February 8 Radio History

➦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.

➦In 1929...KOY-AM, Phoenix, AZ sign-on.

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 isbranded as "93.7 El Patrón", simulcasting on an FM translator.

Dick Clark

➦In 1960... U.S. Congressional investigators began exploring the influence of payola in the radio and record industries. Alan Freed and “American Bandstand” host, Dick Clark, among others, were called to testify.

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.

Alan Freed

Other forms of payola include making arrangements to purchase certain amounts of advertising in exchange for staying on a station's playlist, forcing bands to play station-sponsored concerts for little or no money in order to stay in a station's good graces, and paying for stations to hold "meet the band" contests, in exchange for air time for one of the label's newer, lesser-known bands.

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.

Marvin Miller - 1958

For the Mutual Broadcasting System, he narrated a daily 15-minute radio show entitled The Story Behind the Story, which offered historical vignettes. He also served as announcer on several Old Time Radio shows of the 1940s and 1950s, including The Jo Stafford Show and the long-running mystery series The Whistler.

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.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first significant overhaul of telecommunications law in more than sixty years, amending the Communications Act of 1934. The Act, signed by President Bill Clinton (using an electronic pen), represented a major change in American telecommunication law, since it was the first time that the Internet was included in broadcasting and spectrum allotment.

One of the most controversial titles was Title 3 ("Cable Services"), which allowed for media cross-ownership. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the goal of the law was to "let anyone enter any communications business -- to let any communications business compete in any market against any other."

The legislation's primary goal was deregulation of the converging broadcasting and telecommunications markets.  However, the law's regulatory policies have been questioned, including the effects of dualistic re-regulation of the communications market.

Previously, the Communications Act of 1934 (“1934 Act”) was the statutory framework for U.S. communications policy, covering telecommunications and broadcasting. The 1934 Act created the FCC, the agency formed to implement and administer the economic regulation of the interstate activities of the telephone monopolies and the licensing of spectrum used for broadcast and other purposes. The Act left most regulation of intrastate telephone services to the states.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a combination of technological change, court decisions, and changes in U.S. policy permitted competitive entry into some telecommunications and broadcast markets. In this context, the 1996 Telecommunications Act was designed to allow fewer, but larger corporations, to operate more media enterprises within a sector (such as Clear Channel's dominance in radio), and to expand across media sectors (through relaxation of cross-ownership rules), thus enabling massive and historic consolidation of media in the United States. These changes amounted to a near-total rollback of New Deal market regulation.

Bob Collins

➦In 2000...WGN 720 AM Chicago morning radio personality Bob Collins died after his private plane and a student pilot's plane collided upon approach to the runway at the Waukegan Regional Airport in Waukegan, Illinois.

The student pilot, Sharon Hock, was directly below him, and they were unaware of each other's presence until the collision. Collins attempted to steer his plane to a safe landing, but it crashed and burned atop a nearby hospital, killing him and a passenger and injuring five people on the ground. The student pilot also crashed three blocks away and died.



The official report indicated that the control tower personnel were unable to observe or communicate the perilous situation until it was too late. Many of Bob Collins' friends and co-workers worked in Bob's memory to have radar and other safety tools installed at the Waukegan Regional Airport to prevent further tragedies.

WGN held a memorial radio show, much of which was captured for a CD that was sold to benefit his favorite charities, the WGN Radio Neediest Kids Fund and the Salvation Army.