Transcription Mystery Disc #134

This is a make of home recording blank I'd never seen before. It's 8 inches in diameter, and while branded for Grinnell's Music store, it's a metal core Packard-Bell PhonOcord record underneath. It has an outer-edge start and spins at 78 rpm. The disc is labeled unusually well It's a jazz recording of the Tommy Harris Band from 02-09-1950. It looked like Tommy Harris on the label but an Emcee cuts in at the end of the first song and clearly says "Haines."  The live cuts tell me that this is probably a dub of a live recording and not the original. I dubbed it with a Grado 78 cartridge because I had to. The groove was wide enough that a traditional needle just scraped the bottom of the groove.

The Tommy Haines Band


Grinnell's Music was founded in Ann Arbor in 1879 by Ira L. Grinnell. It grew into the world’s largest piano distributor by the mid-1950s. Jack Wainger of WKC inc bought the company in 1955 and opened up Grinnell's stores elsewhere. It went chapter 11 in 1968 and again in 1977. It was liquidated in 1981 and it's original store is now an apartment building. You can read more about Grinnell's here.

Since this disc dates to 11950 we know this disc originated at the original Grinnell's Music at 1515 Woodward Avenue in Detroit. It's possible it was even recorded there. There is a contemporary Tommy Haines band that plays rock music, clearly not the same group. I wish it were. It's possible that there is some connection but nothing I'm aware of.

The National Farm and Home Hour

The National Farm and Home Hour was a variety show which began broadcasting on NBC Blue Network in 1929. The show was broadcast at noon live from 670 WMAQ-AM. It had a studio audience and a band opening daily with Sousa march "Stars and Stripes Forever."  John Dunning's On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio has it airing locally on KDKA-AM in Pittsburgh in 1928. That may seem incongruous but at the time NBC had an agricultural programming director at WMAQ, Frank Mullen the founder of KDKA. somehow Louise Margaret Benjamin skips that link in her book The NBC Advisory Council and Radio Programming. She only connects it back to an experimental radio pilot called the Dinner Bell Hour on NBC. It's also worth noting that the Bibliography on Educational Broadcasting  by Isabella Mitchell Cooper also credits Frank Mullen on KDKA via a citation to a 1935 article printed by NBC, "Radio For the Farm Folks, How the Farm Hour Started.That's a solid source.

The program would continue to run for three decades.  It was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and American Farm Bureau, 4-H Club, Farmers Union, Montgomery Ward, The Future Farmers of America (FFA) and the National Grange.  It's not surprising to see them on a list together, but the program was intended for rural listeners in farming communities. For context try to remember that Rural Free Delivery was only adopted in 1902, and rural electrification only began in 1932. It was a civic-minded era, and the Secretary of Agriculture liked to broadcast the occasional speech from time to time as well.

The program was a true variety show. It had an orchestra, musical guests, comedy skits and a re-occurring park ranger  character played by Don Ameche. But it's core was weather and agricultural news which is how  the secretary of the Dept of Agriculture coudl act as it's producer. In June of 1945 NBC Blue became ABC and the National Farm and Home Hour  moved to NBC as a 30 minute program. It was still being carried on over 100 stations. It remained there until 1958 with Allis-Chalmers as it's primary sponsor. It died with a whimper spending it's last 3 years as a segment on NBC's weekend anthology Monitor.  The program was cancelled in 1958.

It's most famous host was Everett Mitchell. He was on the program from 1932 onward. His trademark line was "It's a beautiful day in Chicago!" Mitchell was a former insurance claim adjustor who broke into radio singing part-time at radio station WENR-AM. A belligerent manager made him choose between radio and insurance. He picked the latter.  Nemorino writes that over the course of his career he also spent time on WQJ, WEBH, and WHT.

It's hard to find citations but WQJ was a short-lived dayshare with WMAQ owned by the Calumet Baking Powder Company and a local Chicago venue, the Rainbo Gardens Ballroom. WMAQ bought them out in 1927. WEBH was another Chicago station, this one owned by the Edgewater Beach Hotel. WEBH is even more fleeting, a dayshare with WDAP.  They signed on in 1923 and were deleted in 1928. (That license became WGN.) WHT was owned by the Radiophone Broadcasting Corporation, in Deerfield, IL a suburb of Chicago. They operated just in 1927 and 1926 as far as I can tell.  But it shows that he had at most a few years experience before landing that job as host of the Farm Hour. years after the program ended, in 1967 Mitchell received the Great Service to America Award and retired that year. He died in 1990. Frank Mullen died in 1977 and farm radio continues to wither to this day.

Electronics at Work (1943)

This is a 1943 Westinghouse video uploaded my the mysterious GBPPR2. It which explains the six basic functions of electronic vacuum tubes and how each type of tube is used in certain applications. About 4 years later the transistor was invented by William Shockley and tubes were obsolete for most applications.

Morse runs amok!

Our modern world is beset by patent trolls.  But a century ago the hot commodity was electricity and radio, not software design so that's where the patent trolls were rife. I could be even handed and argue that where there is money to be made you will always have a mix of legitimate and illegitimate claims to intellectual property.  But today you can truly patent anything: things that are alive, things that don't exist, even things that are already patented. Our modern patent system courts the absurd, which is why I was surprised to recently read of the greatest troll of all: Samuel Morse.

Samuel Morse tried to patent what amounted to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. I fear that were that attempted today, he might have succeeded. I first became aware of this historical footnote thanks to David Ewing Duncan writing for The Atlantic [LINK]. The case of Henry O’Rielly, versus Samuel F.B. Morse, was also known as The Telegraph Patent Case. This 1853 decision has had huge consequences. Immediately it created the legal concept that abstract ideas are not patent-eligible. This has limited patent trolls ever since. Here's how it went down.

Samuel F.B. Morse is best known as the inventor of the telegraph and of course... Morse code. He sent the first telegraph message on May 24, 1844. It was "What hath God wrought?". Morse was not the first person to try to convey data via wire. This was decades before Tesla invented AC current. So they were struggling to convey DC voltage which has the well known problem of loss to resistance. (see Ohm's Law (R = V / I ) Morse's solution was the repeater or relay. While the signal to noise ratio is still tractable, he used an amplifier and a filter to bump up the amplitude. His system needed one about every 20 mile, but it worked. However, that was just one facet of his patent. I'll quote the deeply dubious section 8 which was later struck down:

"Eighth. I do not propose to limit myself to the specific machinery or parts of machinery described in the foregoing specification and claims; the essence of my invention being the use of the motive power of the electric or galvanic current, which I call electro-magnetism, however developed for marking or printing intelligible characters, signs, or letters, at any distances, being a new application of that power of which I claim to be the first inventor or discoverer."

When Morse invented the telegraph he offered to sell it to the U.S. government for $100,000... the modern equivalent of about a quarter million dollars. His working model was a 40-mile experimental line that ran from D.C. to Baltimore; built with a $30,000 federal grant. [More here] They rebuffed him, so Morse went looking for what we now call VC money.  Morse hired former postmaster general, Amos Kendall, as his agent to help do that. O’Rielly was the former editor of the Rochester Editor Newspaper and he happened to be friends with Amos Kendall. [note O’Rielly is sometimes spelled O’Reilly]

In June of 1846, Kendall signed a contract with O'Reilly and other patent licensees. O'Reilly clearly imagined a huge telegraph system crossing and interconnecting the country. They started with 15k of funding and began licensing local telegraph companies immediately. I'll quote that too just to be thorough.

 “...for the construction of a line of Morse’s Electra-Magnetic Telegraph to connect the great seaboard line at Philadelphia, or at such other convenient point on said line as may approach nearer Harrisburg, in Pennsylvania, and from thence through Harrisburg and other intermediate towns to Pittsburg, and thence through Wheeling and Cincinnati, and such other towns and cities as the said O'Reilly and his associates may elect, to St. Louis and to the principal towns on the lakes.” 

That licensing may have produced cash flow but it by 1851, it also produced 50 more telegraph companies operating in the United States some also creating competing technology and patents. O'Reilly though the had the right to manage that system, but Kendall had intended that it be only the right to build and that conflict was coming. By 1846 the Philadelphia to Pittsburgh line was complete. By 1847 he lit Boston was connected to New York and the Pittsburgh line was extended to Cincinnati and Louisville. But he was having money problems, so he issued stock in companies that technically he did not own. Kendall was pissed off and supported/encouraged the other telegraph companies in building competing telegraph lines. they filed injunctions against O'Reilly but failed. O'Reilly got over confident after the victory and expanded his network beyond even the original CP. That was a bridge too far. More here.

In 1848 Morse sued him for infringement of the telegraph patent #1647. [Patent text here] O'Reilly appealed and counter sued trying to invalidate the patent. He argued in favor of prior works by some European tinkerers. Essentially they held that the first seven "inventions" of the patent specifications stand but the  eighth is too broad. Morse legally disclaimed part 8 and kept the rest. O'Reilly may have started with a genuine understanding but it graduated to malefaction; he ran amok in other words. Sparing the future from the ramifications of Morse owning all RF... that was coincidental.  O’Rielly continued to start and stall companies and never succeeded. He got a job at a customs house in New York but was laid off in 1877 at the age of 72. He died in 1886. More here.

The Voice of Experience

Marion Sayle Taylor was the voice of experience. More specifically it should be said he was the host and narrator of the program "The Voice of Experience." Whether it was intended or not, it became his pseudonym. It was an advice program of sorts, that first aired on WOR-AM in 1932. People found the program inspirational. In the Great Depression... hope sold well. Maybe it was his booming voice or delivery, or that earnestness. The content was almost confessional in nature, some written by him, but mostly it was built on the letters from his listeners.

It was picked up by CBS in1933. They carried the 15-minute program six days a week at noon (plus 8:00 PM on tuesdays) the first year then just weekdays (and Sundays at 6:45) into 1936. NBC carried it for a year, then Mutual for another, finally cutting it to 3 days a week in 1938. Born in 1888, He was at least 50 when the program ended it's run. He only lived another 4 years. More here. Marion's personal story sounds like it was written by a publicist. He was an organist, studying to become a surgeon then his career was tragically cut short when a car wreck crushed his hands. That may or may not be true. The book Golden Throats, Silver Tongues by Ray Poindexter corroborates some of the more implausible claims.

He was born in Kentucky, the son of a minister. He was an organist at the Worlds'd Fair in St. Louis 1904. He attended William Jewell College in Liberty, MO and at least enrolled at Pacific University near Portland. There was an accident of some kind, and he was studying medicine at Pacific U. He was later a social worker in Seattle and saw a lot of hard living. He instead became a teacher in North bend Oregon, later on he was lecturer on human behavior and then a debater on christian fundamentalism. In 1925 he took that act on the air at an unnamed Spokane radio station. There were only two in 1925, so if the date is accurate it had to be KFIO-AM or KFPY-AM. It's sort of moot since they were a dayshare on 1130 kHz. Peter Bellanca at The Illustrated Press wrote that it was in San Francisco. They can't both be right and I lean toward Spokane because of the time line.

He fit in well at radio and lectured on many more stations. He began buying airtime and holding public meetings. In 1928 he trademarked "The Voice of Experience" and began looking for a home for the advice radio program he imagined. WOR took him on and the mail came pouring in, literally tens f thousands of letters a week. In 1935 he tried to repackage the program as a magazine. That didn't go anywhere.  But everything else did well.  He built an advice empire with pamphlets, quack medicines, dubious sexual aids, books and short films. More here. He made possibly a million dollars a year at that point and donated large sums to charity. Little is written about the end of his career. it is unknown whether he retired or his program ended.

Transcription Mystery Disc #133

This is a Wilcox-Gay Recordio Type 3A variant 1. It spins at 78 RPM with an outer edge start, paper core, 6.5 inches in diameter. This one bears no date but other similar discs date to around 1947. It is perhaps the most common brand and make of home recording blank. But this one is more promising than most, because despite the lack of labeling it still bears one single very promising word "testing." It was even better and weirder than I expected.

Testing


The Disc is recorded on Both sides. Side "A"  has two tracks the first is a woman singing in a foreign language, the clarity and amplitude indicate that it's directly into a mic. The other track is recorded from the radio, the first of which has part of a station break, but no call sign.  I haven't identified that song. The second is Benny Goodman's version of String of Pearls. It was originally a Glen Miller tune, Benny started covering it around 1949 I think. The "B" side is all some strange sort of jazzy pipe organ music, but the bed noise is intractable. I have no idea what it is...

1929 Air Telephone Directory

This is my 1929 Air Telephone Directory. The brand name originates in 1889 with the founding of the Dayton Fan and Motor Company. Day Fan was printing these bi-monthly and mailing them out at 50 cents for a 1-year subscription. This one describes itself as number 6, Volume 6. So Presumably that's last issue of year 6. So issue one, year one would have been February of 1924. I've scanned it below. It contains 38 pages of domestic radio stations and frequencies, even some international broadcasters.

The company only made fans until 1922, when they started to sell radio components, then whole radio units around 1924, which lines up nicely with my math. The company was bought in 1929 by General Motors and thus was became the General Motors Radio Corp. I've never found a directory any later than 1929, but I suspect they were printed into 1930 since that's only 30 days after this issue. But later than that is unlikely as the company was liquidated in 1931 as a result of an antitrust suit.

This of course was back in an era when we actually prosecuted anti-trust cases.  The General Motors Radio Corporation was owned 51% by GM the other 49% was owned by Westinghouse, RCA and GE. But why did they buy it?  By 1929 the company was a total money loser, it was insolvent, and funded by Charles Kettering, a VP at GM. It's likely that they bought Day Fan just because they had an existing license from RCA for their radio patents. It further concentrated market share in the hands of a few. But it was very late in a game they were about to lose.

In 1930, the DOJ filed their antitrust suit against against RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse. They lost and the DOJ divided up the pie. GE and Westinghouse had to give up their shares of RCA. RCA stayed in the radio business and GE and Westinghouse had to get out of the pool. They couldn't even compete in that industry for almost 3 years. As a result the majority of the shares in Day Fan were owned by companies no longer allowed to sell radios or GM for whom it was ancillary to their core business. The General Motors Radio Corp. was liquidated in 1931.  You can read more here  here.

Download all 29MB

HERE

piccsy

This is pretty neat.

The Moxie Minute Men

Cocaine used to be pretty popular. I know it was the hip narcotic in the 1980s, but it used to be a pretty common ingredient even in soft drinks. In 1885 Dr. Augustin Thompson quit medicine to sell Moxie a carbonated beverage which contained sassafras, wintergreen, gentian root, sugar and cocaine. If you've ever had Moxie you know it tastes like cough syrup with a hint of mint. But cocaine pretty much guarantees repeat customers. Like many early soft drinks it was supposedly medicinal.  He claimed it was effective against paralysis, imbecility, nervousness, and insomnia. In 1906 the Food and Drug Act outlawed the use of cocaine and it was removed from the recipe. More here.

Despite tasting like crap, Moxie became popular. If you've ever actually tasted Moxie this is almost unbelievable. Cocaine or not it's just nasty tasting. Like many bad products, it rose to prominence through prolific advertising.  Dr. Thompson died in 1903 and the new owner Frank Archer cranked up the ad machine. He advertised in newspapers,  and magazines. He paid for odes to be written to Moxie, and then for song pluggers to sing them. They even paid baseball player Ted Williams to drink it. So when radio came along they adopted the new media like any other.

In 1922 they began driving around a car with a sphinx mounted on the front. People could seek advice from the sphinx who would respond via radio. A radio operator sitting in the car would receive and interpret the message. Re-ly-on bottler described it's responses as "words of wisdom." It was a publicity stunt. Moxie was big on that. I've read reports of a "Moxie Radio Program? but information is scant. But there was also a band. In his book American popular music and its business: From 1900 to 1984, author Russell Sanjek even wrote of a singing group: the Moxie Minute Men.

There isn't a lot of information on this group.  Unlike other sponsored groups like the Clicquot Club Eskimos or the A&P Gypsies they had no recording career that we know of. We know the the Moxie Minute Men were active in 1929 on WEAF-AM. They were mentioned by name in the Indiana Evening Gazette in April and July of that year. They took another stab at radio in the late 1930s. They sponsored the Moxie Hostess Hour carried on NBC. The program aired in 1930, running on at 3:00 PM, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. It was actually only 15 minutes long.  It was bumped up to 4:00 PM in July. It is often the case that the use of  "hour" in program names is farcical. But for this discrepancy it was sometimes listed as the Moxie Hostess Program. The program appears in NBC schedules from march through July of that year. It is possible that it stretches back into 1929 and that it's where the Moxie Minute Men originate, or they are separate, unrelated stabs at radio land during their worst sales decline.

Kickstarting Radio

 Today Janko Roettgers at Bloomberg Businessweek suggested that websites like Kickstarter might change the way public radio raises money. I instinctively rejected the idea but then I remembered I was wrong about facebook, twitter and tablet computers so I took another look. Roettgers used a couple notable examples to drive home his point such as Blank on Blank and 99% invisible.

"Some radio producers have already begun to turn to Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and similar sites to raise funds for their shows. This week Blank on Blank successfully closed a Kickstarter campaign, raising a modest $11,337 in the process. The show, which resurfaces “lost interviews” with such celebrities as Bono, Martin Scorsese, and Tim Gunn, wants to use that money to produce 30 new radio show episodes... Design show 99% Invisible is another Kickstarter success story in the making: It was able to achieve its $42,000 funding goal within 24 hours. Listeners have since pledged more than $74,000 at the time of writing, with 24 days to go. Producer Roman Mars now wants to raise money from a total of 5,000 backers."

But these aren't amateur hour programs, they're distributed by PRX.  Audiences have been migrating away from the meatspace of the FM dial and toward podcasts and mobile apps. This is something that I find depressing, but I have to concede is very real. I recently recommended that WRVU peruse broadcast alternatives rather than expending effort and money chasing the ghost of their old space on the FM dial. This state of affairs was predicted by former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller back in June of 2010:

"In the next five to 10 years, Internet radio will take [radio's] place, and there's no reason why we should be fearful about it. In fact we should embrace it, especially on mobile. Mobile is the second coming of radio. It has been a godsend for us, because mobile devices are so easy to take with you, and you can listen to any stream you want"

So looking just now on Kickstarter,  there are a slew of radio documentaries, and radio plays but there are some novelties too. Roundup Radio on WNMC is looking to buy some new modern equipment. A community group is raising money to build their own radio station in San Miguel Ixtahuacan, Guatemala. CHIRP is raising money to launch an internet radio station. KRBX 89.9 raised money to move from internet radio to become a licensed station. There are many more, but the most compelling tale is of  KHOI 89.9 raising money to sign on by the August 2012 deadline on their CP. They are running it down to the wire. 

Of course with all change comes consequences. The web is more democratized than the radio dial. The immediate problem for radio is that with modern digital tools anyone can make a podcast. When both parties have talent, all public radio can fall back on is branding and local programming, something that many affiliates have sacrificed in favor of syndicated programming. On that more level playing field Public radio might even be at a disadvantage. They certainly have some popular programs, but they have much greater operating costs. The ultimate question is whether it will be easier for them to raise $50,000 than for a small community group to raise $5,000. The total expenses at NPR last year were $187,674,195 [source]. A lean and mean operation like KHOI could live off of Gary Knell's pocket change.  If Public radio doesn't see that as a threat, they need to bring back Vivian Schiller.

Transcription Mystery Disc #132

This is a Presto acetate recording disc. Phonozoic calls this make a Presto Type 2. They date that make to 1941. Mine is unlabeled and un-narrated and probably un-datable. It is 8-inches in diameter, spins at 78 rpm and has an outer-edge start and an aluminum core. It's paper sleeve is brown and also totally unlabeled. Damn.

Mystery Organist 


There was something else vexing though. There's a funny thing about church organ music. It's pitch sounds equally right at 45 rpm and 78 rpm. Typically I can intuit the speed of a record by it's pitch, not so in this case. Lacking any further information, even a song title I can say no more.

The Radio of Jimmie Mattern

There are many difficulties with recorded history. Due to some quirk in human nature we tend to think of historical figures as mono-faceted. We know of William Tecumseh Sherman as a general, Jack Kerouac as a writer, and Nikola Tesla as an inventor. Any of them could also have been painters, cabinet makers, musicians or gardeners but the qualities ancillary to the popular condensed account are typically omitted.Much is the same with the famous Pilot Jimmie Mattern.

James Joseph "Jimmie" Mattern  was a Lockheed test pilot, cargo pilot, a Hollywood Stunt pilot and a bit of a self-promoting adventurer. In 1932 he tried and failed to circumnavigate the globe in a a Lockheed Vega. He did set a record for crossing the Atlantic but he also crash landed in Borisov, Belarus and was taken by the soviets as a spy and interrogated. They eventually released him and shipped his damaged plane back to America. He tried again in 1933, and had to make an emergency landing in Siberia where he was literally rescued by Eskimos. After he returned to America he had a short-lived time on radio.

"Jimmy next turned up in Chicago, working on a contract for the Sherman Hotel, describing his adventures as a pilot in a nightly show. While there he met a Chicago showgirl named Dorothy Harvey. In 1934 Jimmie became the Aeronautical Director for the Pure Oil Company, and helped script a radio show (1935) that dramatized his life up to that point."

The tiny blurb doesn't note the call letters but we can guess. At first I thought it might be WLS-AM. In November 1925, WLS moved to quarters on the 6th floor of the Sherman Hotel in downtown Chicago.  But in 1928 the station relocated to the Prairie Farmer Building on West Washington Street. But it's pretty likely that Jimmy spoke at the 100 seat theater there that WLS had formerly used.

The Pure Oil Company called Chicago it's home. The corporation had it's own radio history. They sponsored news programming on NBC's Red Network. On the Mutual Network in 1934, Pure Oil Company bought time on WOR-AM , WGN-AM  and WLW-AM for the "Pure Oil Show. " The program was 15 minutes long and ran on Mondays and Wednesdays at 9:00 PM.  These were the very first radio network programs on Mutual. More here. It is highly likely that 'The Diary of Jimmie Mattern" was a Pure Oil program carried on Mutual, possibly even as part of the "Pure Oil Show. "

In 1936, two years after the radio program had ended, Pure Oil published a three volume set "for Listeners to the Radio Show 'The Diary of Jimmie Mattern'." These tiny booklets are the only real proof we have the the program existed or aired at all. Later in life the Lockheed test flights damaged a blood vessel in his brain and he became unable to fly. He retired from flying, wrote several books, and remained active in related industries. He passed away on December 17, 1988

STUPID DJ TRICKS: Part 21

Bob Hannah was on 107.3 WAAF doing overnights from 2003 into 2006, then moved to 7pm-12m from 2006-2009. He was quickly picked up for some fill-in work at 104.1 WBCN and sister station 100.7 WZLX. I have heard that he's back at WAAF for  Saturday mornings 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM but I've not confirmed that. Bob Hannah was really famous in 2007 for doing something really dumb. Why he did it we do not know. He later said that he just thought it was funny, but that's what ichthyophiliacs* always say.

Maybe it was a fundamental misunderstanding of how social media works, or maybe Bob really likes attention.  He simply replaced his normal head-shot on Myspace with a picture of him naked, using a dead fish to cover his groin area.  The only problem here is that this maneuver posts that same photo to your "friend's" pages. So while that's fine for most "friends,"  it may not be appropriate for all "friends." Because not everyone wants to see a half naked man wearing a fish. Fishermen pose with their catch all the time in Boston. They usually don't do it naked.

In this case the wrong "friend" was the Attleboro Police Department. Oops. As to exactly why they took the page down, police Capt. George Bussiere said  “Research found that it wasn’t meeting the criteria we had hoped it would meet...” There is a man with a gift for understatement.

*I made up that word.

STUPID DJ TRICKS: Part 20

This was a more traditional prank, the April fools joke. The holiday has it's roots in a Roman pagan holiday called Hilaria, celebrated on the vernal equinox to honor Cybele on  (about) March25th. Hilaria is the root word from which we derive "hilarity."  Incidentally it was one of a few Roman holidays which was to be celebrated soberly. How it devolved into the modern tradition is unclear. But it probably had something to do with the ever-popular Spanish Feast of Fools, and Christian Feast of the Ass. Fast forward two thousand years and the holiday now centers around morning zoo DJs playing trick on their own listeners.

This prank may have been an homage to satellite radio. Beginning in mid-March, the Denny Schaffer Breakfast Club morning program began announcing that their program was converting to a subscription-only business model at 92.5 WVKS. Much like the Wall Street Journal, without a subscription, only portions of the content would be available. They claimed that free content would only include commercials, music beds, drops, and the listener-end of phone calls.

On April 1st the program was aired only in part with big gaps to simulate the "pay radio" platform. Toledo responded with ire and venom. Angry callers flooded WVKS and were recorded and played back after the prank was announced at 8:30 AM. Denny crossed the street to 1370 WSPD-AM  in 2003, and moved to Atlanta in 2006 for a gig on WGST-AM. last I knew he was doing nights at WGKS-AM still in the Peach state.

STUPID DJ TRICKS: Part 19

This prank was somewhere between cruel and amazingly stupid.  On May 25th, 1998 102.5 WLTO held a call-in contest.  That night, disc jockey, Jason Hamman aka "DJ Slick" announced that he wanted to thank people who listened to his program through the American Idol finale. He was holding a contest to win 100 grand. He even wrote it up on his blog. His actual written words were "Be caller 10 @ 280-1025 and you'll be 100 GRAND RICHER!!!"

Norreasha Gill won that contest by listening to the radio show into the night and managed to be the 10th caller. She was understadably excited, and began immediately planning on what to do with the money. DJ Slick told her she could pick it up in the morning. But there was no money, the contest was a farce. When Norreasha arrived at the WLTO-FM studios the next morning, she was asked to return that night, when DJ Slick would be there. But when she got home, a message from the station manager was waiting. He explained that she had won a 100 Grand candy bar, not money. When things became disputatious, he offered her $5,000 to settle her claim.

Gill sued of course.  In July she filed a lawsuit against Cumulus Media Inc. in Fayette Circuit Court. It accused them of breach of contract. DJ Slick was not named in the lawsuit, but he did voluntarily resign.

STUPID DJ TRICKS: Part 18

When the story is about a man with a name like "Greg T The Frat Boy," one must assume the worst.  I assumed he was a dudebro, and the situation was much much worse.He was a DJ on 100.3 WHTZ-FM "Z100" in Newark, NJ. In Carteret, New Jersey Greg duct-taped himself to a utility pole. It was a sort of human billboard type of stunt but one for which he had no permits, nor had he made any of the appropriate arrangements. He even parked the stations van blocking the sidewalk. He did however bring his own duct tape. It took all of 20 minutes to get arrested. The NY Daily News noted this was his third arrest for similarly stupid stunts one of which included trespassing in Martha Stewarts driveway back in 1997. [source]

That faux frat boy's real name is Gregory Tyndorf. He was arrested on August 14th, 2002. The event was staged in a parking lot across the street from Exit 12 of the New Jersey Turnpike. Municipal Court Judge Allen Comba fined him $500 for disorderly conduct,  further noting that Tyndorf had selected one of the busiest intersections in Central Jersey, if not the state.  Tyndorf pled ignorance which  is believable for a DJ. More here.


The stunt had been part of a strange public display of support for Ira Joe Fisher, a WCBS-TV weatherman who had been recently cut loose. In the end, Ira Joe Fisher was retained by CBS until 2003 and left there for CBS News Saturday Early Show through 2007. Gregory Tyndorf still co-hosts on the morning zoo show on WHTZ. That ghastly image to the right is him... and you can even buy the poster on their website for some heinous reason.

Stupid DJ Tricks: Part 17

 My stockpile of stupid DJ stories is so deep I am afraid I must unload a weeks worth upon you all.  It is that time again. Today's tale is about Brett Reese, the owner of 104.7 KELS-LPFM It's not much of a station, operating at 61 watts in Greeley, CO with a 9-watt repeater in Fort Collins. For the last several years, for the week before Martin Luther King day this bigot reads aloud a speech written by Kevin Alfred Strom, a  white supremacist, which maligns Dr. King. The specific charges are that King was a sexual degenerate, an anti-American communist and an embezzler.

Never mind that King wasn't a communist, or even a remarkable perv of any stripe. He did cheat on his wife but that's all too commonplace. What offends Reese (probably) is that King was having affairs with Caucasian women, and that offends him because he's a bigot. Bigots are also commonplace and unremarkable. But broadcasting that message all week before MLK day for years.. that's just asking for trouble.  But that lack of candor strangely is not the offense that wins him a place on stupid DJ Tricks.It gets better Reese said he would begin carrying his gun at school board meetings because he's been threatened for his King commentary.
In response that January, other school board members asked district officials to draft a policy banning weapons from all school property.

In 2011 Brett Reese (alleged) left a threatening voice-mail message for Justin Sasso, the owner of another local station 1310 KFKA-AM.In the message he threatened a "shootout" because advertising reps from KFKA had called on businesses that happen to also underwrite KELS. Darn that free market capitalism. Subsequently Reese was served with a temporary restraining order by the Weld County Sheriff's Office and lost his permit to carry a concealed weapon. Understandably, a restraining order was also issued against Reese by Sasso.

Then in May a teacher accused Reese of sexual harassment, and several other people reported to the board that they believed Reese was drunk at a meeting. He was censured and the board got that weapons ban by June. In Greely Reese was still the big story even that summer. In July the Southern Poverty Law Center named  Reese third on a list of nine for “Hate in the Mainstream” for his broadcasts. In February of 2012, over  a year after the whole rigmarole started Reese finally resigned from the school board. He still owns KELS-LPFM.

Long Story Short

Chuck Blore is a legend in radio. He spent time on KTKT-AM in Tucson, KELP-AM in El Paso, KTSA-AM in San Antonio, KFWB-AM in Los Angles  and notably on 630 KDWB-AM in Minneapolis. This video is Chuck Himself relaying the story of a prank advertising campaign he played on every other station on the Minneapolis radio dial in 1959. It has been called the grandest radio stunt ever perpetrated. Gavin named him Radio Man of the Year in 1961 and he struck out on his own and started an ad agency in 1963.

Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford

As fun as it is to be a totally free form DJ like John Leonard, it's more or less listenable when you're sober.  Listenership matters, it drives ad rates. Consequentially, commercial free form was still free but not anythign resembling random. Clyde Clifford would be of that latter school. He was playing what was then deemed "underground" music, but it was almost all rock music and it flowed.

Clifford played King Crimson, Frank Zappa, The Moody Blues, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Mason Profit, Savoy Brown, Frijid Pink, Jethro Tull and mixed in artists we still hear on classic rock stations like Cream, Pink Floyd the Doors, and Janis Joplin. But there is a big difference between playing the 3 minute edit of "Light my Fire" and playing the full 7:00 plus opus. That difference was Clyde Clifford.  That's what was happening on 1090 KAAY-AM in 1966 and it probably won't ever happen again.

Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford is one of the three radio programs usually cited as the "first" free-form underground type radio program. It's not but it was still very good and very early.  Beaker Street began airing on KAAY-AM in the Fall of 1966 from Midnight to 3:00 AM. Clydes real name was Dale R. Seidenschwarz. It's worth noting that he was a radio ham (WA5AVA) a sign of a true radio man. He wasn't a jive-talking, race records man or a fast-paced hipster. He was mellow and he spoke slowly over trippy instrumentals. He sounded, in a word... stoned.  More here and here.

Clyde Clifford was the programs original announcer holding the helm from 1966 to 1972 being succeeded by Don Marcus. Then Ken Knight, and Stuart McRae. Under McRae the program was moved and expanded to run from 11:00 PM to 4:30 AM. The part of Ken Knight was actually played by a few different DJs. That clear channel, 50,000 watt AM radio station pushed their voices as far as Canada, Cuba and Mexico and they have the QSL cards to prove it. When a new program director came to town he decided to kill Beaker Street.  McRae resigned and Don Payne took the mic for the last couple shows. KAAY was sold and flipped from a rock music to a religious talk format in 1985 as it remains today.



Clifford moved to the FM dial in 1974. I know for a fact he was looking for work as of that July; he'd placed an add in Billboard. He described himself as "married, draft exempt and dependable." He began getting calls to re-launch Beaker Street. Essentially he'd been proven right as a programmer on a few levels. AOR rose in the 1970s and much of his play list became classic rock. He hosted the program on 94.9 KZLR-FM for 3 years, and only a few years ago he was on Sunday nights, 7pm-12midnight on KKPT, 94.1.

4th of July Holiday

Off today for the holiday.

Five very lame states ban all fireworks: NY, MA, NJ, DE, and RI. Six more only allow novelties like sparklers. Those pansys are AZ, IA, IL, OH, ME, and VT. At the far end of the spectrum are states that allow anything short of munitions: Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas... and that'd be were most of those 2,000 annual fireworks injuries occur of course.

Transcription Mystery Disc #131

This is a 8-inch, red Wilcox-Gay Recordio. It has an outer edge start and a fiber core.  Phonozoic calls this a "Wilcox-Gay Recordio Type 4A, red lacquer."  It is undated, but it does have a bit of text scribbled on it in pencil. The text reads "Camp Fire Bev - Radio."  At least that last word looks like radio. It's cursive. One can never tell for sure when it's in cursive.

Bev Radio


I added about 6Db of noise reduction but the first part of the recording is still pretty hard to understand. There are at least two voices: an adult female and a male child.  The kid is pretty clear later on his name sounds like Tim Burkett. A second kid is introduced about 1 minute in and he's older, in 6th grade and speaks more clearly, and a girl named Holly.  The woman keeps asking them about camp. On the B-side the same woman makes a hard to hear introduction, then the kids sing in that off-key way that sounds unmistakably like children who don't want to be singing. I'll spare you that audio.

TETRA and TETRAPOL

Terrestrial Trunked Radio(TETRA) is a type of professional mobile two-way transceiver; aka a walkie-talkie. TETRA is not for little Billy's camping trip. It was specifically designed for use by government agencies and emergency services, ie the military and police. Under TETRA the transmitter uses a block encoder, a convolutional encoder, a re-order interleaver, a scrambler, burst builder, and differential encoder all before the signal is modulated and transmitted. Needless to say it's highly secure, but it can also be configured for group calls. they can communicate via network or like a walkie-talkie. More recently, in the TETRA release 2, it was modified to also provide wide-band high speed data communications.  (Yes that means the internet. )

It is sometimes confused with TETRAPOL. Tetrapol uses Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK) modulation instead of the Quadrature Differential Phase Shift Keying (QDPSK) used by TETRA. This is where most people say "huh?" GMSK is a type of digital modulation that uses spectrum efficiently. Efficiently in these case refers to its needed bandwidth.  Other forms of phase shift keying have sidebands that extend outwards from the main carrier and cause interference to other signals. QDPSK is less efficient and uses two encoded BPSK carrier waves. The two carrier waves are out of phase with each other by 180°. So it's highly noise resistant. If that's getting too complicated just remember that TETRAPOL is the one based on an FDMA multiplex using a narrow-band channel.

There are more than a hundred nations using TETRA systems: China, India, Pakistan, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Australia, Mexico, Israel and the UK. (Notice that the USA isn't on that list. The FCC has not officially allocated any frequencies for the use of any TETRA-based standards. TETRA is a European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standard. The first version published 1995 and it's fully endorsed by the European Radio Communications Committee (ERC.)  So why don't we have it here?

You might think that maybe the FCC doesn't like open standards, or maybe just not European ones. But that's not the case. Motorola cock-blocked all that technology. Motorola, having invented the walkie-talkie owns a lot of valid US patents.They just refused to license them to the ETSI. More here. They tried to petition the FCC to intervene, but they did nothing since ETSI  has no standing as a broadcaster in the US.