, but oldest non-commercial station, and it's had its license continuously since 1915. University of Wisconsin has held the license to WHA that whole time. So that's a very long record of service by the university to the people of Wisconsin. And everybody came after that. So I'm plenty happy to say that WHA is the second-oldest one in the country. That historical marker actually was written by WHA's PR director, and of course the Historical Society then took it as gospel. And people took it as, the Historical Society produced the marker, it must be true. So there's kind of a circular logic kind of thing to that. But as I said, I'm plenty happy saying that WHA is the second-oldest in the country. First oldest among educational broadcasters. I will take questions and I'll repeat them so everyone can hear. Anyone have a question about the past or the present or anything else like that? >> ( inaudible ) >> The question is, do we share programming with other stations? We do right now, Wisconsin Public Radio produces four shows for national distribution. Most widely-known is "Whaddya Know?" But they did in earlier days as part of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, and we produced shows on tape and they were sent around to other stations. We took shows from others, we sent shows to others, the big famous one they did was a series on the Dead Sea scrolls. That was one we did that was really popular. Another one that was really popular, Dr. John Schindler from Monroe had been on, did a thing on psychosomatic illness one day in 1949, a one-hour speech. Everybody wanted to hear that, it was carried by many stations around the country. He turned it into a book, "How to Live 100 Years Happily," and it was published in many languages, and many, many years later when I was hiring announcers, I hired his granddaughter to be an announcer at WHA, so there's some continuity there as well. So, but there's always been shared programming. We actually shared the farm show back in 1929 with WTMJ Milwaukee. >> When you were researching this, did you come across the name Willy Forest? >> Willy Forest? Was he involved at WHA? >> Well, yeah, in fact he was so excited about it that he quit college and he put WIBU on the air and then he got a -- license. Right before the war, and he couldn't get any tower, and he put that on right after the war. ( inaudible ) And someone said, "Willy, you got a license for this here station?" And he says, "what?" The guy says, "well yeah, you gotta have a license," and he says, "how do you get one?" "You gotta write to the radio commission." So he sent them a postcard. And they sent back a sheet of paper to fill out for the license. And 40-some years later --. >> In the early days they were much looser with regard to licensing in the early days. Where WHA's tower is now, just on the edge of the arboretum in Madison, that tower site was actually owned by the Wisconsin State Journal. The Wisconsin State Journal had their own radio station, WISJ, and what they had done is they had bought the college station in Beloit. And just moved it to Madison, you could do that then. It's almost impossible to move an AM station now, but they bought that, and they merged their facilities with WIBA, and took the best of both and built one really well-resourced station. They had these towers left over, out there by the arboretum, WHA bought them, got special allocations to buy those towers and they remained in use till probably 1970 and then the one that was just taken down last year went up at that time. So just put a new tower up there just in the last six months, probably. But that tower site was originally owned by a commercial broadcaster that, again, you didn't need much in the way of licensing back in the early days. Other questions? Yeah? >>( inaudible ) >> How are the call letters determined? In the early days they were just assigned to you on kind of a scheme, usually the stations to the east start with Ws, and the ones to the west start with Ks. Canada's all start with Cs, Mexico's all start with X. Kind of by mutual assent they kind of agreed to this. It wasn't till 1924 that you could request call letters that had some kind of meaning to you. So everyone says, WHA, what does it stand for? It doesn't stand for anything. They did try in future years to get all their call letters to line up, to start with WH-something, but all the legends about "Wisconsin Hails America" or "Wisconsin Hogs Agriculture," it's not true. And the thing that's the proof of that is that in 1929 they made a real, real push to get a station in Columbia, South Carolina to give up WIS. They really wanted WIS for the state stations up here. WLBLs were actually picked for that reason, it's "Wisconsin Land of Beautiful Lakes." And it's picked for that reason. The last really full-power FM station built before this last round of stations was WHBM in Park Falls, there's the WH, and the HBM was in honor of Harold B McCarty, who was the station manager from the 30s to the 60s and had just died. And so it's to honor his memory that those call letters were picked. >> I noticed that WHA is three letters and the rest are four letters, why don't they have four letters? >> Why didn't the call letters go to four? They were available as four right away, they gave out threes early on and were gonna run out of them. So as soon as 9XM went away, the 9 stood for the Midwest, X was experimental, M stood for Madison. Well you can see the problem immediately. An experimental station in Minneapolis, they can't be 9XM because 9XM's in use. So they became 9XI. And this was not a useable system, so they went to these call letters and when the first one was KDKA in Pittsburgh and they had no place to put it, there was no place for a broadcasting station in the licensing scheme of things so they just put it in as part of the license categories for ship-to-shore stations. And that's why, even though they're in the east they have a K. >> ( inaudible ) >> There's Ws in the west, there's some Ks in the east. There's a K in Wisconsin, there's two actually, there's KWS in Superior, which is a Wisconsin Public Radio Station, and it stands for UW Superior, and there's a K in Fon du Lac, a pioneer station in Wisconsin that still uses its K. >> ( inaudible ) >> When did FM begin? For Wisconsin Public Radio, they got going in 1947 the first one, the last one of the original eight was built in 1952. And so by the end of '52 they had the whole state network in place. There had been FM before World War II that was down in 40 and 50, between 40 and 50 on the dial. >> ( inaudible ) >> FM dates to much earlier. And it was very popular in the northeast, in New England. And there were a quarter million receivers in New England, a thing called the Yankee Network there. And after the war, people that had money invested in AM kind of lobbied to say, you've got to move this FM somewhere else. So that's why non-commercial radio was able to jump in, because there was, everyone was shy about getting into FM, non-commercial broadcasters loved it. You could get right in and do stuff with it. >> ( inaudible ) >> Sure. Even when I worked in commercial radio we did school closings. And we had to give, you gave each school principal a code to call in, this guy would say, "I'm from Pierce Middle School, schools are closed today," and you'd say, "What's the code?" And if it's a kid calling in to cancel school because there's a test today, they don't know the code! ( laughter ) But we'd give each person, we had a little list in the studio of all the codes for each school. And that way that prevents kids from closing school inadvertently, or on purpose, but we don't go on the air and close schools then without the okay. But yeah, radio still does that, local radio will still do school closings. And now they'll do them on their website, it's the easiest thing in the world. >> ( inaudible ) >> AM stands for amplitude modulation. And FM stands for frequency modulation. It's just the way the signals are transmitted, the radio waves. One goes this way, one goes this way. The thing with AM, it's affected by static, it's affected by lightning and electrical stuff. FM isn't by and large. AM, though, has this peculiar thing where it bounces off the atmosphere after sundown. And that's why AM stations you have to go low-power or go off at sundown, a lot of them. Whereas FM stations can be on all the time, at the same power, but FM is line of site. It's from the antennas on the tower to the horizon. And that's as far as an FM station will go, they do not bounce at night. But it's tremendous fun to listen to AM radio at night at great distances, and the ones that can stay on full power, their technical term is clear channel. It's not the company Clear Channel, the company picked that name because there's this technical term, "clear channel." A clear channel AM station can stay on full power, and it's a high-power station, can stay on all the time at the high power and cover a big chunk of the continent. And they're shared between the country. 800 for example is Canadian clear frequency, so at night you can hear 800s from Canada. There's a big one in -- CKLW, which is a big powerful on 800 on AM band, but there's ones in the United States that are full power. Mexico had a bunch of them and that's how border radio got going. You'd have these high-power Mexican stations that would cover the entire United States. And a lot of early country music stars, the Carter family, they'd record programs and then play it on stations in Mexcio that could stay on at full power all night and cover the whole country. >> ( inaudible ) >> I was asked this question recently, everybody keeps writing the obituary for radio. And it's still around and I always maintain that if radio had been invented after television, people would be thinking it's so much better. Because you can do other things and enjoy it completely. TV, you've got to watch it. There's so much available with radio right now, between terrestrial radio, is regular old radio. There's, you can listen on the internet to radio stations all over the place. You can podcast, you can get shows when you want, you're not tied to the program schedule any more. There's HD radio, where stations will have a secondary channel, doing some specialized programming. Here in Madison, the secondary channel of triple M, 105. 5, is all blues all day long. What a nice thing. So there's that available. I think the future's very bright for radio. It still has value, there's still that sense of wonder when you stumble on something, spinning the dial, and you hit something, where is that from? What is that? That's magnificent. I'm still surprised at radio, I'm still kind of intoxicated by the magic of it. The fact that you can listen and hear someone instantaneously giving you information that's of value to you, to me that's real value. And it doesn't cost you anything. It's still free, over-the-air service. Radio in the United States is still over the air and its model is that it's free. In some countries you have to get a license to have a radio, you have to pay a license every year. It's not that way here in the United States, radio is a free service and the air waves belong to the public. There's now a new, low-power FM stations are popping up. In medium-sized communities where people can get on the air. Kind of like WORT in Madison, a community station, where people have a voice. That's wonderful, too. So I think the future's very bright for radio. One final question. >> And the quality of the shows, Garrison Keillor is better than most things on television. >> Well, quality's always an issue. There's poor-quality radio and good-quality radio and you have to search it out. And you can do that. There's a lot of good-quality radio available everywhere in America. You just have to look for it. It's on the dial and there's stuff out there of all kinds. There's news, there's sports, talk, entertainment, music, fine arts. There's lots of wonderful things on the radio. And that's another nice thing about radio, people have access to many, many stations no matter where you live. There's many stations for you to pick from. I see our time is up here, it's 2:30, I thank you for your time, I thank you for your attention. And enjoy the rest of the program today. ( applause )