Copyright © 1981 by the South Dakota State Historical Society. All Rights Reserved. Radio in the 1920s: A Social Force in South Dakota REYNOLD M.WiK Technology has profoundly influenced the life of people in South Dakota and the United States, and its impact on com- munication has been no exception. During the nineteenth cen- tury, information was disseminated by the use of the printing press, a telegraph system, telephones, and the phonograph. It was the advent of the radio in the 1920s, however, that opened the ears of Americans to the sounds of the world and established a new form of mass communication. With millions of people ex- posed to the new technology, radio became an instrument for social change. Fred Allen, one of the early radio comedians, fre- quently referred to the new gadget as "the furniture that talks," and William Jennings Bryan concluded that it was a gift of Providence.' Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday insisted that the radio boom in the twenties altered the daily habits of people as significantly as anything the decade produced.' Prior to 1920, the radio audience consisted of amateur hob- byists who listened to crude homemade receiving sets, consisting of earphones, a crystal of galena, and a few coils of wire. They could listen to messages sent from ships at sea or to a few in- dependent broadcasting stations. In the spring of 1920, Frank Conrad, an engineer with the Westinghouse Electric Company in 1. Lloyd Morris, Not So Long Ago (New York: Random House, 1949), p. 452. 2. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nine teen-Twenties (New York: Harper & Bros., 1931), p. 77. Copyright © 1981 by the South Dakota State Historical Society. All Rights Reserved. South Dakota History Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, conducted some experiments in a workshop in his barn. He succeeded in sending out some music produced by phonograph records, and these programs reached a limited audience. The Pittsburgh Gazette described Conrad's ef- forts in detail and printed ads for radios sold at the Horne depart- ment store. This publicity encouraged the establishment of the first commercial broadcasting station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, which obtained a license on 27 October 1920. On 2 November. KDKA broadcast the returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election.' In South Dakota, also, amateurs were experimenting with transmission equipment prior to World War I without licenses from the federal government, making it difficult to be exact about the first radio broadcast in the state. Furthermore, an undeter- mined amount of time might have elapsed between the receipt of a license and the station's first transmission. Nevertheless, one of the earliest receiving and sending stations in the state existed in Eureka, where John A. Gardner and Edward R. Isaak began building a wireless in 1912 and eventually received the call let- ters 9TZ.^ In Pierre, Dana McNeil was also experimenting with Morse code over his wireless by 1916, and he applied for and received the twelfth license issued by the United States Depart- ment of Commerce in June of 1916 (Class 5, call letter 9ZP).'' Amateur licenses were suspended during World War I because of the possible security risk,** and broadcasting did not become regular or commercial until the 1920s. 3. E. P. Shurick, The First Quarter-Century of American Broadcasting (Kansas City. Mo.: Midland Publishing Co., 1946), p. 16. 4. Northwest Blade (Eureka), 21 June 1962; Interview with Myron Fillback. Ipswich. S. Dak.. 15 June 1970. The call letters and license were probably issued in 1916. Early transmissions were in Morse code, and the two men did not become proficient in use of the code until 19161917. The sUtion was closed down during World War I, but it reopened following the war with the call letters 9PI. Gardner and Isaak concentrated on voice and music transmission in the early 1920s, broad- casting recorded music for an hour each evening and for fairs and special occasions. The station closed down permanently in 1925. 5. [Max F. Staley. ed.). South Dakota Broadcast Pioneers (n.p., 1970), p. 3; "Seven Women in Radio and TV Win the McCall's Mike," McCall's 84 (May 1957); 100. 6. The range of these early amateur radio operators was remarkable, making the security risk quite real. The Eureka station, for instance, was picking up the war news directly from Germany in 1916 and 1917. The federal government "sealed up" station 9TZ on Good Friday of 1917. shortly after the United SUtes declared war on Germany. Northwest Blade, 21 June 1962. Copyright © 1981 by the South Dakota State Historical Society. All Rights Reserved. Radio in the 1920s 95 The state's colleges and universities also experimented with the new technology prior to the war, and several of them had licensed stations operational in 1922 and 1923. WEAJ {KUSD after 1927) at Vermillion went on the air in May 1922; WCAT at the School of Mines in Rapid City in July 1922; and KFDY at South Dakota's first amateur radio stations invariably became the pride of an entire community and an important link to national events. When train service faltered in the winter of 1917, the Northwest Blade reported that "while Eureka has been without train service since January SO, we are fortunate in having a connection with the outside world, possessed by few cities in the Northwest" (8 Feb. 1917). This connection, the paper explains, was provided through the wireless station of John A. Gardner (back to camera) and Edward Isaak (far right). Brookings in April 1923. Yankton College also had a short-lived station, 9YAK and later WJAU, licensed in 1921 and completed in the fall of 1922. Programming on these stations was irregular in the beginning and might consist of a single broadcast of football games or other event-oriented broadcasts at intervals. These col- Copyright © 1981 by the South Dakota State Historical Society. All Rights Reserved. 96 South Dakota History lege stations were often started by students and professors in radio clubs and were used as teaching aids by the institutions. The first attempts at truly commercial radio enterprises in the state took place in Sioux Falls and Yankton in 1922. The Sioux Falls Daily Argus-Leader newspaper company received a license and the call letters WFAT in the fall of 1922, Apparently intend- ed to put the city "on the map" and the local talent "before the limelight," the station proved unsuccessful as a business. The media was new, and local businessmen were reluctant to pur- chase air time when they had no idea of the size of their audience. On 8 November 1923, the newspaper announced that WFAT, "established more than a year ago by the Argus-Leader, has through the efforts of some local business men, been purchased and presented to Columbus College."" Columbus College, a Roman Catholic institution in the city, used the equipment intermittently until 1926. With the assist- ance of remote electronic equipment from the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company, this college station was the first station in South Dakota to produce a "live" broadcast of a national political speech. Although reception was not always good, an estimated one hundred thousand people heard Charles Gates Dawes give a campaign speech from the Sioux Falls Coliseum on 19 September 1924 over station WFAT." Technical production suffered from the fact that politicians were not used to the necessity of staying im- mobile, and Senator Peter Norbeck, who spoke on the same occa- sion, "was so earnest in his talk that he forgot the invisible radio audience and wandered away from the microphone.'"" Public response to this type of broadcast, in spite of its technical flaws, was encouraging, so when Robert LaFollette spoke in the city the following month, his speech was also broadcast over WFAT." In Yankton, back in November 1922, Dakota Radio Apparatus Company officials E. 0. Walgren and E. C. ("Al") Madson had received a broadcasting license from the United States Depart- ment of Commerce with the call letters WNAX. This station's first public broadcast occurred on 25 November 1922 as part of 7. Staley, South Dakota Broadcast Pioneers, p. 12; Yankton Press and Dako- tan. 2 Sept. 1922: Robert F. Karolevitz, Yankton: A Pioneer Past (Aberdeen, S. Dak.: North Plains Press, 1972), p. 173. 8. Sioux Falls Daily Argus-Leader, 8 Nov, 1923. 9. Sioux Falls Press. 18, 19, and 20 Sept, 1924. 10. Ibid,, 20 Sept. 1924, 11. Ibid., 17 Oct. 1924. Copyright © 1981 by the South Dakota State Historical Society. All Rights Reserved. Radio in the 1920s 97 the fiftieth anniversary of the First National Bank of Yankton. WNAX contributed recorded music to the occasion.'- On 2 December, the Yankton Press and Dakotan reported: "Yankton broadcasted her first radio concert to the world last evening, and the Dakota Radio Apparatus Company ... has been receiving messages of congratulations from the surrounding territory all day. Friends were entertained at a number of homes about the city where there were receiving sets Mrs. Marie Ohlman Shipley sang Mr. and Mrs. M. P. Ohlman sat at a receiving set in the west part of the city and heard their daughter's voice by radio."'^ These efforts from WNAX were not to be steady fare, however. Businessmen were not yet sufficiently interested in this unpredictable and untested media. Consequently, WNAX closed, and the transmitter was put in storage for a time.''* By 1924, programming seems to have been again on the air over WNAX and now in a more regular, if sparse, fashion. On 12 April, the Press and Dakotan, in a special edition intended for wholesalers and manufacturers, reported that the Dakota Radio Apparatus Company "broadcast the market, weather and news particularly to farmers every morning at 11:30, and give a musical program Wednesday evenings at 9.