The FCC Quadrennial Review

On November 3rd 2009 FCC Commissioner Michael Copps spoke at the launch of the FCC's Quadrennial Review. He was eloquent as he often is. He spoke at some length on the heedless consolidation of media companies fueling the downturn of that industry and the current death throes of news media.
You can read his complete comments here.

"As for government and the FCC, we’ve been asleep at the switch when we weren’t being downright destructive. Twenty-plus years of heedless deregulation eviscerated almost every public interest guideline we had. Media companies took advantage of that. Don’t blame them. Blame us. And while I’m on that, let me say right here that there are many broadcasters who strive to serve the public interest and who do darned good jobs of it. But their ranks have been thinned, to say the least, and we’ve made it—Wall Street and Washington, DC have made it—ever more difficult for them to act as they would like to act while the tune has been called by Wall Street and see-no-evil government regulators."

DJ Dave Dudley

I was reading the back of a Dave Dudley LP "George and the North Woods." Like most releases of it's day the back cover includes a short bio which tipped me off to the story. Successive bios all disagree but I'll start where the trail went cold. More here.

"...It was while convalescing from his injury in his hometown of Steven's Point, Wisconsin that Dave went to visit a friend who was a disc jockey on a local radio station. Dave was asked to sing in a fashion that would do Hollywood scenario writers proud-a star was born."

Which radio station? Was the first question. Turned out the bio was a lie or an exaggeration or a massive understatement from a copy-writer at Mercury records circa 1969. George typically put out two or three records a year at that time in his career so a little summarizing was probably in order. The injury was a semi-pro baseball injury, one that ended that sports career. His first record "Where there's a will" was recorded in 1959 for the NRC label. So that dubious biographical note would have occurred before that date.Most bios state that Dudley was a DJ at WTWT in Wausua, WI KBOK in Waterloo IA, and KEVE in Minneapolis, MN. It seems beleivabel that it was at 1010 WTWT-AM where the station owner encouraged Dudley to venture out as a performer. This bio put him as performing as the The Texas Stranger at WTWT in the late 1940s. It's even more dubious when you recall that WTWT only first went on air in 1948. But this bio dates his baseball injury to 1950. There is clearly some confusion.The Country Music Encyclopedia clearly identifies the neighbor in the Mercury records bio as Vern Shepard. Vern liked Dave's music, and got him a gig playing on the station in the fall of 1950. While Dudley wasn't from texas he had played in the Texas minor leagues. This is certainly his The Texas Stranger phase. In late 1951 he began playing on KOBK Waterloo, IA.

This conflicts KBOK as noted in other bios, I suspect it's a typo even though Billboard Magazine repeats it as recently as 2004. To further confuse the matter White Log in 1952 lists no KBOK, btu lists KOBK-AM as 1390 in Owatonna, MN. But the 1951 edition lists a KBOK on 1280 in Waterloo. The 1950 edition lists neither. So maybe he did play on a short-lived station in Waterloo... Or maybe biographers confused the stations, KOBK is still on the air today as KRFO-AM.

It might be a coincidence but WTWT became WSPT in 1952 and that same year he relocated to Charles City, ID and started work on KCHA. There he started the dave Dudley Trio. In 1960 they disbanded and he moved to Minneapolis. He started a new group there, The Country gentlemen. They did well enough he managed to get a spot on KEVE-AM.

KEVE was his last stop in broadcasting.He went on to have charting 40 singles across at least 70 albums. Much of his catalog remains out of print. He died in 2003 he was 75. More here.

Mystery Transcription Disc #78

Mr. George C. Strange recorded two old country songs, "You Are My Sunshine" and "South of the Border." It is a 78 rpm transcription most likely in the 1940s by a totally unknown musician. Audiodisc blanks of this make were available for years before and after the songs were first published.
The first, You are my Sunshine, was written in 1939 by Governor Jimmie Davis of Louisiana. The second, South of the Border, was written by Jimmy Kennedy and Michael Carr but best known for it's 1939 performance by Gene Autry in a film by the same name.


The convergence of the two dates probably dates this disc to 1940 or as late as 1942. I considered that it might be a recording by George Glenn Strange, an old black& white western movie villain. I have confirmed that he did play guitar. But I can find no record of recordings, not even novelty records. It may also be George Strange & His Memory Ranch Boys, a Hillbilly artist who recorded between 1946 and 1956. These are all possibilities.. nothign is certain. The recordings are in rough shape... the first 20 seconds of each suffer from a crease in the thin aluminum blank beneath the black acetate.

Tangier Island CQ

In 1954 the tiny Island of Tangier found themselves without a doctor. After 37 years their resident doc had retired. A Japanese Doctor, Mr. Kato was moved by the islands plight and moved there to serve for 4 years. So in 1958, the island was without a resident physician once again. This time they took extra measures. I'll quote directly from the account of William A. Warner in the book "Beautiful Swimmers, Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay."

"This time the islanders decided to take a more dramatic approach. They invited a boatload of amateur radio operators from Richmond to come to the island and broadcast a continuous "CQ" or call to anyone listening... These actions led to the culminating event a well known television commentator took up the cause and invited a delegation of islanders to plead their case on a national TV network."

The New York times reported it as "The electronic and Elizabethan eras converged here this weekend as this tight little island broadcast a shortwave appeal around the world for a doctor." Alas it failed. After a med student racks up a quarter million dollars in student loans, it's hard to lure them to a small rural island in the Chesapeake.

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Short-wave Radio Listening REDUX

This is a revisit to a post from October 19th.
It took me a week but I scanned the whole thing, all 96 pages.

You can get all 42 MB if you
DOWNLOAD HERE

8XK, 8XS, W8XK

It was 8XS in Saxonburg that transmitted the first international broadcast, to Europe via England, on New Year's Eve in 1923. 86 years ago 8XS was owned by Westinghouse. An article in "What's on the Air" from February, 1931 lists their frequency as 19.72 Kilocycles; broadcasting Wednesdays and Saturdays from 7:00 am to 11:00 am. It aired programs from NBC's international network called "the White Network" by some. It ran all religious content.
I was going to go into the history a bit but I'll take this opportunity to shill for Fybush and jsut quote the master directly:

"At Saxonburg, KDKA experimented with shortwave broadcasting, with medium-wave power levels as high as 400 kW and with several antenna designs that were complex (and apparently unsuccessful) prototypes of today's low-profile antenna designs, such as the Kinstar and Paran antennas. The Saxonburg site remained in use for shortwave (under the W8XK calls) until the end of the war, and was eventually donated to the nuclear physics program at [Carnegie Mellon.]"

8XK was Dr. Frank Conrad's old experimental call from 1916 it was canceled in 1917 and re-licensed as 8XK in 1920. He began broadcasting KDKA programs on shortwave in 1923 as 8XS. Westinghouse was attached to the calls so when they launched a WBZ in Boston, it's first experimental calls were W1XK, and WBOS which became W2XK. In the 1930s all shortwave was still experimental and all of them started with experimental calls in this era. All experimental calls consisted of the letter "W" followed by a number representing the "radio district" then an "X" then two or three letters. More here.

Westinghouse had to hand over the reins to The Government in WWII for operation under the Voice of America network. In 1939 the experimental W1XK calls were replaced with the more traditional calls WPIT.

Road

daytrip. back tomorrow