➦In 1922...President Warren G. Harding had the first radio installed in The White House.
➦In 1924...From a banquet hall at the Congress Hotel in Chicago one man could be heard simultaneously in New York, Jacksonville, Denver, San Francisco, and even Havana, Cuba. This was the first coast-to-coast radio broadcast and it was accomplished less than a decade after the first coast-to-coast telephone call was placed in 1915. The future of broadcasting had arrived.
General John J. Carty, a vice president at Bell Telephone Company, spoke from Chicago, addressing by name the various telephone managers in each city where he was being heard. Only about 10% of Americans had a radio set in 1924, but "millions" of others also heard the broadcast, all tuning in with the new radio sets which were quickly becoming quite a coveted new piece of tech for American homes.
KOY was the first radio station in the state of Arizona, signing on in 1921 as Amateur Radio station 6BBH on 360 meters (833 kHz). Earl Neilsen was the holder of the 6BBH callsign (there were no country prefixes for hams prior to 1928). At that time, broadcasting by ham radio operators was legal.
In 1922, the station received its broadcast license, under the Neilsen Radio & Sporting Goods Company business name, with the callsign KFCB. While the KFCB call letters were sequentially assigned, the station adopted the slogan "Kind Friends Come Back" to match the callsign.
A Phoenix teenager and radio enthusiast named Barry Goldwater was one of the new station's first employees.
When the AM broadcast band was opened in 1923 by the Department of Commerce, KFCB moved around the dial, as did many stations at the time. It was on 1260, 1230, 1310, and 1390 before moving to its long-time home of 550 kHz in 1941. KFCB became KOY on February 8, 1929. Today the station is owned by iHeaertMedia and is branded as "93.7 El Patrón", simulcasting on an FM translator.
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| Dick Clark |
The term Congressional Payola Investigations refers to investigations by the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight into payola, the practice of record promoters paying DJs or radio programmers to play their labels' songs. Payola can refer to monetary rewards or other types of reimbursement, and is a tool record labels use to promote certain artists.
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| Alan Freed |
Alan Freed, who was uncooperative in committee hearings, was fired as a result. Dick Clark also testified before the committee, but survived, partially due to the fact that he had divested himself of ownership interest in all of his music-industry holdings.
After the initial investigation, radio DJs were stripped of the authority to make programming decisions, and payola became a misdemeanor offense. Programming decisions became the responsibility of station program directors.
➦In 1985...actor Marvin Miller died at age 71 after a heart attack. He was best known as the Signal Oil announcer on CBS Radio’s memorable series The Whistler, and as Michael Anthony, the man who passed out a weekly cheque on CBS-TV’s hit series The Millionaire in the late 1950’s.
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| Marvin Miller 1958 |
In 1945–47, he was the announcer for Songs by Sinatra.
In 1952, Miller had a one-man program, Armchair Adventures, on CBS. He did "all voices and narration" in the 15-minute dramatic anthology. He also recorded 260 episodes of a program described in a 1950 trade publication as "Marvin Miller: Famous radio voice in series of five minute vignettes about famous people." The program was syndicated via electrical transcription by The Cardinal Company.
He also won Grammy Awards in 1965 and 1966 for his recordings of Dr. Seuss stories.
➦In 1994...Barry Manilow launched a $28M dollar lawsuit against Los Angeles radio station KBIG over its pledge to not play his music and its TV ad campaign in support of the “No Manilow” policy. Hastings, Clayton & Tucker, a Nevada-based entertainment firm that owned the promotional and marketing rights to Barry Manilow's name, filed suit in Orange County Superior Court against Utah-based Bonneville International Corp. The station used Manilow's name in promos for its "No Manilow" music policy. The legal action was dropped a few days later after KBIG agreed to withdraw the promotional spot.
➦In 1996...the "Telecommunications Act of 1996" de-regulated Radio ownership.
