The Spy Who Loved Radio

This is one of those stories in radio that seems a bit too strange. But on the face of it, numerous other public figures, and even politicians have owned media outlets. So maybe it's not that improbable that once, in the 70-year history of the CIA, a known spook happened to also buy WINS-AM in New York City in 1953.

Let's start before he was in the CIA. Lt. Col. John Elroy McCaw was from from Aberdeen, WA.  He founded the first radio station in Centralia, WA: 1440 KELA-AM, in 1937 and owned the Lewis and Clark Hotel where it was originally housed. Years later McCaw also bought station 1260 KYA-AM (with John D. Keating) in San Francisco, 630 KPOA-AM in Hawaii [SOURCE] and 1010 WINS in New York.
 In 1953 In FCC docket 9041 in an Aladdin radio and Television application the bureau listed off a long series of McCaw's facility ownerships and their relative percentages over the prior 20 years:

Call Letters	Frequency	City	State	Percentage
KRSC-AM	1150	Seattle	WA	100%
KORC-AM	1140	Mineral Wells	YX	100%
KELA-AM	1440	Centralia	WA	50%
KYA-AM	1260	San Francisco	CA	50%
KYAK-AM	930	Yakima	WA	33⅓%
KALE-AM	960	Richland	WA	33⅓%
KALE-FM	106.1	Richland	WA	33⅓%
KPOA-AM	630	Honolulu	HI	50%

It appears that most of his large acquisitions involved Keating and/or Charles Skouras. His company in that acquisition was Gotham Broadcasting Corporation. In the book Big Deal: Mergers and Acquisitions in the Digital Age author Bruce Wasserstein praises McCaw's work but not his paperwork, calling him a "freewheeling entrepreneur." One of his wife's obituaries refers to his "his handshake deals."  But he was very successful despite that undercurrent of chaos. I'll quote Wasserstein:

"He converted New York station WINS to the country's first rock station in the middle 1950s, and within 9 years flipped the station for twenty times more than he had paid. At his height, Elroy McCaw owned interests in dozens of radio, television and cable television companies."

His wife Marion was no slouch either. After the end of WWII she started her own radio station KAPA-AM in Raymond, WA. None of this mentions that he had another job. It's not the kind of job you put on your resume, and not the kind of job where you can always tell people what you did at work today. Information is scant. But we know that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed at least officially in 1942 by President Roosevelt. Lacking cooperation from existing U.S. agencies, early agents were trained by the British. President Truman dissolved the department in 1945, but it's functions were divided between the War Department and the State Department. By the end of the year the term "Central Intelligence Agency" was appearing on documents to describe the collection of intelligence groups, and by 1947 it was official. He has no entry in Wikipedia except in the biographies of his now wealthy heirs. But one of his wife's obituaries get's into the details. [SOURCE].

Throughout the war, she [Marion] commuted from Washington D.C. when necessary while Elroy served at Army Air Forces Headquarters in the Pentagon as Executive Officer and Special Assistant to General McClelland, head of USAAF communications. He was also McClelland’s liaison to OSS.

His exact involvement as you expect, is unknown. I've never filed a FOIA request and I don't intend to. But I have to admit I'm curious. Many businessmen served in the military during wartime— notably Robert S. McNamara who left Harvard to serve in WWI, then left Ford to serve as Secretary of Defense under Kennedy. Very few figures would be so high profile. An issue of the The O.S.S. Society seems to bear a note from son Bruce McCaw looking for more information from retired OSS members about his fathers life. (The operations referred to involve radio controlled ships.)

"My father, Lt. Col. John Elroy McCaw, worked on OSS Special Projects known as operations Aphrodite, Simmons, and Javaman. He worked with OSSers John Shaheen and Jim Rand and is particularly interested in Javaman, which called for blowing up the tunnel connecting Kyushu and Honshu prior to the invasion of Japan.”

Another obituary notes that the family moved to Seattle in 1953. Several sources note that he died in 1969 suddenly, after a brief illness. [Nothing suspicious here, moving along] The cause is never listed but it's clear that his finances were in disarray due to his informal business practices. When his estate was cleaned up, all that remained was a single cable company with fewer than 30,00 subscribers. His sons built that up and bought heavily into cell networks as Cellular One, then sold out to AT&T. It was renamed renamed AT&T Wireless. Today most of them are listed by Forbes. More here.

J. Aku Head Pupule

Many people in media take on stages names. It may be to appear more ethnically neutral, but more often it is to make their name simpler, shorter and easier to remember. He was born Herschel Hohenstein, and was using the name Hal Lewis. But on the radio he used the on air name J. Aku Head Pupule.  The word "Aku" is a type of fish, also called a bonito, it's used often in sushi. The word "pupule" is Hawaiian for crazy. Thus Aku Head Puple means Crazy Fish Head.. In 1975 he actually sued Mr. Earle E. Aku for misappropriating his stage-name. At one point in the 1950s it was said that Pupule was the highest paid DJ in the world. Estimates ran as high as half a million dollars a year. This will take some explaining.

A native New Yorker, all accounts have him relocating to Hawaii from San Francisco in 1947. He was playing fiddle as an entertainer on a cruise-liner and jumped ship in Honolulu where he waltzed into KGMB-AM and became an announcer. He was young, and broke and slept on the beach. He was fired for insubordination about 2 months later. He scraped by writing for the Hilo Hattie program and writing for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Then he stumbled into a morning slot at KPOA-AM.

While treating that lucky break a bit too seriously he began identifying the time a little too often. Then he gave it incorrectly. A caller called him an aku-head. He kept the name and his style evolved. He mixed cranky political commentary with pranks, stunts and all the zany bells, buzzers and whistles of a Spike Jones routine.

In 1957 in a publicity stunt, Mr. Akuhead then at KHVH-AM and  Don Sherwood at KSFO-AM switched places. It was said that consternation and hilarity ensued. When Hawaii became a state in 1959 he covered the event with all due seriousness on air. This was only 8 years after he had announced it...in yet another prank.

He moved on to 650 KORL-AM around 1960 then 760 KGU-AM before returning to KGMB in 1965. He remained there for 17 years. He was also on KMVI in that window. Hal died in 1983. He knew he was dying. He read a heartfelt farewell message. But shortly before his death he pranked Honolulu one last time with coverage of a parade which included a fictitious appearance by Tom Selleck. Yes Magnum P.I. jokes to the bitter end.

Mahalo Lucky Luck

Radio History is biased toward the mainland.  The residents of the contiguous 48-states do think of Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and the other territories and states as the back 40. We don't take a lot of notice of what's going on back there. But Honolulu is market #64, Puerto Rico is market #14! With their rapidly expanding population centers it is no longer acceptable to disregard these markets. A failure as a programmer to understand the radio history of these markets does them a disservice. An attempt by a radio group to serve San Juan like they serve Boston would result in utter failure.

This is no more obvious than in the story of Robert Melvin "Lucky" Luck. In 1967 Lucky Luck became the PD of brand new KCCN-AM.  It was one of the very first "ethnic" Hawaiian radio stations. Previous to this time, there was not enough commercial Hawaiian music with which to forge a playlist. Lucky used data from juke box operators Mid-Pacific Island and Aloha State to program his station. He was interested in building a library to support an entirely new and local format. Billboard wrote a blurb on it in 1968:

"KCCN works with a 60 tune playlist. principally LPs and the material encompasses songs of a Hawaiian nature by Percy Faith, Elvis Presley, Henry Mancini, George Greeley, Sammy Kaye, Frankie Carle.  these songs are called haole (Caucasian) hits. Luck admits there isn't enough strong authentic Hawaiian material to fill the stations program day."

He didn't start his career at KCCK-AM. Actually he didn't even start it in Hawaii.  He was born a few thousand miles away in Waco, Texas. His interest in what was then called Polynesia started while he was a Marine stationed in Samoa. While he was there he became fluent enough to serve as an interpreter during World War II. He went native as they say. He relocated permanently to Honolulu and went into radio. More here.

Before KCCK-AM he was on KPOA-AM, he started there in 1954. Paradise of the Pacific Magazine called him "the Jackie Gleason of Hawaii." He was well known for his "buffoonery", he did impersonations: Louis Armstrong, Clark Gable, Andy Devine and various regional Hawaiian accents. He was already Hawaii's highest paid entertainer. He later worked at  KGU-AM. He had a program from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM called "Lucky's Luau."  The trade rag Media-scope described him as an "easy going conversationalist."

He also had a program on KHVH-TV, a Kaiser television station. By the 1970s his fame was great enough to warrant his own TV program “The Lucky Luck Show” on KONA-TV an NBC affiliate. By the late 1960s he was getting cameos in movies like Kona Coast. He developed a fixation on all things Hawaiian.He owned a tiki bar The Okole Maluna Lounge. He became a recording artist and recorded Hawaiian music.  He even published a Hawaiian cook book. I wish I knew more, but I can't even find an obituary.

Hawaii Calls!

The program traces its origin to July 3, 1935 when the first Hawaii Calls radio program was broadcast on mediumwave at 7370 kHz under the callsign KEQ. The program was performed live at the Moana Hotel on the beach at Waikiki. The program was created and hosted by Island radio pioneer Webley Edwards. It focused almost entirely on local artists, playing Hawaiian music. At it's peak the program was carried on 600 radio stations across North America and the Pacific rim.Edwards learned his radio chops at KOAC, the campus station of Oregon Agricultural College. On the American mainland the program was probably hear d at 11-m or later. But in Hawaii that was 5pm, a prime-time program. This was via KIO on 25.6 metres. In 1938, station station 760 KGU-AM in Honolulu started carrying it locally. In 1943 KGMB picked up the production from Webley Edwards. But that didn't' last. They handed it off to KHON who in turn passed it to KPOA in the 1950s as it's popularity faded. More here.


The program ceased in 1975 with only 10 stations still running the program. For most of it's run the government of Hawaii had been subsidizing the production costs. Without that funding the ratings book mattered all the more. More here.
For a shortwave program this enjoyed great popularity. Capitol Records released a slew of "Webley Edwards present Hawaii Calls albums." They contained a mix of wave noises, schlock, and authentic Hawaiian music. Many of the featured local artists on these albums went on to release solo albums and even short careers. I own a number of these. The releases dates all seem to fall between 1956 and 1966. Only a fraction of these are still in print.

Webley Edwards went on to be the first broadcaster to announce news of the attack on Pearl harbor and was also present for the surrender of japan aboard the USS Missouri. He went on to the state legislature of Hawaii. The Internet Radio Station Aloha Joe vintage Hawaii calls Programs every Sunday.