Colwyn Bay Wireless College

 

For several years now I've been seeing folks selling ads snipped from magazines and newspapers. It's a little problematic to have the content removed from it's source material. The same complaint exists in archeology. The artifact is interesting by itself, but without context it loses some meaning. I don't know where this ad came from originally. But I have found others similar to it from the 1930s. I found a google site that fills in some of the blanks. That website reports that the college was established in 1920 and operated until 1971, which disagrees slightly with other sources. 

Even more interesting is that the school, which more likely operated from 1923 to 1973, has it's own alumni facebook page. That in turn revealed that a few alum even published books! But inexplicably many students, even those writing about the town of Colwyn Bay ignore the topic. Many touch on it briefly, the book A-Z of Colwyn Bay by Graham Roberts has a few sentences it under the section about Coleg Llandrillo Menai. The Colwyn Bay heritage website at least has some great pictures.

In Wireless world, September, 1922 there were a few ads for wireless radio supplies sold by the Wireless College. A college-operated mail order business is a little unusual, but typically what they're selling is diplomas. This was a whole host of wireless equipment: valves, enclosures, tubes, batteries, insulators etc. The book Wireless, the Crucial Decade: History of the British Wireless Industry by Gordon Bussey briefly mentions these Colwyn Bay Wireless College wireless kits but not a word about the school. The book Colwyn Bay at War From Old Photographs by Graham Roberts does address the school at some length.

"The college building was at the far end of the East Parade; the college and the Parade have now been demolished to make way for the A55 and a plaque in a car park now commemorates the work done by the College in training radio operators..."

The Roberts book picks a different year for it's start, dating it back to 1918 as founded by Gordon Scott Whale as the "North Wales Wireless College" but that he moved it to Colwyn Bay in 1923.Whale converted an 8-gabled 3 story home called "Olive House" into the college. Gordon was born in 1893 so he would have been 25 years old when he founded the school and 30 years old when it moved to Colwyn Bay.

Gordon Whale joined the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers) in 1926, and had previously trained at the Direct Spanish Telegraph Company and worked for Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company. A 1937 article also added the acronyms AMIRE, and MAAAS to his resume, that specifies Associate Member, Institution of Electrical Engineers. MAAS probably stands for Member, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. Though that makes little sense for a British private school teacher, it was founded in 1780 and is possible. Radio Pictorial magazine wrote up his two colleges in 1938 and added a third acronym: FRSA, which is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. 

I've not seen a book with specified which Marconi station Whale worked at. The Journal of the Royal Society of Arts mentioned in his obituary that he worked at both the Wales and Ireland stations. The station in Wales was Carnavon. Construction started in 1914, and it sent it's first messages in 1918. It was located on a mountain, Cefn Du, and used the call letters MUU. But in Ireland Marconi operated three different stations, of them Clifden seems the most likely, though Crookhaven was open as early as 1902. 

As the school grew, Whale hired Charles Oliver as a tutor in 1926, then Harry Nelson in 1930. Volume 15, 1925, of the magazine "The Child" contained a list of Schools and educational institutions which included some extra details on Colwyn Bay and a short description:

"The North Bay Wireless College, Colwyn Bay, Students 15-23 years of age rapidly trained for lucrative appointments in the Wireless and Cable Services. College Stands in 5½ acres of grounds overlooking sea, and is 400 feet above sea level..."

Somehow in 1937 Gordon opened a second wireless college in Calmore, Southhampton. The building was originally called Loperwood Manor. It planned for 50 students on a 16 acre property. By 1938 it had expanded to handle 100 students and they bought another 40 acres of land. It closed in 1940 due to the hostilities of WWI. Being on the English Channel, 30,000 bombs were dropped on Southhampton just in 1940.

In 1937 Practical Wireless Magazine wrote an article about a visit by Sir Ambrose Fleming. Yes, the one who invented the vacuum tube.  That article is the only image of Whale I've found. Whale had retired in 1935 from Colwyn Bay, but returned in 1940 for the war effort. In 1944 The Electrician magazine reported that a group of privately owned British wireless schools had decided to form The National Association of Wireless Colleges. The chairman was B. G. Morton or the Manchester Wireless College and the honorary Secretary was Mr. Gordon Whale. Strangely I have never found another reference to the National Association of Wireless Colleges. Perhaps it was not at long lived as the Colwyn Bay Wireless College. 

Harry Nelson retired in July 1966 after 36 years at the college. Gordon Scott Whale died that year at the age of 72. Wireless World noted in their obituary that Gordon died on January 9th onboard the RMS Andes. Some of their marketing from that year has survived which reads "Be well away when winter chills in January - March 1966." The retrofitted cruise liner went to Barbados that Spring. His son Neville had already succeeded him as principle of the college. Neville kept the school running another 7 years until it closed in 1973. The former college building was demolished for the A55 when it was split into dual lanes in the 1980s.

G & F Searchlight Radio

My interest in radio is mostly history and programming. I accumulate books, and ephemera. I'm not particularly a collector of radios themselves. But I do recognize an unusual table radio when I see one. This stood out to be when I saw it.

I saw this on an auction website where bidding went into the thousands of dollars. There's another on eBay right now that is almost up to two thousand dollars. It's unlike anything I have seen before. As a table radio it's enormous. It's almost 19" tall, over 14" wide and 7" deep. That's as big as some televisions. The base alone is 6" x 7".  It tunes AM and shortwave, and apparently can be precisely rotated to optimize reception; though the label on the back recommends adding a 50 foot aerial.

Radiomuseum.org dates this model to 1937/1938. Apparently it was also called a Spy-Glass or Disk-shaped radio. It's clearly a novelty radio. What unusual about it is primarily the cabinet. It's unclear how much it's directionality aided reception. If it was a wild success I imagine there would have been a whole genre of like devices and not just this lone mutant. The label on the back reads "G&F sales patent applied for..."  Paul Turney did the sleuthing to find the patent #109,040 granted to Irwin Feitler November 9th 1937.  More here.

Irwin Feitler is the "F" in G&F. The G belongs to either Gardner or Granger of Gardner & Co. with whom G&F shared an office at 2309 S. Archer Ave, Chicago. Pacific Radio Corp. located at 844 W. Adams St in Chicago made the chassis and the radio was a clone of the Pacific Radio Corp. Model 3, (Rider 9-1).  Yes, Rider as in John F. Rider of the Rider Troubleshooting Guides. The Searchlight must not have been a success as Feitler never dabbled in radio again.

By the 1940s Irwin Feitler was listed in court documents as the "sole general partner" of Gardner & Co. He was in trouble for not paying excise taxes between 1935 to 1938. So Those Search Light radios were selling but he wasn't paying the IRS. Unexpectedly I found a wedding announcement in the Reform Advocate of May 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Gombrig of 5108 Kimbark Ave. announced the engagement of their daughter Bernice to Irwin Feitler, son of Mr. and Mrs. Adolph Feitler. He was back in court in with a new partner, his wife, Bernice Feitler in 1942. That happened a lot.

But his name also appears in 1950 in court documents regarding an investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. There the address of Gardner & Co. is given as 2222 South Michigan Ave, and the company is self-described as "the biggest punch board manufacturer in the world." Their gross sales exceeded 1 million dollars that in 1947, down from 1.8 million in 1943. That's 14 million in 2025 dollars. Punch boards were banned in many states as it was gambling-like in nature. They were somewhat similar to scratch off tickets. Gambling author John Scarne estimated that 50 million punchboards were sold in 1939 alone, at the peak of their popularity.

In 1951 the FTC ordered that Gardner & Co. cease operations for selling games of chance and lottery schemes. Other employees/family members were named in the judgement: Everett J. Granger, Mame Partin, Frances Martin, Hattie Gardner and Thekla Maas. Feitler immediately requested a writ of certiorari from the U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th circuit, a judicial review in 1953 for Feitler v. Federal Trade Commission (docket No. 804). It was denied.

The Golden Age of the Bike Radio

There have been hundreds of thousands of different makes and models of transistor radios.  Every once in a while I find one unique enough to write about. I recently discovered the Concept 2000 Bike Radio which has an interesting form factor. In researching it I found there was a very specific era when Bike Radios were notably popular, relatively speaking. This is different from motorcycle radios which date back much earlier, to at least 1915. To define terms I'm looking only at radios which can be installed on a bicycle, and are marketed primarily at a children demographic. I did not expect at the start of this that I'd find the inventor of the bike radio or that it even had one... but it did. But let's start with that first bike radio that started me on this quest:

Concept 2000 made an odd selection of radios, from high quality table radios to plastic children's novelties. They had multiple Mickey Mose, Big Bird and Cookie Monster radios. This one lands somewhere in the middle, having some novelty in the category but it's size distinctly also made it functional. You can see how it works immediately. The two flanges slot into the back of the radio, and clamp tight on the handle pars. the compass-like dial is a simple enough AM radio. The radio inside the box looks exactly like the picture on the outside. I've seen the circuit, it's nothing to write home about. Inside is a simple and very short ferrite rod antenna.  It takes a 9 volt battery and it works.

Apparently this was not their only foray into bike radios. In the early 1970s they came out with an  AM/CB radio which clamped to the handle bars but was a bit bigger, with a contoured shape. It looks very 1980s, like something you'd attach to a plastic kids seat at Burger King (below). Notice that foot tall flexible coil antenna? I'm sure no kid ever hit the handlebars and took that whip antenna right in the eyeball. 

More complex devices were also available beyond that CB/radio. Siemens had one in the sixties. Westinghouse made at least one Bike radio-headlight which was advertised in 1968 through 1970. A later version re-appeared in 1989 Boys life. The one picture I found has an amber strobe amber light on top of the device. Fanon, a name I know as a maker of cheap walkie talkies, was selling their own Bike Radio in 1978 called the "Spokesman" which also incorporated a CB. It had a completely different form factor and would have looked more at home on a desk than a bike. It may have been repurposed from some other design.

I found an issue of Boys life from august 1971 which had yet two more Bike radio products: an Archer Bike radio of a completely different design, available from Radioshack. But also a whole feature on a bike radio bracket by Glen Wagner which merely clamps your standard pocket transistor radio to the handlebars. The Archer model continued to appear sporadically through June of 1972. A second maker of the bracket "Buddy Bike Radio" was for sale in the classifieds for $5.99 and included a 6-transistor radio from Gentile Sound Enterprises. Their address was PO Box 147, Fairport NY 14450. It's a Rochester suburb; the company advertised it only in 1972.

As you would imagine, Radioshack had their own Bike Radio by December of 1974, SKU 12-193. It was simply called the "AM Bike Radio".  It looks highly derivative of the Archer model with a more contoured chassis. Kmart had one that was almost identical. Arvin sold a model in 1971 which also looked identical and was sold through at least 1984.

In the mail order scam world J.S.C.A. was selling a combination radio/horn/light combo from 1965 through 1972.  Olympic Sales club was still selling a no-name Bike radio in 1989. As horrible as those were, the Discover American Sales Club had a combo Bike Radio, Siren Megaphone which obviously no parent would think was a good idea. You might notice these later bike radios have some safety features. These were listed as fire resistant, and water proof, and had lights built in. This was probably an acknowledgement that they were actually marketing to the parents. 

Most of these ads are from the late 1960s and early 1970s. That's your golden era of the bike radio. The latest models I've found were in the 1990s. In 1992, a green no-name GPX AM/FM radio still being sold by the Olympia Sales Club in Boys life. Nintendo also notably made a "sport" AM/FM  bike radio with a built-in clock and light in 1998. It came in a few colors. You can still pick those up on eBay for about $25. Purportedly Hasbro made a pink Barbie Bike radio as late as 2002.

You can still buy a "bike radio" today but it's more of a Bluetooth speaker than a radio. But JBL still makes one that clamps to the handlebars; a descendant of the originals marketed more at motorcycles and with the modern soft rubbery exterior that breaks down so quickly.

The earliest references to bike radios are from Popular Electronics which advertised "How to Build a Bike Radio" as early as 1954. This was advertised in Radio & Television News, Popular Mechanics, and Flying Magazines but I've never found that article nor the kit. The image below is from 1956 and I had thought that was it.  But World Radio History has a scan of the October 1954 issue with the original Bike Radio instructions referred to in all those advertisements. [SOURCE]  That's pictured at the top of the page. That's the first ever issue of Popular Electronics by the way.

That How-to article was authored by Louis E. Garner Jr., a prolific writer, editor, and frequent contributor to Popular Electronics for over 25 years. Before Popular Electronics Lou wrote articles for Electronics Illustrated as early as 1961. He also wrote for the National Parks Service, Popular Science, Radio and Television News all the way back to 1950. [SOURCE] He also wrote texts for Coyne Electrical School, Tab Books, and the infamous Gernsback Library. It's also interesting to note that he also wrote prose, contributing to Quanta, the Washington Science Fiction Association zine starting in 1949. (Note: There have been at least 3 different publications by the name Quanta) [SOURCE] So there you have it, Lou Garner, engineer, writer, PhD, and unassuming resident of Silver Springs MD, the granddaddy of them all.

60 Years of Albert Batts

The second radio station to sign on in Chattanooga was 1420 WAPO-AM in September of 1936. WDOD literally beat them by a decade. It had been on air since 1925. The third was WDEF which signed on in 1940. Radio grew slowly in Chattanooga. It was a city of barely more than 50,000 people. The original studios were on Foust Street off Rossville Boulevard.  WAPO has it's place in history. I;m not as sure about Rev. Albert Batts. More here. 

Rev. Albert Holmes Batts remains an obscure figure. This songbook is undated. But I found a newspaper ads from 1947 and 1965 which match. A 1948 issue of the Church of God Evangel lists it on 1340 WDEF-AM daily at 4:45 with Rev. Batts. [SOURCE] It appears that Batts was on both WDEF and WAPO at the same time, or that he crossed the street multiple times in the 1940s.

The front cover of the hymnal reads "Listen to the Word of God Daily 6:15 AM - Sat. 12:30 PM Over North Alabama network each Saturday 12:30 to 1:15 PM from WAPO Chattanooga"  It gives an address of 411 Forrest avenue, Chattanooga, TN. It's a small but tasteful Colonial brick house. Copies were only 35 cents, and it refers to a monthly paper called The Word of God DEFENDER, spelled just that way. 

On the interior there is a head shot of the reverend himself, and  a group photo of the Bell Avenue Quartet. It's membership included: Mrs. A. H. Batts, Rev. A. H. Batts, Doyle Blackwood, Grady Hurst at piano and Mrs. Grady Hurst. Ms. Hurst I think is actually Ruby Wright Hurst, who taught piano at Lee College 1947 to 1952 and again from 1954 to 1970. For a local piano teacher, Roby is a well documented figure in Chattanooga.  [SOURCE] Ruby died in 2016. Her obit says that she and Albert performed with the “Word of God Quartet.” No word if Doyle was in that troupe. But that obit reports that she and Albert first met at Vaughn's School of Music, prior to working at Lee.  

But the big name there is Doyle Blackwood. He can only be one of the Blackwood Brothers. Their eponymous singing group formed in 1934 in Choctaw County, MS. They broke big in television in 1954 and stayed big on a Quartet circuit. I've written about them before.

I think Doyle appears in the Blackwood Brothers pictures at the Dollywood museum. The KMA guide of April 1946 commemorates his involvement with the radio station. [SOURCE]  The book A History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music by E. Linnell Gentry further confirms Doyle Blackwood was an announcer on WAPO. This somewhat dates the hymnal to the late 1940s.

"Doyle Blackwood, who is now an announcer in Chattanooga, TN will visit the Blackwood quartet from April 8 to April 26. He is a brother of Roy and James Blackwood and was former manager and master of ceremonies of the group. While here, he will make guest appearances with the Quartet."

Batt's "Word of God" radio program became a TV program.  They released at least one LP which has one small picture of Batts on WTVC channel 9 and gives the PO Box 21305 in Chattanooga. WTVC signed on in 1953. I'd guess that picture is late 50s early 60s.  But in the top corner of that LP it reads "On radio and television for thirty-five years." But without a date that's not terribly helpful. Few sources help the dating of his career. There was a book published in 1965 transcribing a debate he had with Rev. Harold Sain. Then another published in 1967 of a debate he did with Rev. Gus Nicols. He wrote the forward in 1969, quite lively and even somewhat salty.

 

A 1993 compilation of some newsletter called Evangel [SOURCE] records Batts turning 90 years old that year, and having been broadcasting, in Chattanooga for 58 years. He was now on WFLI-AM 11:00 Saturday mornings. Station 1070 WFLI-AM was a later AM stick, signing on in 1961. Initially a contemporary hits format, it became a christian radio format in 1962. They rebranded as "The Mid South's Most Powerful AM Gospel Station". They played Southern gospel music with some Christian talk and teaching shows. Sounds like somewhere Batts might fit in with his Pentecostal rhetoric. 

But using this date we can finally work backwards to date the rest of the story. If Batts was truly on air for 58 years then he first was on radio in 1935. But that's before WAPO signed on. I'm assuming there was a little rounding, and he was on air the first year WAPO was broadcasting, which is 936. It also means he was born in about 1903, which matches the one correct obit. He was about 33 years old when he first had a program at WAPO.  It also dates that LP to approximately 1971. 

I found an image of Batts at WBMD, a station in Baltimore. I am assuming that was a guest appearance.

In 1940 WAPO moved from 1420 to 1140 AM at 5,00 watts. Around that time the studios moved to the Read House, a fancy hotel. Today WAPO is WGOW, as it has been since Ted Turner bought the station in 1968. It flipped to a news talk format in 1988. Batts died in 2001 at the age of 98. WDOD signed off the air permanently on May 31, 2011. Thus WGOW became the longest running active radio station in Chattanooga. Next year they will celebrate their 90th anniversary. Hopefully they have something to remember about the long radio career of Rev. Batts.

Lake Fred Radio

 

The popularity of the name Fred has been in decline since 1888. Despite titular Fred's like Fred Flintstone, Fred from Scooby Doo, Fred Durst, Fred Savage, DJ Fred Allen, Fred Schneider, Fred Armisen, Fred Astaire and the Honorable Fred Hampton there are just fewer Freds than there used to be. The Fred thing really got me interested so we're going to have to talk about Fred before we walk about WLFR.

Lake Fred is not technical a lake, but actually a series of interconnected, artificial ponds in New Jersey. It was created somewhere between 1860 and 1880 in the peak Fred years for cranberry farming. [LINK] Dammed for use by a sawmill around 1900.  at the time it was simply called "Saw Mill pond. When Stockton university took over the property in 1971, they initially referred to the property as Lake Stockton but by 1972, through machinations still not fully understood today... it had become Lake Fred. By 1985 there were already inquiries on the origin of the name. More here. 

Like any good mythology, every origin story contains some conjecture. There are stories of the name originating with people named Fred: local residents, neighbors, students, and professors. But my favorite is about the famous DJ, Jean Shepard. Jean Shepherd, used the then common slang “Fred” as a generic name for someone who was a goof or a slacker. The term was popular enough in the moment to appear in the The Dictionary of American Slang 1998 edition and a possibly related entry in the New Hackers Dictionary 3rd edition of 1996.

But in the 1950s and 60s Shepard was pretty famous for his radio show on New York City’s WOR. In the evening he told strange, long-winded by funny tales. He used a lot of hipster slang and in his stories, there was always a Fred. Fred was his John Smith. So the lake was named for Jean Shepard's Fred.  Fred lake was really just a disused cranberry bog i.e. not really a lake.  In Shepherd’s usage Fred was a fraud or a fake. So there you have it: Fake Lake.  

 

So in 1984 when WLFR first signed on, they used the call letters stand WLFR for Lake Fred Radio. But WLFR wasn't the first campus station at Stockton. The roots of the station start in a small cabin on the shore of Lake Fred in 1974 with a Radio Club. The station was called WSSR - Stockton State Radio. This was a low budget carrier current radio station which had 2 QRK turntables, 2 cart machines, a Revox 77 reel-to-reel and a 4-channel RCA mixing board. Some of that gear was built by student Paul Glaser. Glaser once said that it "really just played a lot of Grateful Dead music." One of the early General managers, Olen Soifer, formerly of WMCJ (now WMCX) at Monmouth also mentioned the Grateful Dead which certainly paints a picture.

Early records for WSSR are few. The Federal Register records a request for $41,524 by Stockton state college in March of 1984 to extend the signal of WSSR. This had to have been filed before WLFR was granted call letters indicating that WSSR was still at least nominally active. A February 1980 issue [SOURCE] of the Argo describes a "newly organized" WSSR. The station was at least 5 years old at that time. So perhaps they only meant that the station was decidedly disorganized before 1980? But it also refers to an existing radio station in the library. Regardless, GM Jeff Louis seemed to have big plans. The 1976 IBS radio annual lists the station with no metadata. A simple entry: "WSSR, Richard Stockton State College" But in November of 1983 Michelle Mclelland managed to submit a chart to CMJ. For once the Grateful Dead were not in heavy rotation. But the inclusion of both Leo Kottke and Spandau Ballet speak to their tradition of free form radio. [SOURCE].

 

Purportedly it was the mischievous Professor Claude Epstein who completed a hydrological survey of the area, and on his maps in 1972, he labeled that bog "Lake Fred." Epstein equivocated when asked about the etymology decades later, but he also named a tributary stream Cedick Run (“see Dick run”)  inspired by the Dick and Jane readers of the 1930s thru the 1960s. Epstein definitely had a particular sense of humor.

In one interview, Epstein told a story about Jean Shepherd, It was after Shepherd had been fired from WOR, when he was hosting a TV show in the 1970s on the New Jersey Network, Shepherd’s Pie. In 1977 Shepherd encouraged viewers to send in common items for a the “People’s Bicentennial Time Capsule,” and Stockton students sent in a t-shirt from one of the early and popular Lake Fred Folk Festivals. On the next episode Shepherd held up the t-shirt and exclaimed, “It figures there would be someplace named Lake Fred in New Jersey.”  The name had stuck.  Epstein's memory may be off. Jean Shepard did a Time Capsule event in 1977; but it was while he was still on WOR. There's even a recording. [SOURCE]  The Lake Fred Folk Fair started as early as 1974 so the timeline still works. [SOURCE].

WLFR celebrated it's 35th anniversary in 2019, The Atlantic City Press covered the event, but not their 40th anniversary in 2024. [SOURCE]  The campus publication, The Argo did of course. [SOURCE]. The station remains devoted to it's free form format. As I listen to WLFR now, the DJ is playing the Kinks "Sunny Afternoon" on a chilly but in fact sunny day.