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100-Year Celebrations
- Thread starter trusty
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There are only a handful in the Class of 1921. WBZ was in September, WABC was October 1 (and is doing weekly specials every Sunday), and KYW is next month, if they choose to acknowledge their origins in Chicago before moving to Philadelphia in the 1930s.
It's the Class of 1922 that will be a nonstop series of centennials next year. I've already been approached by several of them to help with history.
It's the Class of 1922 that will be a nonstop series of centennials next year. I've already been approached by several of them to help with history.
Almost nobody is alive that was around in 1921, and even fewer care.
By that standard, no company or organization should ever celebrate a centennial.
Ancient Modulation is almost irrelevant now. Who, other than radio historians, cares?
Because the stations that do it right aren't celebrating a modulation method. They're celebrating a legacy of service to their communities.
Look, I'm as cynical as the next guy about a lot of things radio does these days, and about the future of AM as a medium. But when there's something for the industry to celebrate and promote, I'm also right there to help it do the celebrating and the promoting (and to help document the history accurately!)
Of course there's not much actual reminiscing about what these stations sounded like in 1921, or even 1951. WABC's focus has been on its top-40 heyday (of course) and its early years as a talker, as it should be. That's what today's listeners - who, yes, are an older demographic - are going to enjoy reminiscing about. Any station that has any sort of coherent 100-year history and doesn't bother to use it to leverage some promotion is missing out on a nice opportunity.
The best promotions for very old stations is along the lines of "we've been with Anytown all the way and we are with you just as strong today" reflecting on the Depression, WW II, Kennedy, the Civil Rights changes, covering "our new freeways" and "new suburbs" and things like that.
But unless you are a dominant big signal talker, all news station or sports operation, talking about that just makes the station old. KDKA and WBZ and KFI and similar stations can do it. And they can pull it off.
But a "dead station walking" like WCAU, despite being the first CBS station (bought to promote the Paley's cigar business!), just can't play age and tradition into a valuable commodity today. Others, like WFAN or even WCBS don't have a common call letter history and heritage.
On the other hand, almost all the 1-A clears from way back when are still quite successful or holding their own. WSM would be the one that is kept mostly as an anchor for the Opry heritage but with little listening. There rest are mostly successful, although some like WGN are thrashing about like fish out of water.
There is a 2012 website with a list of first stations:
www.oldradio.com/archives/general/100oldest.html
Wonder if there have been any changes to these since 2012...
www.oldradio.com/archives/general/100oldest.html
Wonder if there have been any changes to these since 2012...
I don't know to what extent KDKA celebrated their 100th anniversary last year, having been recognized (allegedly) as the oldest commercial station. If anyone has any audio, please share. I just wish they had preserved the original KDKA studio, instead of razing it for a fast-food restaurant (if memory serves).
Now you sound like our old friend Julius, ragging on poor 1210 in Philadelphia!
The last time I visited KDKA's website they still had a lot of 100th anniversary material posted, including remembrances of a lot of their long-time hosts and on-air staff, timelines illustrating key moments in that station's history, etc. One thing I missed seeing were old shows from well-known hosts like Fred Honsberger, Mike Pintek and John Cigna. It'd have been nice to be able to give them a listen just for old times sake, but I never saw any posted. Pittsburgh is one of those cities where families go back generations, sometimes starting with grandparents or great grandparents who put down roots there when they first immigrated to the USA. Pride in their city and traditions runs deep so I'm sure there was a lot of interest in that city and community in KDKA's centennial.
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More than likely there were none of those recordings available.
Sad but most likely true. It seems television does a much better job at archiving and cataloging than radio.
Recording equipment barely existed in the 1920s. Reel-to-reel tape recorders weren't invented until almost 10 years after KDKA and KYW signed on. I guess teh only medium that did exist were acetate.
There is no shortage of lost TV, on the network and local level. Preserving shows that wete on 2 inch tape was cost and storage space prohibitive. As an example, the Ruth Lyons show which originated at WLWT, Cincinnati and was on the air 5 days a week for 17 years has only a few short clips that have survived. The only full-length recording that is known to exist comes from a logger tape of the day of the JFK assassinations.
Other than airchecks of jocks recording themselves, and a handful of logger tapes that were salvaged and restored, most airchecks are from kids who recorded their favorite top 40 stations. Very few people seem to have recorded AOR, MOR, and Country stations.
Agreed, I wasn't referring to recordings of the day KDKA signed on and did it's first legal ID, I actually meant some of the shows and programming their best known hosts did in the 1970s through the 90s. Host who are no longer with us, but are still fondly remembered by listeners who are still around and might enjoy hearing 30 minutes or an hour of their stuff again as part of the centennial.
I'm sure that's true, but it seems that when someone from broadcast TV signs off for the last time, for instance, they usually have plenty of footage of them through the years for whatever reason (maybe from their personal archives). I recall seeing a youtube video of a 30 minute special a TV station in a smaller market put together as part of an anniversary celebration - They had tons of video of past newscasts, some going back a number of decades featuring various anchors and hosts, positioning slogans and logos they once aired during breaks, etc.
Magnetic tape recording on paper tape was invented by the Germans in the 30's but made useful for speech and music using a synthetic backing during WW II and brought to the US after the surrender as "spoils of war".
Wire recording was used for things like dictation but not broadly adopted until vastly improved after WW II. It lost to tape due to tape's flexibility and lower cost.
Electrical Transcriptions on disk for radio began in the late 20's, with "Amos and Andy" being the first major program to use the medium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_transcription
I recently got a plaintive email from a friend at a Very Big, Very Well Known Station that's approaching its centennial. After the station's changed hands several times in recent years, there's no archival anything that's survived.
This is not an uncommon situation, sadly. What has survived over the years has almost never survived at the station ownership level. It's been individual air talent or production people saving their own stuff, or listeners doing their own archiving.
This is not an uncommon situation, sadly. What has survived over the years has almost never survived at the station ownership level. It's been individual air talent or production people saving their own stuff, or listeners doing their own archiving.
In the same vein, over 50 years ago I asked my stepfather what Forest City Publishing had done with the files and memorabilia of WHK when they sold it to Kluge. Being the direct and rather abrupt person he was, he said, "we are not in the museum business. It went into the trash".
(He took advantage of the question to again tell me what a bad decision I had made to go into radio.)
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