May 24, 25, 26 Radio History

On the 24th In 1844...Samuel F.B. Morse gave the first public demonstration of his telegraph by sending a message from the Supreme Court Chamber in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. to the B&O Railroad "outer depot" (now the B&O Railroad Museum) in Baltimore. The famous message was, "What hath God wrought?"


On the 26th in 1971...Don McLean recorded the classic hit "American Pie," about the plane crash that killed singers The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens.




On the 25th in 1985...CBS Radio began coverage of major league baseball after the game's 20-year absence from network radio. Brent Musburger called the play-by-play for the Los Angeles Dodgers-New York Mets game.

On the 26th in 1989...Radio stations staged 30 seconds of silence at 7:42 AM (EST), to honor Radio.

On the 26th in 1993...Radio dramatist, Carleton Morse, best known for "One Man's Family", died at age 91.

"One Man's Family" centered on a family in the well-to-do Sea Cliff area of San Francisco, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. The tribulations of its main characters, Fanny, Henry and Jack Barbour, dominated the national airwaves from the time the show began in 1932 until it went off the air in 1959 after 3,256 episodes.
He covered radio and police news for The Sacramento Union before moving to San Francisco, where he worked for several newspapers, including The Call, The Bulletin and The Chronicle. He took a writing job at NBC in 1929 and went on to became a legendary radio pioneer.

At its peak, "One Man's Family" rivaled "Amos 'n' Andy" in popularity.

Dan Daniel - WCBS-FM

On the 26th in 1996...Dan Daniel starts at WCBS FM.

He started as a disc jockey at age seventeen on Armed Forces Radio with the US Navy. His first commercial job was at KXYZ in Houston in 1955 and he then worked at WDGY in Minneapolis before moving to WMCA in 1961.

His first broadcast at WMCA was on 18 August 1961. He started on the graveyard shift overnight but from 1962 to 1968 he played the top 40 hits from 4 pm to 7 pm. The station produced a survey of the current sales in New York record stores and Dandy Dan gave the countdown of the week's best sellers every Wednesday in this late afternoon slot.

From 1968 to 1970, he did the early morning drive-to-work slot before leaving WMCA after nearly nine years; his final broadcast was on 11 July 1970.

Dan was heard coast-to-coast on NBC Radio's "Monitor" in the summer of 1973.

He subsequently worked on WYNY-FM where he hosted the mid-day slot and later morning and afternoon drives. He then did a stint at WHN playing country music before returning to WYNY-FM. Finally, he moved to WCBS-FM in 1996. He retired from WCBS on December 31, 2002.



On the 26th in 2010...Radio and TV host (House Party, People Are Funny) Art Linkletter died at the age of 97.

Art Linkletter

Although he earned a degree in teaching, Linkletter worked as a radio announcer at KGB in San Diego. Radio paid better than teaching, and Linkletter directed radio programs for fairs and expositions in the mid-1930s. In the 1940s Linkletter lived in San Francisco and worked in radio.  In the 1940s, Linkletter worked in Hollywood with John Guedel on their pioneering radio show, People Are Funny, which employed audience participation, contests and gags. The series served as a prototype for future radio and television game shows. People Are Funny became a television show in 1954 and ran until 1961.

Other early television shows Linkletter worked on included Life With Linkletter with his son Jack (1969–1970) and Hollywood Talent Scouts (1965–1966). He acted in two movies, People Are Funny (1946) and Champagne for Caesar (1950).

Linkletter declined the opportunity offered by his friend Walt Disney to build and operate the Disneyland Hotel due to Linkletter's doubts about the park's prospects. But, out of friendship for Disney, Linkletter volunteered his experience as a live program broadcaster to help organize ABC's coverage of the Disneyland opening in 1955.

with Walt Disney

Besides being an on-air host, he recruited his two co-hosts: Ronald Reagan and Bob Cummings. The park opening experience convinced Linkletter Disneyland was going to be a huge success. When Disney asked what he could do to show his gratitude for the broadcast's role in the successful launching of the park, Linkletter asked for Disneyland's camera and film concession for its first ten years, to which Disney readily agreed. This turned out to be very lucrative.  He appeared for two stints of two weeks each, as a guest host of The Tonight Show in 1962 between Jack Paar's departure and Johnny Carson's arrival as its new host.

In the 1950s, Linkletter became a major investor in and promoter of the hula hoop.


On the 25th in 2013...Veteran radio talk show host (WOR-New York City, KGO-San Francisco, WRKO-Boston, WCAU-Philadelphia, WKIS-Orlando)/food critic Gene Burns died of complications from a stroke at age 72.

Gene Burns KGO

In his early twenties, Burns was hired as news director for radio station WWHG in his hometown of Hornell, New York before moving on to WSBA in York, Pennsylvania. He began his career as talk radio host at WCBM in Baltimore in the mid-1960s. While at WCBM, Burns did two major international assignments, going to Vietnam in 1968 and the Middle East in 1969.

Following a brief stint with WEEI in Boston, Burns served as a talk show host as well as program director at WKIS 740 AM in Orlando, Florida, beginning in 1971. He would remain there until 1981, when he departed for WCAU in Philadelphia in 1981. He then returned to Orlando and WKIS in the early 1980s and was named the station's operations manager in 1984. In 1985, Burns returned to Boston, hosting a talk show on WRKO for eight years.

In 1993, Burns moved to New York City and began hosting a nationally syndicated talk program from the studios of WOR.

In 1995, he resumed his broadcasting career at KGO-AM in San Francisco. He hosted a talk show of political and social commentary called The Gene Burns Program on weeknights, as well as a program that focused on wine and fine dining in the San Francisco Bay Area called Dining Around with Gene Burns which was broadcast weekly on Saturdays.

Talkers magazine ranked Burns #24 on its list of The 25 Greatest Radio and Television Talk Show Hosts of All Time, in 2002

Harry Birrell

On the 25th in 2013...Harry Birrell, a Los Angeles radio news reporter and anchor at KNX for more than 30 years, died of complications from interstitial lung disease at 85.

Birrell joined KNX in 1968 and was a regular weekday anchor on the all-news station until 1993, when he retired. But  he continued to file daily reports of Ventura County news from his home in Thousand Oaks until January 1999.

The Radio and Television News Assn. of Southern California recognized Birrell with multiple Golden Mike awards for excellence in local broadcast journalism.

He was born Henry Walker Birrell in Steubenville, Ohio, on March 5, 1928, but he was known throughout his life as Harry. He attended Miami University before beginning his radio career in Beaver Falls, Pa., in 1949. He criss-crossed the country working as a broadcaster before arriving at KNX.