January 31 Radio History

➦In 1892...comedian Eddie Cantor was born Edward Israel Iskowitz in New York City.  The man known for his “banjo eyes” and his five daughters was the first of the great vaudevillians to hit it big on radio, after an appearance on the Rudy Vallee Show in early 1931.  In 1950 he jumped into TV & was an instant hit in the new medium.  But he never fully recovered from a heart attack two years later, and died Oct 10, 1964 at age 72.

Cantor was regarded almost as a family member by millions because his top-rated radio shows revealed intimate stories and amusing anecdotes about his wife Ida and five daughters. Some of his hits include "Makin' Whoopee", "Ida", "If You Knew Susie", "Ma! He's Makin' Eyes at Me", "Baby", "Margie", and "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?" He also wrote a few songs, including "Merrily We Roll Along", the Merrie Melodies Warner Bros. cartoon theme.

His eye-rolling song-and-dance routines eventually led to his nickname, "Banjo Eyes". In 1933, artist Frederick J. Garner caricatured Cantor with large round eyes resembling the drum-like pot of a banjo. Cantor's eyes became his trademark, often exaggerated in illustrations, and leading to his appearance on Broadway in the musical Banjo Eyes (1941).

➦In 1902...acclaimed actress Tallulah Bankhead was born in Huntsville Alabama. Her most important broadcast credit was as hostess of NBC Radio’s last hurrah, the star-studded “The Big Show” Sunday night variety extravaganza as the tidal wave of TV was taking effect.

➦In 1915..Radio-TV broadcaster Garry Moore was born Thomas Garrison Morfit in Baltimore. Moore (January 31, 1915 – November 28, 1993) was an American entertainer, comedic personality, game show host, and humorist best known for his work in television. He began a long career with the CBS network on radio in the 1940s and was a television host on several variety and game shows from the 1950s through the 1970s.

After dropping out of high school, Moore found success as a radio host and then moved on to the medium of television. He hosted several daytime and prime time programs titled The Garry Moore Show, and the game shows I've Got a Secret and To Tell the Truth. He was instrumental in furthering the career of comedic actress Carol Burnett. He became known for his bow ties and his crew cut fashion early in his career.

After being diagnosed with throat cancer in 1976, Moore retired from the broadcasting industry, only making a few rare television appearances. He spent the last years of his life in Hilton Head, South Carolina and at his summer home in Northeast Harbor in Maine. He died on November 28, 1993 at the age of 78.

Starting in 1937, he worked for Baltimore radio station WBAL as an announcer, writer and actor/comedian. He used his birth name until 1940, when, while on the air announcing Club Matinee hosted by Ransom Sherman at NBC, Chicago, Sherman held a radio contest to find a more easily pronounceable one. "Garry Moore" was the winning entry, which was submitted by a woman from Pittsburgh who received a prize of $100.

It was on Club Matinee where he met his long-time friend and broadcasting partner Durward Kirby.

Moore headed Talent, Ltd., a variety program on Sunday afternoons in 1941. In the years that followed, Moore appeared on numerous network radio shows. He started out as an announcer and then as support for broadcast personalities, one of whom was Jimmy Durante.

From 1943-47, Durante and Moore had a joint show with Moore as the straight man. Impressed with his ability to interact with audiences, CBS offered him his own show. Starting in 1949, the one-hour daytime variety show The Garry Moore Show aired on CBS. Moore briefly returned to radio as host of NBC's Monitor in 1969.

He died of emphysema Nov 28, 1993 at age 78.

➦In 1936...The Green Hornet“ was introduced by its famous theme song, “The Flight of the Bumble Bee”. The George W. Trendle radio production was first heard on WXYZ radio in Detroit, the same radio station where “The Lone Ranger” had originated 3 years previous.  The title character in “The Green Hornet” was really named Britt Reid, and was supposedly the great nephew of John Reid, the Lone Ranger. The Hornet stayed on the air for 16 years.

Beginning on April 12, 1938, the station supplied the series to the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network, and then to NBC Blue and its successors, the Blue Network and ABC, from November 16, 1939, through September 8, 1950. It returned from September 10 to December 5, 1952.

➦In 1954...Major Edwin Armstrong - founder of FM radio - died at age 63, an apparent suicide.

Edwin Armstrong

He has been called "the most prolific and influential inventor in radio history".  He invented the regenerative circuit while he was an undergraduate and patented it in 1914, followed by the super-regenerative circuit in 1922, and the superheterodyne receiver in 1918. Armstrong was also the inventor of modern frequency modulation (FM) radio transmission.

Armstrong was born in New York City in 1890. He studied at Columbia University.  During his third year at Columbia, Armstrong came up with his first major invention: the first radio amplifier. He had learned how Lee DeForest's radio tube worked, then he redesigned it by taking the electromagnetic waves that came from a radio transmission and repeatedly feeding the signal back through the tube. Each time, the signal's power would increase as much as 20,000 times a second.

This phenomenon, which Armstrong called "regeneration," was an extremely important discovery in the early days of radio. With this development, radio engineers no longer needed 20-ton generators to get their stations on the air. Armstrong's single-circuit design provided the key to the continuous-wave transmitter that is at the core of radio operations today. He graduated with his B.S. in engineering in 1913. He patented his creation and licensed it to the Marconi corporation, in 1914.

Soon after graduation, Armstrong was sent to Paris to serve in World War I. There he came up with his second major invention, the superheterodyne receiver, after he had been put on a project to improve ability to intercept shortwave enemy communications. The superheterodyne receiver is still part of virtually every tuner in today's radios, televisions and radars.

In 1920, Westinghouse bought Armstrong's patent for the superheterodyne receiver, and started up the nation's first radio station, KDKA, in Pittsburgh.

Radio became very popular at about this time, and more and more stations came to the airwaves. The Radio Corporation of America, or RCA soon bought up all of Westinghouse's radio patents, as well as the patents of other competitors.

By then, Armstrong was back at Columbia University working as a professor. In 1923 he married Marion MacInnes, secretary to the president of RCA, David Sarnoff. Later that decade he became embroiled in a corporate war for control of radio patents. This continued through the early part of the 1930s, and Armstrong was unsuccessful in most of his court battles. Meanwhile, however, he pursued a solution to the problem of static in radio. By the late 1920's he had decided the only solution was to design an entirely new system. In 1933 he presented the wide-band frequency modulation (FM) system, which gave clear reception even in storms and offered the highest fidelity sound yet heard in radio. The system also allowed for a single carrier wave to transmit two radio programs at once. This development was called "multiplexing."

In 1940 Armstrong got a permit for the first FM station, which he established in Alpine, New Jersey. In 1941 the Franklin Institute awarded Armstrong the Franklin Medal, one of the science community's highest honors.

Armstrong went on to prove that FM was capable of dual-channel transmissions, allowing for stereo sound. This capability of FM could also be used to send two separate non-stereo programs, or a facsimile and telegraph message simultaneously in a process called multiplexing. He even successfully bounced a FM signal off the moon, something not possible with AM signals.

According to damninteresting.com, AM radio was big business in the pre-television days, and there were powerful people who wanted things to stay as they were. Innovation only meant smaller profits for them. At that time there was no more influential man in radio media than the founder of RCA, David Sarnoff. Known as "The General," Sarnoff controlled all the technical aspects of radio; he also created the NBC and ABC television networks. He was also an important early supporter of television and developed the current NTSC standard for TV that we have used for over 60 years.

Regenerative Circuit 1912

Seeking to kill FM radio before it could threaten his profits, Sarnoff's company successfully lobbied the FCC to have the FM spectrum moved from Armstrong’s frequencies to the ones we use today: 88 to 108 MHz. The FCC ruling said that the 40 MHz band was to be used for the new television broadcasts, in which RCA had a heavy stake. RCA also had an ally in AT&T, which actively supported the frequency move because the loss of FM relaying stations forced Armstrong's Yankee Network stations to buy wired links from AT&T. The deck was stacked against the future of FM broadcasting.

Matters became worse when Armstrong became entangled in a new patent suit with RCA and NBC, who were using FM technology without paying royalties. The cost of the new legal battle compounded the financial burden that the problems with the Yankee Network had caused. His health and temperament deteriorated as the FM lawsuit dominated his life. His wife of thirty-one years, unable to cope with his worsening personality and financial strain, left him in November of 1953. RCA's greater financial resources crushed Armstrong's legal defences, and he was left penniless, alone, and distraught.

On February 1, 1954, Armstrong's body was discovered on the roof of a three-story wing of his apartment building. In despair, he had thrown himself out the window of his thirteenth-floor New York City apartment sometime during the night. He died believing he was a failure, and that FM radio would never become accepted.

Through the years Armstrong’s widow would bring twenty-one patent infringement suits against many companies, including RCA. She eventually won a little over $10 million in damages. But it would take further decades for FM radio to reach its potential.

Following Armstrong’s death, television’s emerging popularity ended radio’s golden years. Slowly, listeners learned that FM radio was clearly better for musical high fidelity than AM broadcasts.

Radios started to have an FM band included with the AM band in the late 1950s and 1960s. By the 1970s, FM audience size surpassed that of AM, and the gap has been growing ever since.

He held 42 patents and received numerous awards, including the first Institute of Radio Engineers now IEEE Medal of Honor, the French Legion of Honor, the 1941 Franklin Medal and the 1942 Edison Medal. He is a member of the National Inventors Hall.

This is an audio recording of the March 6, 1954 final broadcast of Major Edwin Armstrong's experimental FM station at Alpine, NJ. This broadcast came a month after the inventor of FM radio jumped to his death.

The audio track is accompanied by historical photos and footage

➦In 1968...The Tet Offensive began in SourthVietnam and 9 military broadcasters were attacked in their quarters in Hue. They held out for 5 days until a final assault set the building afire and they fled. Three were killed, 5 became POWs for 5 years. Only one escaped. This is the aftermath. Photo from AFVNVETS.NET.

➦In 1992...Radio/TV Sportscaster Howard Cosell retired from his ABC Radio duties at age 73.  He would pass away little more than 3 years later.

➦In 2000...73-year-old Peter Tripp, who wowed radio audiences with his mid-1950s Top-40 countdown record shows on WHB in Kansas City, and later at New York City's WMGM 1050 AM, died January 31, 2000, at Northridge California Hospital, following an apparent stroke suffered at his home in West Hills, California.

Billing himself as "The curly-headed kid in the third row", he became one of the nation's best known Top40 countdown personalities beginning in 1954 at Todd Storz' WHB in Kansas City, and at Loew's Theatres' WMGM in New York City from 1955 through 1960 with his "Your Hits Of The Week" program.

Lee Rodgers

➦In 2013… Lee Rodgers, a conservative talk-radio host who was a constant on San Francisco airwaves for almost three decades, died at age 75.  He had been undergoing experimental heart surgery at the time.  In the early 1990’s, between Bay area assignments, he spent a year as talk show host at Seattle’s KIRO Radio.

He was born and raised in poverty near Memphis, Tennessee, lost part of a leg at age 13 working in timber industry. He began his broadcasting career at WIND in 1963 as a disc jockey and sportscaster, followed by stints with radio stations in St. Louis, Miami and Chicago.

After 10 years with KGO San Francisco, Rodgers went north to Seattle's KIRO radio. One year later, he returned to the Bay Area where "the most interesting and spirited dialogue in talk radio takes place."

➦In 2014…San Francisco radio veteran Chris Edwards died after an extended illness at age 72. 

Chris Edwards

He had started in Bay Area radio in 1968 with the morning show at the original KYA-AM, a highly rated Top 40 station. Later, he hosted KYA afternoons from 2 to 6. In the 1980s, he hosted the “Chris Edwards Solid Gold Time Machine,” Sunday nights from 6 to 10, at K-101 where he was a sales executive.

Born Edward Christian Reinholtz on Nov. 10, 1941 in Mount Vernon, New York. He loved radio from a young age, earning an amateur ham radio license as a teenager, and hosted his first radio show, "Moonglow with Edwards," on WRUF at the University of Florida. It was there that he took the on-air name Chris Edwards, which combined his middle and first names.

Edwards moved to KSFO-AM/KYA-FM as an account executive, also hosting a Saturday morning show until the end of 1991. For the next 20 years, he worked in sales at radio stations including KFRC, KABL and KKSF. He retired from KGO/KSFO in the summer of 2011.

Harry Wayne Casey is 71

🎂HAPPY BIRTHDAYS:

• Composer Philip Glass is 85. 
• Actor Stuart Margolin (“The Rockford Files”) is 82. 
• Bluesman Charlie Musselwhite is 78. 
• Actor Jonathan Banks (“Better Call Saul,” ″Breaking Bad”) is 75. 
• Actor Glynn Turman (“The Wire,” ″A Different World”) is 75. 

• 

  Minnie Driver is 52

  Singer Harry Wayne Casey of KC and the Sunshine Band is 71. 
• Singer John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols is 66. 
• Actor Anthony LaPaglia (“Without a Trace,” ″Murder One”) is 63. 
• Actor Kelly Lynch is 63. Singer-guitarist Lloyd Cole is 61. 
• Actor Paulette Braxton (“The Parkers,” ″In The House”) is 57. 
• Bassist Al Jaworski of Jesus Jones is 56. 
• Actor Minnie Driver is 52. 
• Actor Portia de Rossi (“Arrested Development,” ″Ally McBeal”) is 49. 
• Comedian Bobby Moynihan (“Saturday Night Live”) is 45. 
• Actor Kerry Washington (“Scandal,” ″Ray”) is 45. 
• Singer Justin Timberlake is 41. 
• Actor Tyler Ritter (“The McCarthys”) is 37. 
• Singer Tyler Hubbard of Florida Georgia Line is 35. 
• Singer Marcus Mumford of Mumford and Sons is 35. 
• Actor Joel Courtney (“Super 8,” “The Kissing Booth”) is 26.