Shallow Hal

I first wrote about radio personality Hal Turner back in 2007. Here are my exact words:

"Hal Turner isn't a run-of-the-mill bigot. He's really a flaming shitheel of racist redneck throwback to previous century. I was surprised how human he looked in his headshot. I expected the slouched posture, pronounced forehead, and hairy palms."

It was true. Hal was and is a white supremacist nutter and I probably disagree with everything that he's ever said and most of what he hasn't said. Strangely, the FBI has managed to get involved in his life in such a way that I almost have a little sympathy for the bigot. So let's begin with the strangest part of the story. More here.

Since 2003 Hal has been a salaried employee of the FBI. That means when he uttered this hateful crapola in the clip below in 2007... our tax dollars were paying for it.
But the FBI made good use of him. he was a valuable contact within the white power movement. They exploited his credibility to manipulate contacts as far away as Brazil. A FBI memo said Hal "has proven highly reliable and is in a unique position to provide vital information on multiple subversive domestic organizations." Try to remember, he's not the head of a militia. He's a radio host that got kicked off WBCQ and lately is just a blogger. More here.

Today he's an inmate. The same FBI that was paying him to snitch on his fellow bigots arrested him for saying hateful things. It becomes more complicated now because Hal claims that the FBI coached him, with specific thing they wanted him to say; with specific people they wanted him to focus on. He is a bit of a nutter so the latter may or may not be true, but the story now lies in the arena of things that only can happen in radio.

Thanksgiving.

It's a National Holiday. No blogging today.

FCC SMACKDOWN

I'd like to quickly cover an event of note. The FCC deleted the KRAT calls and has ordered 97.7 in Altamont, OR to shut down. I've seen a number of shut-down orders from the FCC. They're not an every day occurrence by any means, but this one was exceptional.

It starts in 1988. Peter W. Moncure got the original CP for a 100k Kilowatt station broadcasting on 101.3 FF. It was assigned the calls KPMA by the FCC on August 8, 1988.Peter turned around and sold the CP to Western States Broadcasting on November 2, 1988. He took the cash and ran, with no idea of what was going to go down.

Western States filed to modify the CP to reduce the power to 60k watts and changed the Calls to KCHQ. The FCC granted the authority for these changes on August 1, 1990.

In March of 1997 you can see the first twist in the story. In the FCC Broadcast Applications REPORT NO. 23942. Under FM BROADCAST STATION APPLICATIONS ACCEPTED FOR FILING there is a single entry:

"OR BMPH-970218IC KCHQ GEORGE J. WADE MOD OF CP TO CHG HAAT, ERP, & TL 101.3 MHZ ALTAMONT, OR"

That's the FCC issuing a license for George J. Wade. He had filed for a license and they are granting it including a minor change in HAAT, ERP, and TL. Those are Height Above Average Terrain, Effective Radiated Power, and Tower Location. Then in 1996 they issued a construction permit.

"BAPH-960924GE KCHQ WESTERN STATES BROADCASTING VOLUNTARY ASSIGNMENT OF CONSTRUCTION PERMIT 101.3 MHZ ALTAMONT, OR FROM: WESTERN STATES BROADCASTING TO: GEORGE J. WADE (FORM 314) INFORMAL OBJECTION FILED 10-15-96 OPPOSITION TO INFORMAL OBJECTION 11/04/96"

That objection is from the Wynne Broadcasting Company. It was dismissed but construction did not begin. In 1997 KCHQ again filed to make a change. The new frequency of 97.7 and new calls of KRAT were also granted. In 1999 they received a license to cover. That meant they could begin broadcasting. But there was a problem. KRAT wasn't' paying taxes to the IRS, or fees to the FCC.

More interesting was that Mr. George Wade never bought the station. Wade testified in a court case that he was never the licensee and had no idea a license had been issued in his name until IRS investigators informed him. The real operator of KRAT was Sandra Soho. She had stolen his identity to hide income and assets while she was receiving welfare checks and food stamps from the state of Oregon under her real name. She was convicted of several felony counts of larceny and fraud and sentenced to 3 years in prison, fined in the amount of $499,308, and ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $8,746.79. Ouch.

Here's where that gets way more interesting. Most rags like Radio Ink stopped there. I went back and looked at other Western States Broadcasting properties. They also owned 1070 KWSA-AM. Soho was meddling in the affairs of KWSA as well! In 1994 Western States sold the then silent station to Sandra Ann Falk for $7,500. Wynne broadcasting objected to that one too. More here.

In 1996 she changed the calls to KRAM. Sandra Ann Falk died in June 2006 and her estate began trying to sell off the property. Then I found this. On On June 23, 2006, Falk passed away and Sandra Soho (Soho) was named the representative of Falk’s estate. Soho filed notice that she would be representing the estate in the appeal. The document further reveals that Ms. Soho works at KRKT which employed both Falk and Soho and that they were roommates. Furthermore that the owner of KRKT George Wade had loaned money to Falk to secure property to build KRAM. So it all comes full circle.

Rough Transcription Disc

This transcription disc is in really rough shape. Side A is decent. Side B is just vile. Side B was probably exposed to direct sunlight and dried out enough that the shellac has pulled back from the edge and cracked along it requiring some pieces be glued down, and the edge coated in nail polish so the needle not tear off dime-sized flakes. The physical cracks make the most noise so the first in the first 15 seconds are unintelligible, and the rest is a reading from a book on crystals in circuits. But he reads standing away from the recorder leaving us with that tell-tale boxy echo. It also ends abruptly.

So I have not bothered to include any audio from Side B. Side A however, has everything you could want. The opening words are:

"This is Anthony Lisicky speaking on the 15th of February 1950 for Section A. About 11 years ago I entered the Allentown high school and I chose the industrial curriculum with autoshop as my major..."

...And so we have everything we could hope to find out. We have a name, place and date. it gets better from there.

The Belmar Station

The Belmar Station is a strange short story among the vast thousands of tales that make up World War I. On paper, it was known as the Belmar High-Power Marconi Wireless Station. It was at Camp Evans, located in the town of Wall in Monmouth County New Jersey. Construction began just before WWI and the events of the war changed everything and confused every damn date in the story. I think I got it right. let me know if I do not. The story starts a tad earlier. It was the first transatlantic fixed wireless service. Clifden-Glace Bay service opened commercially on October 7th 1907. Tests had begun in 1899, and verified transmissions to the station at Poldhu on 182 kHz were as early as 1902. It ran a spark gap transmitter on a D.C. generator with 6000 cells. It had 30 masts reaching 330 meters tall. More here.

30 miles away was camp Evans. It was built in 1912, the same year as the infamous Radio Act of 1912. A Radio World article in 1913 made the comment:

"Good progress is being made with the Construction of the high-power stations which, when completed, will add enormously to the public facilities for the use of Transatlantic wireless telegraphy. The Clifden-Glace Bay service, which, since 1908, has been in regular continuous communication, day and night, carrying commercial, public, and press messages, has hitherto been the only service in existence affording direct wireless communication between the Eastern and Western hemispheres."

I take this to mean that in some sense during construction that the Belmar station was intended to have some civilian and possibly commercial use. These original Camp Evans buildings were built by a contractor, J.G. White Engineering Corp and were hired by the American Marconi Co. Construction went on between 1912 and 1914 as part of Guglielmo Marconi's original wireless network. It was duplexed with his New Brunswick station 30 miles away. A telegraph operator in Wall keyed the New Brunswick transmitter, 32 miles to the northwest, through a land line.

The US Navy took over the entire facility at the start of WWI. Some sources give this as 1912, others as 1915, and still yet others at 1917. The 1912 date is doubtful as construction was not yet completed. 1915 is more likely but I lean toward the 1917 date. The reason is that most sources line thsi up with the arrival of Dr. Albert Hoyt Taylor as the new man in charge as . Hoyt was head of the Physics Department, University of North Dakota until February 1917. In March he was made a Lieutenant in the Naval reserve and at the outbreak of war, Director, Naval Communications in Washington, DC. Only after leaving DC that October did he take over Belmar.

He stayed in Belmar until he moved to the Naval Air Station in Norfolk in 1918. After leaving Belmar he moved on to experimenting full time with radar. In August 15, 1945 the Daily News would list Dr. Taylor among the "Scientific Pioneers" responsible for radar, in an article with a photo from Camp Evans and a photo of Dr. Taylor at the Naval Research Laboratory. Throughout all of this the Belmar station continued to send and receive wireless messages. More here.
At the end of the war, the Navy returned the property to the Marconi Co. who continued Wireless operations. But in October 1919 GE bought out the Marconi Co. and created RCA. This while the end of the Naval monopoly on transatlantic wireless communication, at least (in their view) transferred it from the hands of a British company to an American one. Marconi himself also had fascist ties that made them nervous.

But ultimately RCA sold the Wall site in 1924. As they consolidated thieir transatlantic wireless stations the new Riverhead Receiver Station on Long Island became the center of opperations. Belmar was already a decade old. the property was sold in 1925 to the Monmouth County Pleasure Seeker's Club who had some kind fo weird connection to Arthur H. Bell and the Ku Klux Klan. In 1936 the Young People's Association for the Propagation of the Gospel bought it.

In an ironic twist, the U.S. Army purchased the land in 1941 to revert to military use focusing on research in WWII. This included most famously, Project Paperclip.