Fayetteville, Arkansas gets radio

Arkansas had a long road to radio, but that's only because they started early. As early as 1897 William N. Gladson was conducting experiments with the wireless. By 1900 they had a wireless station. But it took another 14 years for even the navigational beacon 9YM to go up. And then from the darkness college radio came upon Fayettville, The U. or Arkansas went live with 5YM as a technical and training school" station. http://www.uark.edu/studorg/w5ym/history.html

Harvey C. Couch Sr., an industrialist and founder of Arkansas Light and Power had visited pioneer radio station KDKA-AM in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1921. He got all giddy abotu the blinky lights as many of those in management are known to do. He wanted one of his very own to play with.

Harvey arranged for a radio demonstration in Pine Bluff in November of 1921 to the local Rotary Club. they were also suitably impressed. Radio was brand new, music from thin air was almost magical. [Not like now, when 10 year olds are annoyed to have to actually make sound with actual instruments.] By February Couch had built himself an antenna and named his new baby WOK-AM This was to stand for "Worker Of Kilowatts" The station was fully supported by the utility company and ran no advertisements. It was to be short lived. At that time radio licenses had to be renewed every 3 months.

So then POOF it was gone. Harvey lost interest. WOK was Licensed 02/16/1922, and deleted 06/--/1924. By 1924 WCBZ in Chicago launched and the deleted calls reappeared there.
In January of 1924 KFMQ, the University's broadcast station went live, so for 6 months they had two local radio outlets. WSV in Little Rock, and KTHS, Hot springs started rolling about the same time. Harvey went on to donate heavily to the political campaigns of Huey Long another radio aficionado...

The First Radio Station

I probably have posted on this before. I may even be contradicting myself.
So who is the oldest radio station in America?
It's an opinionated debate of course; and the usual answer is KDKA-AM in Pittsburgh. But they are only the first commercially licensed station. There were hundreds of experimental radio stations that preceded them. As is typical, technology preceded legislative oversight. The right answer depends on just how you define "radio station."

1290 KUOA-AM is my current favorite vying nominee. An experimental wireless station was constructed at the University of Arkansas in 1897. Professor William Gladson performed this enterprising pioneer work a mere two years after Marconi began his work in Italy. As a result of this pioneer experimentation, the University of Arkansas constructed a wireless telegraph station that was subsequently granted the call sign 5YM.

After WWI University personnel turned their wireless endeavors into the direction of establishing a radio broadcasting station at the university. Thus it was that experimental became professional broadcasting in 1924 . The FCC granted them the calls KFMQ with 100 watts at 1140 kHz.

The call sign was changed to KUOA to better match the university name in 1926. Seven years later, U. of Arkansas sold the station. It changed hands, eventually ending up as the property of John Brown University in Siloam Springs where it remains today.

Most of my info on this is second hand, based on an article in Popular Communications, written apparently by Alice Brannigan. If she made this up, I apologize.