Radio History: May 19

➦In 1922..WGN Radio signed-on as WDAP. It was granted the sequentially issued call letters WDAP to Mid West Radio Central, Inc. in Chicago. The corporation was headed by Thorne Donnelley and Elliott Jenkins.

WDAP was originally located at the Wrigley Building. The studios were moved to the Drake Hotel the following July. In mid-1923 ownership was transferred to the Board of Trade, and the next year the Whitestone Company, managers of the Drake Hotel, took control.

The Chicago Tribune purchased WDAP, and on June 1, 1924, renamed it WGN. The call letters came from "World's Greatest Newspaper", a slogan used since 1911.

Elliott Jenkins, left, and Thorne Donnelly, right, are the original owners of WDAP, the predecessor to WGN radio. Jenkins and Donnelly are at their transmitter in the Wrigley Building in 1922. This 50 watt transmitter was built up from component parts by station engineers and was moved over to the Drake Hotel at the latter part of 1922.

The pioneering WDAP shifted its studios to two handball courts atop the Drake Hotel in July 1922 after a sudden violent storm destroyed its inaugural antenna, with pieces “picked up in all directions for weeks,” Jenkins wrote in a 1923 edition of Radio Broadcast. The station gained some early listeners, including Chicago Tribune publisher Col. Robert McCormick, who wrote to his mother, “you cannot help being thrilled at the little box that picks sounds from the air,” according to a WGN history published by the station in 1961.

Early programming was noted for its creativity and innovation. It included live music, political debates, comedy routines, and some of radio's first sporting event broadcasts, including the 1924 Indianapolis 500, and a live broadcast of the 1925 Scopes Trial from Dayton, Tennessee. In 1926, WGN broadcast Sam & Henry, a daily serial with comic elements created and performed by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. After a dispute with the station in 1927, Gosden and Correll took the program's concept and announcer Bill Hay across town to WMAQ and created the first syndicated radio show, Amos 'n' Andy.

A perennial ratings powerhouse, WGN Radio had double-digit audience shares and millions of regular listeners from the 1960s through the 1980s, when Wally Phillips, Bob Collins, Roy Leonard and other legendary broadcasters ruled the airwaves. In the spring of 1986, as Phillips was ceding the morning show to Collins after nearly 20 years, he still had a 15.7 audience share, nearly double the nearest competitor.

Today, the station is the only radio station in the Nexstar portfolio.

➦In 1926...inventor Thomas Edison spoke at a dinner for the National Electric Light Association in Atlantic City, NJ. Reportedly, when asked to speak into the microphone, he said, “I don’t know what to say. This is the first time I ever spoke into one of these things … Good night.”

Alan Freed

➦In 1960...On this day in 1960, the man who coined the term, "Rock And Roll", Alan Freed, along with Mel Leeds and 7 other NYC disc-jockeys were accused of taking payola.

The others included: Peter Tripp of WMGM, Hal Jackson of WLIB, Tommy (Dr. Jive) Smalls of WWRL and Jack Walker, ex-WOV.

Peter Tripp was immediately fired from his popular late afternoon air shift at WMGM.

After departing from 1010 WINS, Freed for a time was employed in New York by WABC 770 AM around 1958, about two years before it evolved into one of America's great Top 40 stations by launching its "Musicradio" format.

At this time, WABC (unlike Top40 WINS) was more of a full-service station which began implementing some music programming elements.

Freed was fired in 1959 by WABC during a dispute where he refused to sign a statement certifying that he had never accepted payola.

➦In 1994....Humorist Henry Morgan died at age 79 from lung cancer (Born - Henry Lerner Van Ost Jr.).  He first became familiar to radio audiences in the 1930s and 1940s as a barbed but often self-deprecating satirist; in the 1950s and later, he was a regular and cantankerous panelist on the game show I've Got a Secret as well as other game and talk shows. Morgan was a second cousin of Broadway lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner.

He began his radio career as a page at New York City station WMCA in 1932, after which he held a number of obscure radio jobs, including announcing. In 1940, he was offered a daily 15-minute series on Mutual Broadcasting System's flagship station, WOR. This show was a 15-minute comedy,[which he opened almost invariably with "Good evening, anybody; here's Morgan."  He also was a personality for WOR, WNBC and WNEW-AM.

In his memoir, Here's Morgan (1994), he wrote that he devised that introduction as a dig at popular singer Kate Smith, who "...started her show with a condescending, 'Hello, everybody.' I, on the other hand, was happy if anybody listened in."

Morgan targeted his sponsors freely. One early sponsor had been Adler Shoe Stores, which came close to canceling its account after Morgan started making references to "Old Man Adler" on the air; the chain changed its mind after it was learned business spiked upward, with many new patrons asking to meet Old Man Adler. Morgan had to read an Adler commercial heralding the new fall line of colors; Morgan thought the colors were dreadful, and said he wouldn't wear them to a dogfight, but perhaps the listeners would like them. Old Man Adler demanded a retraction on the air. Morgan obliged: "I would wear them to a dogfight." Morgan later recalled with bemusement, "It made him happy."

Later, he moved to ABC in a half-hour weekly format that allowed Morgan more room to develop and expand his topical, often ad-libbed satires, hitting popular magazines, soap operas, schools, the BBC, baseball, summer resorts, government snooping, and landlords.

He continued to target sponsors whose advertising copy rankled him, and those barbs didn't always sit well with his new sponsors, either. He is alleged to have said of his sponsor's Oh Henry! candy bar (after exhorting listeners to try one), "Eat two, and your teeth will fall out."

Life Savers candy, another early Morgan sponsor, dropped him after he accused them of fraud for what amounted to hiding the holes in the famous life saver ring-shaped sweets.

Morgan had his fans and his professional admirers, including authors Robert Benchley and James Thurber, fellow radio humorists Fred Allen, Jack Benny, and Fanny Brice, future Today Show host Dave Garroway, and Red Skelton.

Bob Liddle

➦In 2010…Longtime Seattle radio personality Bob Liddle, with more than 50 years on the air in the Pacific Northwest died at age 88.

Liddle spent much of his nearly 60-year radio career announcing, spinning big-band records, hosting easy-listening shows and reading the news on Seattle's KIXI 880 AM. He is perhaps best known for his years hosting KIXI's "Sunday Brunch."

But in his long career he also worked as the station's program director and often hosted New Year's Eve "Tuxedo Junction" celebrations at the downtown Seattle Westin Hotel.

➦In 2016...Newly retired TV newsman and 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer died at age 84. During his lengthy career he brought the horrors of the Vietnam War into American living rooms in the 1960s, and was a mainstay of the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” for almost five decades.

David Hartman is 89

🎂HAPPY BIRTHDAYS:

• TV personality David Hartman is 89. 
• Actor James Fox is 85. 
• Actor Nancy Kwan is 85. 
• Musician Pete Townshend is 79. 
• Singer-actor-model Grace Jones is 73. 
• Drummer Phil Rudd AC/DC is 70. 
• Actor Steven Ford is 68. 
• Actor Toni Lewis (“Homicide,” ″Oz”) is 64. 
• Guitarist Iain Harvie of Del Amitri is 62. 
• Actor Polly Walker (film’s “John Carter,” TV’s “Bridgerton”) is 58. 
• Actor Jason Gray-Stanford (“Monk”) is 54. 
• Gospel singer Israel Houghton is 53. 
• Singer Jenny Berggren of Ace of Base is 52. 
• TV personality Kim Zolciak Biermann (“Real Housewives of Atlanta”) is 46. 
• Singer Shooter Jennings is 45. 
• Comedian Michael Che (“Saturday Night Live”) is 41. 
• Guitarist Tim McTague of Underoath is 41. 
• Guitarist James Richardson of MGMT is 41. 
• Actor Eric Lloyd (“The Santa Clause”) is 38. 
• Singer Sam Smith is 32. 
• Actor Nolan Lyons (“Boardwalk Empire”) is 23.

✞REMEMBRANCES

• In 1994..Henry Morgan, American comedian and TV panelist (I've Got a Secret; Arena), dies of lung cancer at 79
• In 1994..Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, American 1st lady (1961-63), dies of cancer at 64
• In 2004..Tony Randall [Leonard Rosenberg], Actor (The Odd Couple), dies aged 84
• In 2016..Morley Safer, Canadian-American TV newscaster (60 Minutes), dies at 84