Aww, where is Jim Hilliker when we need him? I know of two early KFI announcers and I'm hoping one of them is the answer to the question: Ken Carpenter later served as the announcer on Bing Crosby's radio program and Don Wilson later worked on radio and tv with Jack Benny. ("Well!") Art Baker, who hosted You Asked For It on television, was also at KFI but I think that was in the 1940s.
Correctamundo! Bragging rights are hereby awarded to the man from Glendale for correctly identifying Don Wilson, KFI's first formal staff announcer and football play by play expert. Ken Carpenter and Art Baker were indeed later with KFI, but not in 1929. Art Baker's notebook was on KFI throughout the fifties and possibly into the sixties.
Another 1929 KFI first was the Richfield Reporter, featuring KFI newscaster Sam Hayes. The program was later picked up by the NBC Pacific (Orange) network under the stewardship of John Wald and continued in the same 10:00 pm timeslot for decades. Sam Hayes moved over to the Don Lee network (KHJ). Howard Culver, perhaps better known for his work at KLAC, had a program for some years after the Richfield Reporter; he married KFI's first female engineer who had been hired due to labor shortages during WW2. Also on KFI for a few months during WW2 was another individual destined to become a teevision broadcasting legend - newsman Chet Huntley
When we talk today about KFI trying to regain ratings by being more "live and local" I feel the station should consider its news and local involvement heritage. While still atop the Packard distributorship on Hope in 1923 it had two full time employees coordinating local live music talent from schools and churches because recording disks then weren't broadcast quality. Its first news director was an Hispanic who had been a Hearst correspondent in WW1; Earle C Anthony, himself a shirttail correspondent at one point interviewing Pancho Villa and known to W. R. Hearst, respected his work and kept him on until incapscitated by an auto accident around 1938. Anthony himself did editorials in the late twenties and early thirties focused on Los Angeles issues, particularly centered on police, moral and fine arts issues. I am happy to see KFI newsmen Aaron Bender, Gary Hoffman and David Cruz being given air time to explore various topics. It is my hope that in time this will lead to days reminisecent of the old "KFI calling" program but with a local focus.
The problem is, thanks to the "out with whatever is old" carnage of the Wesley/Nevins era in the seventies current KFI staff has little idea of what I'm referring to. Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters has a few recordings and there are scraps available elsewhere, but there are few still alive who actually experienced the flavor of Vermont Blvd's "old grey lady" with its auditorium, Blue, Coral, Diamond and Emerald studios hooked together by Morse code telegraph keys.
The station was founded and owned until his death by a man with an electrical engineering degree who put technology and content ahead of ratings and revenue because he had other profit centers. He backed his co-chief engineers, Headly Blatterrman and George Mason, to the hilt for the first forty year's of the station's history. He also worked with local schools on the Young America Sings and Young America Speaks programs and had Dick Crenna doing a Sunday Evening program for the Boy Scouts - KFI itself sponsored a "troop" which was actully a choir made up of Scouts of regular troops. This, plus three daily programs targeted at the then prolific farmng industry in Los Angeles County gave KFI a hometown flavor despite being the Pacific Coast flagship of the NBC network. It was to locals simply "KFI Los Angeles, Earle C. Anthony, Distributor of Packard Automobiles."
NBC and David Sarnoff catered to him because they simply had to - Anthony knew, as did they, that his clear channel KFI could create network quality broadcasts at will (and sometimes did). When local weather forecaster Floyd Young got through broadcasting fruit frost warnings using KFI's direct line from Pomona during the winter KFI joined NBC programming "in progress." Anthony's role in the press/radio wars of the mid-thirties, and willingness to pour whatever it took into legal proceedings regarding either radio or automobiles, testified to his priorities.
You want better ratings on KFI? Light some ECA type fire using investigative journalism and local talk hosts that includes positive as well as sensational topics, then use cross referencing promos on Clear Channel's other Los Angeles outlets. People will take notice and listen. At least that's this commontator's opinion.
