Pat Barnes Pablum

Patrick Henry Barnes wrote trite, mundane,  piffle. Correspondingly it was pretty popular. People like trite fluffy crap. Poetry was common radio fare in the content-strapped 1920s.  Really very little of it survived into the golden era.  Pat Barnes was the Program Director of WHT-AM. By all reports he was also the announcer for this show which collected poem he liked and tried to popularize. By all reports, it was all rather flowery and unremarkable... I'll name a few:

A Son's Letter to his Dead Father
The House with Nobody in it
Is there a Santa Clause
Letter From the Trenches
The Beautiful Snow

WHT-AM began in 1925 on 1260, later slipping the day and broadcasting at night on 750 (possibly 720). It became a dayshare on 1480 with WJAZ-AM and WORD-AM starting in 1928.  That was a big year for the FRC who was re-allocating stations trying to put an end to the chaos. That lasted until at least 1931. In that year pleading for an under-served northern Kentucky all three stations were forced off air for WCKY-AM in Covington. They ;later moved to Cincinnati, negating the argument but by then it's 3 adversaries were long gone.  All those call letters were re-used by various entities, WJAZ by Zenith actually... except for WHT.  There is no 1480 in Chicago today, nor is there a 1260... a legacy effect of the frequency shuffling almost a century ago.

In 1930 Radiophone Broadcasting Corporation changed the calls to WCHI-AM on 1490, then changed calls to WSOA in 1931 right before the end. Transmitting from Deerfield, IL the Radiophone Broadcasting Corporation did what they could with the crowded 5,000 watt station. In sum, WHT existed for no more than six years in Chicago land radio history. It was a veritable blink in the context of heritage stations like WMAQ, which started earlier and lasted. In between organ concerts and other local programs Pat Barnes found time to read poetry and essays on the air.  The book was published in 1927.. possibly at the height of the briefly lived station.

Radio Stations in Songs

Writing a song about a specific radio station is quite rare. The inverse is more common where a radio station changes calls or re-brands based on an existing song or artist. In some cases it's just plain unclear.

I'm limiting myself to 3 and 4 letter calls that are based in the U.S. and begin with a W. or a K. For song references I'm sticking with albums or song titles where the sequence of letters is clearly used as a callsign. I'm excluding fictional call signs and other spoofs. The number of fictitious radio stations is huge and warrants it's own post. I've selected these rules to cull the herd and it makes it possible for me to compare these individually to real stations.

KAOS - Roger Waters - "Radio K.A.O.S." from the album of the same name circa 1987.
89.3 KAOS first went on air in January 1, 1973, leaving the possibility open, except that the liner notes clearly describe it's radio reference as about ham radio.

KLON - Queens of the Stone Age (QOTSA)- "You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire" circa 2002. The album Songs for the Deaf uses a car-radio theme to segue between songs. One of the faux radio clips uses the call letters KLON out of Los Angeles. In L.A. 88.1 KLON broadcast under those calls starting in the 1970s and flipped to KKJZ in July 2002. This seems like a real reference.

WJAZ -Donald Fagen - "The Nightfly" Circa 1982
The lyric clearly reads "An independent station / WJAZ / With jazz and conversation / From the foot of Mt. Belzoni" WJAZ is presently used on the 91.7 WRTI repeater near Harrisburg, PA. But the WJAZ calls have been used before. From 1922 thru 1931 Zenith Radio Corp operated 930 WJAZ-AM in Chicago. Neither of those are in baton Rouge, as it is in the song.

WLSD - They Might Be Giants - "The End of the Tour"Circa 1994
1220 WLSD-AM has been using those calls since 1953. For the Christian talker WLSD stands for Where Love Sounds Different. The lyrics seem to be a bland drug reference.

WOLD - Harry Chapin - "W.O.L.D." circa 1974
In Marion VA, 102.5 WOLD went on air in 1968 and remains so today. The lyrics clearly show the song as being about WOLD, But research indicates the song is inspired by WMEX Interestingly the tune in turn inspired the TV program WKRP.

The Birth Of Radio Regulation pt 3

The Radio Act of 1912 required that all radio transmitters be licensed by federal government and that operators have a license. Seems straight forward enough. Just like a drivers license right? So why did things change? Why does the FCC even exist?

The problem was that the law didn't give the secretary of labor and commerce discretion on whether to issue a license or not. He couldn't refuse them and he couldn't even limit them. That was a teensy oversight in teh drafting of the law. Eventually there were too many radio stations.

It was really coming to a head in the early 1920s. In 1923 Secretary Herbert Hoover (before he was president) refused to grant license to an qualified applicant. Hence Hoover v Intercity Radio Co. went down. The court ruled he had exceeded his authority under the law and ordered him to grant the license.

But he kept it up. the law didn't afford him the authority to limit licenses, but they damn sure needed limited. And some broadcasters supported him. Without some kind of license limits, reception was just destroyed by interference. Hoover continued to act beyond his authority even after the 1923 lawsuit. He regularly issued wave-length assignments and times for broadcast.
http://www.hooverassociation.org/photoscommerce.html

He got suedby Zenith Radio Corp. again that year by WJAZ in Chicago and he lost evvery time beacuse what he was doing was outside the law. Broadcasting fell into chaos. If a staiton didn't like their license limitations... they sued Hoover. And in the end it was decided that he had to give out licenses, and his obligation when there was no available channel, was to license them for the one that caused the least interference... this was not good.

Around 1927 Congress woke up after the post-coital haze of voting themselves a pay raise worse off. Finally Congress acted. They drafted the Radio Act of 1927. It began the Federal Radio Commission. It's powers were broader it assigned wave lengths, assigned hours and at assigned levels of power as Hoover did but also regulated licensing and renewal and to a limited extent programming.

Thsi was the law that asserted that the RF spectrum belongs to the public and that licensed broadcasters merely use this public resource under an obligation to operate "in the public interest, convenience or necessity. " at all times.

It had taken more than a decade. But here was a system that could work. Then less than seven years later in 1934,the FCC was founded. The Federal Communications Act was approved, regulating radio, telephone and telegraph industries under one broadcast media-focused entity, the Federal Communications Commission. That act... was questionable. Like regulating guns, alcohol, explosives and tobacco in one commission. Why the hell do that?
Hoover stayed a popular figure in media. In 1927, the Bell System sent live TV images of Herbert Hoover, still just the Secretary of Commerce, over telephone lines from Washington, D.C. to an auditorium in Manhattan. It was the first public demonstration in the U.S. of long-distance television transmission.