Dr. Ben Henneke Interviewer: Nancy Garrett NG

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.

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