Subject: Dr. Ben Henneke

Interviewer: Nancy Garrett

NG: My name is Nancy Garrett. I am a volunteer of the Junior League of Tulsa, Incorporated. I am conducting this interview this 14th day of October, 1979, with Dr. Ben Henneke, at 1015 East 19th Street, Tulsa, OK, exclusively for the Junior League of Tulsa’s Historic Preservation project. [pause] Basically, Dr. Henneke will be discussing radio in Tulsa from 1931 to 1946. First, however, Dr. Henneke will tell us why and when he first came to Tulsa.

BH: Well, I came to Tulsa with my family in 19‐‐‐17? Yes. Oh, my dad was employed by the Deshon Electric Company to design and install, um, fancy chandeliers in the homes of oil people who were making money and were building their own homes [laughs]. And, Deshon was a major electrical outlet; they had a store down ‐‐ well they were on the main mall, uh, and um, I don’t know what’s down there now – Oh, a fish and chips – they were right on about 6th and Main. And, uh, the, uh – and my dad came down her to visit the town and sent postcards back to my mother about the Cosdon Building, and the various things that Tulsa had. And we came down in 1917. And I stayed here from then on.

NG: Did you save any of these, um –

BH: The postcards?

NG: Yes.

BH: Yes, I gave them to Ben for his office.

NG: That’s wonderful. We might be able to – to learn something about the Cosdon, it’s one of the buildings we’re interested in.

BH: Oh, really? Good. Well, now, to go about radio, as you wanted me to do –

NG: Right.

BH: I need to make a couple of disclaimers. Uh, they’re simply to try to say what I can speak of with authority and what I can speak of only, uh, from imperfect memory. I became interested in radio because my mother worked for Glen Condon. And Glen Condon was the big New York show man who came back to Tulsa from – a successful but hectic career with the, uh, B.F. Keith and the vaudeville people. So, oh, Condon saw radio as being a very important new media, and since my mother worked for him I heard things at the dinner table, of what Mr. Condon said, and then Mr. Condon had Skelly Oil Company buy a very early radio program, and he was nice enough to let me be on it, and I was a high school kid at the time. So I knew radio from the side, from, oh, I guess um, ’27 or something of the sort, up until the University of Tulsa got its own radio station, KWGS, and I was responsible not only for getting it but for applying for it and all that sort of thing, and then my life in radio became academic radio, rather than the commercial radio that everybody listened to. And I have to make that distinction because when we got KWGS there was nobody who could listen to it, because nobody had and FM set [laughs]. And, you worked, you broke your heart trying to do programs, you know, in the hope that somebody would hear. And, uh, and of course, we had to have programs so that people would buy sets, just as in the early days of TV, the Oklahoma Tire & Supply would have TV sets turned on, but there had to be a station for Oklahoma Tire & Supply to –so, KOTV started, in order to – with nobody available to listen to it. And we did the same thing with the radio. And, uh, we gave away listening sets, and did everything in order to get listeners. But that – so my career in radio is a fairly long one. It – I was in commercial radio from, uh, roughly, the beginning of World War II, until, we got KWGS, because I became a news censor for the government on KVOO, and we’ll come to that in a minute. But let’s talk about radio first, as, to orient you and people about what it was. Radio started out to be a local entertainment form, like vaudeville, or – it was – nobody had ever thought of networks. And the people who pioneered it thought of it as something that happened in Pittsburgh for the people in Pittsburgh, or something that happened in Denver. And it was thought of by many of the inventors as a major, oh, part of the defense and military establishment, because it would be used for sending signals behind the lines and that sort of thing – you didn’t – didn’t have to have telephone lines, you see. And, uh, what it became was a surprise to everybody. Uh, how it became what it became was a surprise to everybody. It was not really a planned industry. There was no – nobody said “now we’ll do this and this will happen.” It just grew. For example when KVOO, which was the first station in Tulsa, came to Tulsa, and I do not know the year on that but I think that’s fairly easy to find. And just parenthetically, KVOO as a commercial station had been in Bristow before it came to Tulsa. But before that it had been the college – the engineering college station of the University of Arkansas. And, oh, when they – the engineers decided they’d learned all they needed to learn about radio, from it, well then it – the wavelength moved to Bristow, and became commercial, and then it came to Tulsa. And it was brought to Tulsa by Mr. Skelly, who was a tremendous, uh, force in almost everything that was inventive and different and new and might help the city. And – but anyhow, when it came to Tulsa, oh, it was assumed that, uh, nobody would listen to it in the daytime because people were busy doing things such as housework and, oh, taking care of children, cooking meals; and it would be on during the noon hour, it would be on again then in the evening, oh, after dinner, for a couple of hours, and then it would sign off, because, you know, nobody’s going to listen to after 9:30 – everybody’s getting ready to go to bed. And, oh, the prices they charged for advertising on radio were based upon the idea that the station would be on the air only about 4 or 5 hours a day, so that when it finally got to where it was on the air 20 hours a day, its rates were enough to make a nice fortune for people. Oh, so, it started out as a toy, in a way. What did you listen to? Well, you listened to original programs in these areas where you could hear. That is, in Pittsburgh, you listened to, uh, the Pittsburgh Symphony, if they did an experimental broadcast of that, but more likely, you listened to some—some piano teacher’s students, playing piano in the afternoon, or something of that sort. So that I – the first time that I was on radio, I was a part of the 6th grade choir – oh, I take it back – 7th grade choir at Grover Cleveland Jr. High School, and we went down and sang a program on KVOO, because that filled time [laughs]. What do you do? What preceded us was a, oh, local program of a singer and a violinist and a pianist, called The Redheads, who did a musical program, and then one of The Redheads announced that the Grover Cleveland High School choir was going to sing, and, uh, asked us on the air what numbers we were going to sing, and all the kids were chiming in, you know, about what they were going to sing. This—the station was in the Atlas Life Building, at the time, and the studios were about the size of a washroom, and so we stood out in the lobby, with the elevators going up and down [laughs] while we sang. Oh, not – you know, this is partly primitive, but it’s also – it’s a toy, and we’re learning about it. Listeners treated it as a toy; the first program I ever listened to we went to a friend’s house and they put a receiver – an earphone – in a bowl on the table, and then we could all sit around and listen to this –the vibration of the bowl from the earphone. And, oh, then you know, you made little radio sets of your own with what they called “Cat’s Whiskers,” and, oh, everybody tried – nobody really cared what he listened to; he was trying to hear as far away as he could, and uh, the Salt Lake City organ came through beautifully in Tulsa, so everybody had Salt Lake City on their record. All right now, that’s the way radio began in the ‘20s, it was as a novelty, oh, it became the sort of thing that every man who could do handicraft work made himself a radio of his own for his home. And, uh, you wound wire on cardboard tubes, like the tubes that are in paper towels now. Well, they didn’t have paper towels then [laughs], but they had cardboard tubes for other things, and you wound wire on it and that gave you, uh, the whatever it is that it gives you so that your little cat’s whisker wouldn’t go across, and we had crystal sets. And my first set cost me a dollar and 34 cents, as I remember it. All right, so this is – and the programming was all local. And there were no records played; in fact, the –the movement toward records in radio is part of the history of radio in Tulsa, because Mr. Skelly was the Republican – he was the chairman – I don’t know, so anyhow he was the big – he was somebody important in the Republican party. He was the state representative or something, but I mean, you know, he had a state – he had a nationally important job in radio, and he was a Republican, in the Republican Party, and he owned a radio station. And so, at some point, a station in Louisiana, which was owned by a Democrat, was given the same wavelength, essentially, so that there was a real conflict. It was very hard for people to listen, because the station in Louisiana was conflicting with KVOO, and they then had to share time. And the station in Louisiana, the man who owned it, played records, because he thought people should hear the best there was, so if you’re gonna sing Reedy Pagliacci, well have – rather than have one of the Tulsa Redheads sing it, have, uh, Enrico Caruso sing it. And, Mr. Skelly appealed to the FCC on the basis that he was playing records, and that this was not a – what radio was intended for. Radio was intended for local programming. And, there was a ‐‐ it was a – quite a suit, and it went – lasted for a long period of time, and it became nationally very important, because do you play records or don’t you? And, eventually, KVOO was given a clear channel of 50,000 watts, which was a victory, but the man who played records got the idea across that records were permissible on radio, and so that was a victory. But, this would be in the – this would be in the late 20s, maybe early 30s, that records were – but is was still not considered to be very good. Oh, if you were a network announcer – and now networks came in through national politics in the 20s, late 20s, 27 or so, oh, and NBC was the network, and it had two, um, channels, uh, the red and the blue. And so there was possible for there to be two stations in a town having NBC, one having the blue network and one having the red network. And one finally was split off and became ABC. But the network began very timidly in the late 20s, and they had only a hour or so – a couple of hours – per day of your programming; the rest of it was your own programming. But if you were a network announcer, you had to be able to play the piano or sing, or do something, so that if a program did not come to the studios – the network had said “we’ll provide you with a 15 minute program – well then you had to, um, sit down and play the piano, or accompany yourself and sing, or tell jokes, or whatever it was that you wanted to do, or could do, and been hired because you had that second ability. This was also true for local stations, and uh, well, a good many people I know in radio were – had started – have started out as singers or pianists or something because you needed to fill time, and uh, you needed to fill it accurately. Now the reason you needed to fill it accurately, which is very different from the British system, where if they have a program run short, they just start and then start up again; the United States is so big, that the network, and much of what you did locally, went through the telephone lines, and the telephone company billed you by the minute, as they do on telephone calls. So there was a great need for accuracy in radio, long – in the United States – long before there was a need for it anyplace else. And this is one of the reasons Tulsa became very important in the radio business; because Tulsa was a place – was a swish – was a switching center – [laughs] I’ll get it right in a minute – was a switching center for the telephone company. That is, the lines came down from Chicago through Kansas City, or St. Louis, to Tulsa, and then branched, and they branched to Oklahoma City, to Dallas, to Fort Worth, to Louisiana, but , and so that in time, Tulsa became a center for the network of regional broadcasting, and – I’m skipping now – but, in the 40s, then, when a sponsor such as General Foods bought a program to be broadcast all over the United States, they would advertise, uh, chocolate in the northeast, they would advertise Pen‐Gel, which is a way to make jellies, in the fruit districts of Michigan and that sort of thing, and from Tulsa South, we would advertise hot bread, Calumet baking powder and that sort of thing; we were called the Hot Bread Network, oh, for the major networks, because of the way the telephone lines switched. Now when television came along the chamber of commerce tried very hard to get the telephone company to run the television cable through Tulsa, so that we would still have the same advantage that we’d had in radio, but the, uh, pleas of stations in Texas, oh, were heard and the ones from Tulsa were not heard. And, uh, the TV channel goes through the Dallas‐Fort Worth area. But in the days of radio, Dallas‐Forth Worth got its radio out of Tulsa because of the telephone company’s switching center. And, this meant that Tulsa created a lot of programs, more programs than any other stations in this area – the southwest – because we were the switching center. So that, one of the jobs that I performed during the war – NBC ran a – an all‐afternoon program on Sunday afternoons called “The Army Hour,” and it was an attempt by the United States government, through the medium of the radio to explain what was happening, why there were more fighter bombers needed, or why ‐‐ and also to let people know how their sons and loved ones were being treated in the army, ‘cause we’d have programs from them. And Tulsa was responsible for providing somewhere around 30 to –30 minutes to an hour each Sunday, and, uh, we would go to Camp Crowder or Camp Gruber or REF station, or wherever. And, uh, but it was because of the telephone lines, not because of any great ability we had that other people didn’t have. So Tulsa was important in the radio scheme. Tulsa was important in the radio scheme also because of the numbers of people it sent to the networks. The first ones I knew who went to the networks were sound effects men. There was man here in town named Kelly – and I’m sorry that I cannot remember his first name, but I’m sure it is easy to find – who went to Columbia Broadcasting System, and was the great sound effects man on all of the major dramatic shows that came out of CBS, so that, [laughs] and, oh, it’s my faulty memory that I don’t remember his name, not any lack of ability on his part or a lack of fame on his part. His assistant was also from Tulsa, a man named, uh, Robert Stone, and, uh, Bob – his name I remember much more quickly because his little brother Bill was in school with me, so, you know. But Robert Stone was the 2nd sound man at CBS, and they’re the ones who figured out such wonderful things as, in a dramatic play on radio, if you have to crush someone’s skull with a baseball bat, if you drop a cantaloupe it makes the sound that [laughs], I mean, this sort of thing. Uh, sounds effects were a very big business in radio, and uh, so Tulsa provided the pioneers in radio sound, actually, with CBS. Then, of course Patti Page, who still is a very famous vocalist, was a Tulsa girl, and this is a really – describes what radio was like: The KTUL, which was the CBS station in Tulsa, which was managed by a man named Gillespie, was totally self‐programmed just as KVOO was totally self‐ programmed. And, one of the programs that they had was a musical show that was put on by the Page milk people, and, uh, had a singer and a little band behind her, behind the singer, who was a female vocalist, and they would hire different vocalists, if the girl married and went off or if the girl got a better job or whatever, and so rather than have listeners lose identity with the show, rather than call her by her name, they called her by the name “Patti Page” since it was the Page Milk Company show.

NG: I see –

BH: And, uh, this Patti Page has – I wish I could remember her name, but anyhow – she was number 4 Patti Page, or number 5 or whatever, and – but, her singing was so ‐‐ her pitch was so true, and her ability to sing without vibrato was a very important skill at the time she became popular – was one of the things that the big‐named bands auditioned to find singers who could sing without vibrato, so that you could – if you sang for Glen Miller, you weren’t to have a quaver or anything of the sort. And Patti did not have one, so that she was – she moved very quickly from Tulsa to the network. Oh, but we had others. There was one of the early soap operas in Chicago, and the reason that Chicago was a big thing in radio was because it was the major switching station for the networks, just as it is the major airline switching place, you see, I mean, it’s the middle of the nation. So, and switching – I’m using a word that doesn’t mean anything to you really, but in those days it really did – that is, you literally threw a switch and connected Tulsa to Chicago, or Tulsa to Salt Lake City. And, the switches were real electric switches that took time for the electricity to change its direction. So you could – there were always great pauses when you had a transcontinental radio broadcast because the relays going from the west coast to Tulsa, let’s say, that whole stretch across Utah, you could even hear the relays turn over as the switches were pushed in. And, oh, it was that switching time which became the commercial time. That is, the programmers didn’t stop to have commercials, they were really – it was, you know, here’s the Page Milk Company with Patti Page, and uh, it was a – began as identification. But you had to take time to get from Chicago to Tulsa, and so there was 30 seconds allowed for the switching to take places, and this is where they began to sell commercials. And then this became – after the switching became si—almost instantaneous, they still had that 30 seconds in there for commercials. So, anyhow, oh, Tulsa had a morning program about people hanging up clothes in the backyard, and you know, they’d talk about this and that, and I guess they were advertising somebody’s laundry, or something of the sort – this was before my time; I only know of it. And some of the people on the program – they were mostly Northwestern graduates, but they lived in Tulsa, and they went back to Chicago and became Myrt and Marge, which became a – was a very popular soap opera of the time. Oh, the young lady here in town named Muriel Monsell, who lived out in Sand Springs, um, her father was the manager of the Page interest out there, had gone to Northwestern, and then the Pasadena Playhouse, and got herself a job at KTUL as a receptionist in the hope that every time they needed a female voice on the air they would run out and grab her, and they began to. And, uh, this would happen because a commercial would be written that had a lady shopper in it and you didn’t want to hire somebody to do that; you could use the receptionist. So, Muriel broke in this way, and then she and the book editor of the World –oh, and I’ll think of his name in a minute – I’m sorry, I should – but I have no way of – since I’m only here on a visit, I have no way of checking these out [laughs]—

NG: Right.

BH: Anyhow, this book editor of the World and she began a program of morning conversation: We read the morning newspaper and chit chat, and I think it was – it was a very nice little family 15‐ minute kind of a program. And it moved to Chicago and made the network. The – a great many people came from Tulsa to the network as announcers. Oh, one of the finest sports announcers that CBS ever had was a Tulsa boy, and one of the finest commercial announcers that NBC ever had was a Tulsa boy Frank Sims. Oh, they, uh – we provided a good many people to the network. Well, we also provided to the network the young lady who was the longest‐running soap opera queen, Mary Stuart, she’s a Tulsa –

NG: I didn’t realize that.

BH: Yeah, well she – Mary Houchins was her name in Tulsa and she went to TU, and I guess she’s been on her soap opera for 25‐some years now – more than that. Okay, well, radio was not records, radio was not network in the 20s and early 30s. Oh, radio was the thing that you went – most people stayed sane with during the Depression. It turned out it was a very – you know, electricity cost virtually nothing, a radio set cost a dollar and a half, two dollars – times were very bad, and the radio became a friend to these people and became terribly important. And it no longer was on the air just a few hours a day; it was on the air all the time. And the local stations couldn’t provide all‐day‐long programming. They could maybe with records, but records hadn’t yet become that important, and the musicians’ union was fighting the idea of records, because it would mean musicians were unemployed. So, uh, the network grew in importance, and in the number of hours it provided. And, out of the Depression, we moved from that to the terrible international situation of Hitler and Mussolini and the problems of Europe. And news began to be a very big thing on radio. Now the first news I ever heard on the radio was Victor Barnett, who was the man – who was the managing editor of the Tulsa Tribune, reading the Tribune out loud on the air.

NG: Now was this done locally?

BH: This was – yes, this was done locally, and, oh, there was no such thing as national news, and there was no such thing as a news department –

NG: So people actually read the newspaper on radio.

BH: Yes, I mean, Victor Barnett was introduced as the managing editor of the Tribune who was going to read you this afternoon’s Tribune [laughs]. And, oh, the first newsman I know of in radio was a man named, uh, Ken Miller, at KVOO. Ken Miller had been a reporter on the Tulsa World in the 30s – early 30s – and I knew him there, and then KVOO hired him to be a newsman for them. It was never – it never occurred to anybody that he would be a voice – he was just a – to clip the newspapers [laughs] – and then eventually, we began to move to something more sophisticated than that when we began to have our own wire service that brought us national/international news at the stations. And – but we had no local reporting even then, I mean, what was local was out of the newspapers. And the ossification of the time structure for news began in the late 30s and in the early 40s. People liked to think that they knew everything that happened just before they went to bed, so the 10 o’clock news became a very important news segment in the Midwest, and eventually, it became an 11 o’clock news segment in the east, for it to be the 10 o’clock in the Midwest because of the time differential. It was totally absurd; there wasn’t any news. The news they got at 5 o’clock was as hot as any they were going to get, but they – the idea that when you went to bed you knew everything. And then you got up in the morning, and you’d immediately turn on the radio to learn what had happened while you were asleep, even though probably nothing had happened. So we had the early morning newscasts and the 10 o’clock newscasts, and then we began to have a phenomenon, oh, the mid‐day newscast that was part of the farm news. Now Tulsa’s enough of a city now that it probably doesn’t remember its rural beginnings, but when I first was employed full‐time at KVOO, I was taken to be interviewed by the manager, a Mr. Way – W. B. Way – and Mr. Way took me to a window, and he said, “You see out there” – and the station was in the Philtower, so you could see in all directions – we were on the 22nd floor, I guess it was – anyhow, I looked out, and I could see south Tulsa, and I said “yeah, sure. Sure, of course I can see” – it’s the Boston Avenue Methodist Church, and all these things. He said “We don’t care about them.” He said “see out there?” I said “yeah,” I saw railroad tracks, and out toward Owasso. He said “We care about them. That’s where the farmers are; that’s where the listeners are.” And, uh, they sincerely meant it. For example, we had a program on KVOO at noontime – it was first of all a network program called “The Farm and Home Hour,” which was an hour of farm and news put on nationally out of Chicago, then we had programs that preceded it and followed it. They were farm programs, so that from about 11:30 ‘til 1:30, uh, KVOO had a farm audience. That farm audience got back on the tractor, according to KVOO, at 1:30 [laughs], and – and then we went to soap operas. You know, for people – for another audience. We had a farm audience in the morning, and KVOO had its own farm department with an announcer who was a graduate of OSU – then Oklahoma A&M – and he broadcast all the news about –for farmers in this part of the, you know, in Oklahoma, in this part of the state, and for all the places that KVOO was heard. [empty space in recording for about 12 seconds] This local farm department was called the 1170 ‐‐ rural route 1170, because the – KVOO was 1170 on your dial. And it was called “Route” [pronounced raůt, rhymes with “out”]. And now, we had a style book, and we called it “route” [pronounced rüt, rhymes with “loot”] from 9:00 in the morning ‘til 11:30, and from 1:30 and on. But from sign on until 9, and from 11:30 to 1:30, it was “route” [rhymes with “out”]. You see? Because we had listeners who would not identify if we called it “route” [rhymes with “loot”]. The farm audience was an enormous audience, you see, and they had – they had the farm wife, and she really was an important person. She wrote letters, and she told them how now there was somebody in the room to talk to – that farming up ‘til then had been a totally lonely affair. The men were out in the fields, but she was in the house by herself, now the radio was there. So that much of the programming took this into account, and if you listened – if you were to get any old time soap operas and listen to them, just plain Bill who lived in a little country town, Myrt and Marge as I say were women who did things over the clotheslines. Uh, all of these shows were little country people, or simpler America. And this was one aspect of radio, and since KVOO was a major contributor to the farm movement in the United States, KVOO maintained this rather simplistic, um, and simple attitude towards its listening audience, and directed its commercials in that way. Now what we’re talking about is a period of time that lasted through World War II. Oh—

NG: When did you begin to work for KVOO full‐time?

BH: Well, I can’t really say that I ever worked for them full—yes, I did too, I’ll—What happened was I was the right age to be drafted and just had a new baby, and so I was waiting until they called me, since when I tried to enlist, they wouldn’t take me, and the University didn’t really need me. So I punched around as to what I could do, until I was taken, and, uh, I’d worked on the newspaper to earn my way through school, and I’d done radio things ever since Glen Condon would let me, so of course I went to the paper to see if I could work there, and I went to the radio stations, and KVOO said no, they didn’t have anything. And then I was called to come back, and I was asked if I would mind doing, oh, listening to articles on the air. It was a long time before I discovered that I had become the official government censor, because, part of the – I guess the technique of the government was to not let us know what we were doing or why we were doing it, because this might affect something – I don’t know. But anyhow, to make a long story short, what happened to me was I went to work at KVOO to listen to their programs, then I became a part of the programming itself, when so many of the men left. And, uh, they said if you’re going to listen and read all this stuff, you might as well announce some of it, too. And, I was the official government censor, because KVOO, unlike the Tulsa World, Tulsa Tribune, or anything else you ever heard of, by accident of the phenomenon of radio, the signal of KVOO was bounced off the Kennicott‐Heaviside layer, and, uh, reached the Solomon Islands. Now, nobody had ever known this, because nobody in the Solomon Islands had ever written a letter to KVOO and said “We get your programs loud and clear,” but this was a fact, and the government was planning on invading Guadalcanal, and using the Solomon Islands as their staging base for the recapture of –

NG: I see.

BH: So –

NG: This you learned afterward –

BH: Oh, yes. Much later. After we had finally – well, the third year of the war, KVOO finally broadcast a Christmas program to servicemen in the South Pacific, and it was a program in which we recorded their wives’ voices, saying – because, by that time, we were no longer under blankets, you see. But, oh, from the very beginning, we – we were scrupulously – I mean I was in fear of my life most of the time, because a word would get past that shouldn’t, and I didn’t know why it shouldn’t, but – and I finally had books that said these things cannot be said on the air. And it wasn’t happening to anybody else we knew, WFAA in Dallas didn’t –wasn’t doing this, but KVOO was. But it turned out it was because of this phenomenon of the bounce of the signal. And then we later – with our own servicemen there – Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were getting requests from servicemen in the South Pacific, you know, I mean “play ‘San Antonio Rose’,” and whatnot. And, uh, so this is how I became part of the KVOO structure. And, uh, why I really came to know an awful lot about it ‘cause I really watched – I mean I looked at a lot of scripts that had to go on the air, I listened to things that were on the air, I switched things on and off if I thought they were getting into trouble. And then, lectured everybody on what the government said we could and couldn’t do. And I became the censor for the area too, so that if, uh, the World had some kind of a problem, why, I was one of the people who was called in to say whether or not I thought they ought to print whatever it was that they were worried about. So, you know –

NG: This started basically in ’40‐’41—

BH: Yeah, in ’41, and then went through until ’46, as I say. And it was a tremendously exciting learning experience for me, because as I say, we worked on the army shows, we did them on Sundays, and, uh, we did a lot of network work, KVOO did. Because you see, in the ‘40s, there were only three – I think there were only three stations. There was first KVOO, then KTUL, which had its offices in the National Bank of Tulsa Tower – well, I don’t know what it’s called now, but that’s what the building used to be; you know, the building down – KTUL was in it. And there was KOME, which meant “Oklahoma Magic Empire,” OME did, and its studios were down in the Genet Building, oh, which was a beautiful furniture store building across the street from what is now the Tulsa Junior College Campus. And it became the American Airlines Building after World War II, the Genet Building did. But, that’s where – and then KAKC came in, oh, but I think it came in after the war. It was named after Glen Condon and Sam Avie, who put it in. And well, Glen Condon – we’ve gotta go back to Condon, because Condon was Mr. Radio, as far as Tulsa was concerned. Glen Condon had tremendous ideas, was very creative – he had trained Walter Winchell, when he – Condon was in New York and Winchell was a poor dancer in the Keith Albee circuit. But Winchell became one of the greatest names in radio nationally, because of his newscasts, and his rapid‐fire delivery, and “good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea, let’s go to press.” And, uh, whether Condon every imitated him, or he imitated Condon, I don’t know, but they both sounded very much alike on the air. Condon, as I say, got Mr. Skelly interested in the radio station. Condon broadcast a program for the Skelly Oil Company on KVOO back in the very early ‘30s. It was an hour to an hour and a half‐long program, and [laughs] was a very good stunt. Oh, poor – we wouldn’t think it was good radio now, but it was a good stunt. The redheads were on it and Perry Ward, and all kinds of people, and a band, and one thing and another. But, uh, it was touring the United—touring the Skelly Oil Company territory, you see. And, so you’d get in your car, you’d – according to radio, you see, you’d – sound of an automobile from the sound effects people, and you’d pull up, and say “fill ‘er up with that good Skelly gasoline!” And then you’d go driving off to Drumright or wherever it was. And, oh, you would talk about things along the way, and then you would sing songs that were – hopefully were related to Drumright in some way. And then when you got to Drumright, why, oh, an announcer would read the commercials, prepared by the Drumright Chamber of Commerce, about what a good town Drumright was. Well you know, nobody outside of Drumright was really listening to that, but it made Drumright feel good, and it made the Skelly Oil Company feel good. And Condon had lots of good ideas like this. And since he and Sam Avie were great friends, and Sam ran the wrestling at the time, they, uh, they started a radio station, and Condon did the news on it, and it was done in the old Coliseum Building. And, uh, then when KFMG came along – I must admit I do not know – I’m sorry to – it sounds as if I were slighting a station, but they – they really sprang up pretty fast, there. Then – then, during the war, KVOO had been experimenting with television. And KVOO put out television signals. Now KVOO had great engineers. So did KTUL. The man who was the chief engineer for the KOTV now was the engineer for KTUL. He was very able. The ones at KVOO, particularly Howard Hamilton and Watt Stinson, were, in many ways, electronic geniuses. They were able to do things with a bobby pin and an idea that other people couldn’t do with a soldering iron.

NG: Was this from experience, or training?

BH: Well, I’d say it was probably from, um, having a very permissive boss in Mr. Way. Mr. Way, he used to climb all over the announcers, because after all he talked, and he knew what you ought to say, but he didn’t know a thing about engineering, so the engineers really had lots of ways, and had almost a free hand, and they were constantly experimenting with things. And this made working for the station very exciting, because you always – some new sound effect would occur. We did stereo long before stereo was anything except a word in the dictionary. And our television was really very original and very new. And, what was very clear from the very beginning, was that the sound in television was going to be different from the sound in radio, because radio would be amplitude modulation, and, uh, television would be frequency modulation – which are the words AM and FM. And so, the fellows at KVOO, and Mr. Way, decided that they ought to give the university an FM station so that the experimenting in sound could go on, and uh, you know, be a tax deduct for them and a great thing for the University, and, oh, we’d get all the information that everybody needed. So, that’s how we got KWGS, which stands for W.G. Skelly, you see, who owned KVOO, and, oh, this was a great thing, because Mr. Way was a very important person nationally. It turned out that my working for him, oh, got me entrees that I would never have gotten if I had worked for someone else because he was a big man in the industry. So that I went to, I guess, the first NBC school, uh, of television, toward the end of the war. I was sent back to New York to – and it was one of those great broadcasts that nobody could watch it, you know, because nobody had a television set. Uh, but they tried out – they broadcasted a football game. And they tried out a new camera with a range finder on the side, and in moving the camera to the site where they were going to broadcast, the range finder was bumped and twisted, so that the whole broadcast of the game, you were looking at the people in the stands, because the camera never – what the cameraman saw through the range finder was not what the camera actually saw [laughs]. And you know – but the only people who knew this were the people in the truck and those of us back at the school who were watching this on a closed‐circuit affair. And there was no way to contact the people who took the pictures, so you know, it was – TV was really one of those – in the beginning, was really one of those unbelievable experiences.

NG: Trial and error.

BH: And, uh, so, uh, radio really was a very dominant sort of thing. But by ’47 or – not quite right – ’48? Yeah. By ’48, television was so big, that the NBC moved the people who were doing radio out of their building in New York City and moved the television people in. I mean, it was that dramatic a change. And now, records had made a part of the change; rather than playing Enrico Caruso, the broadcasting industry and a number of other people went into the transcription business, which was the long‐play record, and, oh, started their own recording business, and so for years what you heard on the radio, they would say “by transcription.” Or, we’re going to listen to, um, Patty Page – and this is before records, I mean before the record moved into the radio station, because the quality of a record was not good enough for a radio station, originally. Then when they got LP records, the quality improved so that you could play records on the air. So that – but that’s very late – uh, I don’t – I never – in all the time I was in radio, and I guess I left it in ’52, finally, I never played a record on the air. Oh, just because we were still doing programming, or we were playing transcriptions or something of that sort. And, oh, one of the great – I guess I need to say that we are doing this broadcast on – in middle October in 1979, because radio’s coming back. The Columbia Broadcasting System is broadcasting programs, broadcasting dramas, broadcasting sporting events, and up in Maine where we have been, we have listened to radio.

NG: Why do you see this change, or why do you think the change is taking place? BH: Well, first of all, radio was a great, great medium. Oh, you use your imagination and supply things. One of the awfulest experiences in the world was to see Don Ameche after you had heard that wonderful voice on the air. I wrote a play once, which [laughs] – the only point of mentioning it was I tried to show on the stage how absurd radio was, because you’d have someone with a magnificent voice who was 4’11, but it didn’t matter. I mean, here was this magnificent voice. And we had a program called “The Building of the—“ ‐‐ I wrote a program for Oklahoma Tire and Supply company; they had a series that I wrote for them, about the development of the West, and one of them was “The Building of the Union‐Pacific Railway.” And it was so absurd, that even I in the control room thought it was funny, and that’s why I wrote a play and tried to show how funny it was. Because here we had sound effects men, who usually were enormous – I don’t know why, but they were. Well, it was all flute players, are the biggest men in the band. And, here they were, hitting pie pans with nails, which gave you the sound of driving spikes at the railroad you see [laughs], and here’s this magnificent voice, bossing the show, and the boss was 4 feet. Oh, but you supplied all of it, so that when you – Spider‐Man, or the Lone Ranger, or any of them, you know, this was – you had a visual image and you saw what was happening to them. And what’s been interesting about CBS’s revival of radio, is although they recognize that this is what great about radio, and this is what was the magic of radio, in – after all, nobody has run out with his gun to stop the Martians because of a TV show, but they sure did because of a radio show – oh, CBS has lost the ability, and they’ll recapture it, of letting your imagination do the work. It’s been very interesting to listen to their show.

NG: I thought maybe that you might say that it was because of the quality of the programming we now have in TV that perhaps radio is coming back into its own.

BH: Well that might be it, but I would – I would think – you can do other things while the radio’s on; you can’t do much of anything with TV on except watch the tube. Oh, and here it’s summertime, and people want to be out in their yard, and they want to – you know, to move a TV set out in the yard is pretty hard – the radio is in the automobile, and the automobile goes everywhere. Oh, radio is a – was an evocative, provocative business. The great dramas on it, the soap operas, oh, my little limited experience, I had a morning program on KVOO I guess, oh – in the early ‘40s, and, uh, we had people in the audience who would talk back to us, I mean who would speak – and I only know this because I would meet them when I would go out on – for the station. They’d say, “Oh, you’re so‐and‐so; oh, I’ve talked to you for years. I – when you say good morning and sign on, I’m there. I’ve been milking the cows,” you know, and this is a – you know they were always surprised at what I look like, as I’m sure I was surprised at all the people I heard. You know, this is a – but they, they made friendships with people on the radio. You don’t make friends with the people on TV. Oh, they’re outside you’re world, really, whereas the people on the radio were right in your hip pocket, in your vest pocket. It was a very interesting period and it was too bad that it died as suddenly as it did. I mean the radio didn’t do anything to fight back or to keep alive. They just turned over and let TV have it. And, uh, it’s now interesting that radio is beginning to come back. And I’ve been most interested in Maine. We’re out on an island and getting a TV signal is difficult, and the fisherman certainly aren’t going to have a TV set on, but they have a radio set on. And, CBS has bought up sporting events that belong to other networks on TV, but they have the radio on it. And, they’re doing a good job. They’ve even gotten good announcers – good announcers – Jack Buck out of Saint Louis is announcing football for CBS radio, and he does a good job. And I think this – and I know there are new dramas now, you see, on the tube – on the radio, and, so one of these days, we’ll start doing sound effects again. When we first started teaching radio at TU, we had a big cabinet that had a screen door, that you could open it, and it had a house door that you could open – these were all the same framework, and then on the other side of the framework was a window screen that could be opened, and then a window that could be raised so that you had the sound of all these things in one little – and there was a panel of buttons that had doorbells, telephones, buzzers, oh, telegraph instruments – you know, all these things. And when you did a program, you’d use the sounds, and somebody walks in the door, and the screen door opens, and you’d say “Hello, Ma, are you inside?” and she’d say “Yes, come in,” and you know, [laughs] all this. And it was your imagination that told you what the house looked like on the street, and, uh, your imagination told you where in the house Ma was when she answered, and you could hear her off in the distance, why obviously she must be in the kitchen, or wherever. I’ve said very little about drama from Tulsa, or in the Tulsa area, but we – there was lots of it done. And Jennifer Jones, in the movies, did –did a 13‐week series of radio dramas on KOME, and Bob Walker, who was her first husband, who is such a fine actor, he was on the show.

NG: Do you remember what year it was?

BH: Yes, indeed I do. ’38 – 1938. I directed the programs, and we uh – it was really very good. And we did a program about Queens – you know – Tsarina Catherine of Russia, and everything had to give Jennifer a starring part. She wasn’t Jennifer Jones yet; she was Phyllis Isley. But the series was bought and paid for by her father, and she had the starring parts in it, and, then she went on.

NG: Tell us something about what it was like to be an announcer. What were your benefits, salaries ‐‐ ?

BH: [laughs] Well you had adulation of thousands. Uh, you were paid a basic salary. KVOO paid probably the best salaries, and then you were paid talent fees. Now a talent fee was a – if Oklahoma Tire and Supply Company said I want you to announce my program, then they had to pay to get you to do it – that was extra and above. And if the network decided to sell Calumet Baking Powder to Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, and you – they had an audition and all the announcers read copy and they chose the one they wanted, and that was a talent fee. You got extra for that. The talent fees of the network programs were determined by the network. And, uh, they were $16.50 for 30 seconds. This is during OPA when salaries were pegged, you know, you couldn’t get any more, or – and, I guess, I don’t know of anybody getting any less. Um, salaries would probably have been somewhere in the neighborhood of $35 to $40 a week, in those days. And, oh, there weren’t any unions; there was a national union, but it hadn’t come to Tulsa. Uh, it was a national union for engineers, but it hadn’t come to Tulsa. Tulsa was pretty much on its own. And, uh, the unions, I guess, I don’t know whether anything’s unionized in Tulsa now or not. I really didn’t keep up with the business when I moved to television, and, uh, I in a way responded to a statement that Mr. Stinson – Watt Stinson, I talked about this great engineer that KVOO had – he said it’s just too hard to pioneer two businesses in one lifetime. And this is essentially what he had done, and what, to a lesser degree, I’d been involved in. You know, we had started with it when nobody was listening, and you had the three redheads, and Grover Cleveland Jr. High School, up to where it was the most important part of a person’s life. In World War II, people followed the war by the radio breathlessly – is there any news about? And radio took a tremendous – had a tremendous responsibility, and, I thought, did a very good job and served its public and its – was a very responsible part of the United States effort as the voice of America. Still is. We do some very good things with radio. Now, I was lucky that I thought highly of radio, and so I wrote, not the first textbook in announcing, but I wrote the one that is still being sold 40 years later – 30 years later, or whatever. However old Ben is, because I wrote it to pay for Ben, and I’m still getting royalties from it. And, oh, you know, but it was – it was a – if you’d gone into TV, you would have gone into two careers in one lifetime. They were really very different. Although they seemingly are the same, they really are quite different. There’s much too much stage management in TV, that there was never in radio. Uh, now, benefits – the reason a lot ‐‐ most people wanted to be in radio was they wanted their friends to see them standing up in front of Bob Wills’ orchestra, announcing it, or standing up in front of Glenn Miller’s Band, or Glen Gray’s band, or they wanted their friends to say “Gee, I heard you on the radio last night” – it was an ego trip. And that was a tremendous benefit for people. It really was. And this is why there are all the quiz shows that were so successful, because people loved getting on the radio. And, there was lots of local relationship to radio. Let’s see, you wanted to know what was made, what the benefits were – the hours were atrocious, because you were on – your schedules were – you had a set schedule that would be rotated every so often, because nobody liked to get up at 4:30 in the morning and sign the station on. Um – and then, but you also had callbacks, that is when you were paid to do the Hot Bread commercial for Texas on a soap opera in the afternoon, even though you’d gotten up at 4:30 in the morning and announced, then you came back down to do that, and then General Mills eventually bought the Don Ameche show, which was at 7:30 on a Sunday night, and so you came back on a Sunday night to do the Hot Bread portion…

NG: When did the taping of those start?

BH: Taping didn’t occur until after World War II because there was no such thing as tape. The first – the first, oh, records were disks on glass, and they could be broken so easily, and they were wax on glass, and they were made just like the same way you would make a master disk for a recording. Then in the late ‘40s, we ‐‐ or the mid 40s, early – mid to late 40s, we had wire recording. Where we – record on a tape, on a spool of wire that was magnetized, and this meant that you could lose the whole program if you got in some kind of a magnetic field, and [laughs] they didn’t have, oh, the x‐ray to check you on getting on the airplane, but they had things similar to that, and you could lose a great program that you had carefully recorded, because of some – getting into some magnetic field someplace and having the whole thing peeled off by the forces of magnetism. ‘Cause we did some – KVOO did some ‐‐ we did some broadcasting through KVOO of Indian dances, one of the really great programs we did was the pow‐wow that the Osages held to ratify the peace treaty with Japan and Germany, because the Osages had – had declared war on them, you see they were the Osage nation, and we went down and broadcast it. But it was – it was on wire, and we – after it was broadcast, I then wanted to get it for the archives, and – but it was de‐magnetized by something that happened, so we lost that as a program. And then tape recording, oh, came in somewhere in the, oh, 50s, and that became – and that, of course, now, is the way programs are gotten, but, most of the programs I worked on, for example when we did the Army Hour, or we did, oh, things, local programs such as a program KVOO carried called “Going to College,” we used telephone lines. That is, we would put in an order that KVOO was going to broadcast a program from Hanger 5 at Muskogee, Oklahoma, ‘cause we’re going to talk to the National Guard unit there, on the Army Hour, and the telephone company would put in a special telephone line that was capable of carrying radio signals – radio fidelity signals – and that would be put in and we would go down early in a car, and the engineer would carry all this equipment and we would tie into this telephone line, and there would be all this talking back and forth – “can you read me,” “my signal is…” – and then the announcer goes on and tests all the microphones, and this is where you lost programs, because this is where announcers, if they could sing or play the piano got used [laughs], because, if the telephone line broke, or somebody tripped over the cord, or any of the thousand things that could happen, well, then you had to fill, until you could either re‐ establish contact or, oh, they decided to put on another program [laughs]. And, this – this was awful.

NG: Our tape time has expired. Thank you, Dr. Henneke.