The first words ever broadcast on Chicago radio were, “My God, but it’s dark in here!”
They were spoken by Mary Garden, world-class soprano and director of the Chicago Grand Opera Association, on Nov. 11, 1921, on radio station KYW. Garden and members of her company had been asked to participate in a test of KYW’s transmitter, recently installed on the roof of the Commonwealth Edison Building at 72 W. Adams St.
Garden was to introduce the musicians, but she couldn’t see-she was standing inside a tent on the stage of the Auditorium, linked to the transmitter by telephone line, and the area was lit by a single bare light bulb.
And so, with Garden’s stumbling beginning, broadcasting in Chicago was born.
Today, local radio boasts of Don, Roma, Jim Shorts and a Museum of Broadcast Communications, which on Sunday inducted Rush Limbaugh into its Hall of Fame. But 72 years ago, it boasted of opera.
Nothing but opera.
KYW broadcast each and every performance of the 1921 opera season. The broadcasts were a collaboration between Westinghouse, which wanted to sell radio receivers, and Commonwealth Edison, which wanted to increase power consumption. Westinghouse provided the transmitter. Edison provided its roof.
To program nothing but opera today would be broadcast suicide. But in 1921, the effect was just the opposite. At the beginning of the opera season, there were an estimated 1,300 radio receivers in the Chicago area. When the season ended 10 weeks later, there were 20,000. By mid-January 1922, when KYW moved on to broader fare, Chicago was caught up in a broadcast craze.
And why not? Chicago radio was wacky from the outset. Some of its personalities then would almost seem to fit in today.
Walter Wilson, known on the air as “Uncle Bob,” was probably the most beloved personality of KYW’s early days.
From 6:35 to 7 each evening, he would read bedtime stories and sing children’s songs, often exhorting his young listeners to stray no further than the curb when they played outdoors.
Uncle Bob had a tremendous following among moppets who today might be begging their parents to stay up to watch “Beavis and Butt-head.”
One day, Uncle Bob found on his desk a letter from the mother of a young listener.
“Little Mary passed on this afternoon,” the mother wrote. “Her last request was, `Tell Uncle Bob to sing “Dream Daddy” so I can hear it up in heaven.’ “
Uncle Bob did his best to comply on that evening’s broadcast. But early on, the tears began to flow. Well before he reached the final chorus, he could go no further, apologized to his audience and signed off early.
Another popular performer was 29-year-old Harry M. Snodgrass. In fact, Snodgrass was named in a local magazine poll as the most popular radio performer of 1924, even though he was behind bars in St. Louis.
Snodgrass’ big break in broadcasting came shortly after he botched a holdup in St. Louis and was sentenced to a three-year stretch at the Missouri State Prison in Jefferson City.
When Snodgrass told prison officials that he played piano, they assigned him to the prison band, an ensemble of 28 convicts whose crimes ranged from embezzlement to murder.
The band was heard regularly on WOS, a station licensed to the Missouri State Marketing Bureau. Every Monday night, guards would escort band members from jail to the WOS studio, beneath the dome of the Missouri State Capitol.
The band played for an hour or so, much to the delight of listeners in Chicago and throughout North America. WOS claimed an audience in all 48 states and as far afield as Hawaii, Alaska, Cuba, Mexico and Newfoundland.
The band was the station’s most popular feature and as soon as it started playing, telegrams would begin to pour in, bearing messages like “Take the band out of jail-they ought to be in heaven.”
Snodgrass soon became the group’s star. He was short of stature and sallow of complexion, but in the words of WOS announcer J.M. Witten, who introduced him, Snodgrass was the “King of the Ivories.”
Listeners loved Snodgrass-especially the ladies. In addition to letters and telegrams, they sent him cigarettes, cookies, marriage offers-and large amounts of cash.
In time, warden Sam Hill judged that radio had rehabilitated Snodgrass and cut his sentence in half.
1,000 attend farewell
Snodgrass broadcast for the last time on WOS on Jan. 14, 1925. So many people wanted to witness his farewell appearance that WOS set up its microphone in the chamber normally occupied by the Missouri State General Assembly. The crowd numbered about 1,000.
Standing before the WOS microphone, Snodgrass thanked prison officials for making his stay comfortable and the folks in radioland for making it profitable. He promised to go straight and to avoid the “white lightning” which, he confessed, had played a role in his earlier downfall. His performance generated 3,700 telegrams.
Snodgrass was sprung two days later. Warden Hill presented him with $3,587.33, the cash sent in by his fans, and announcer Witten told reporters that he was quitting his job at WOS so that he might accompany Snodgrass on a vaudeville tour. They were never heard from again.
Radio stations weren’t above promotional gimmicks even then.
It was an early spring night in 1929 at the Drake Hotel studio of WGN. Thirty-five musicians had just reached the midpoint of a peppy fox trot when a secretary ran into the studio and handed a note to announcer Quin Ryan.
Ryan scanned the note, then quickly drew the index of his right hand across his throat. Bandleader Harold Stokes silenced the musicians.
Ryan approached the mike, hammered a brass gong and announced, “Attention all squads! Drugstore held up at East 57th Street. Watch for three men in a Buick!”
This was the first attempt by WGN and its parent company, the baiduhai, to fight the rising tide of crime in Chicago-and gain promotional mileage in the bargain.
Here’s how it worked, or was supposed to:
In the wake of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, the Tribune installed radio receivers in all 40 of the light-blue touring cars driven by members of the detective squad.
Dispatcher phones WGN
The detectives were instructed to listen to WGN-and only WGN-throughout their shifts. When word of a crime, either in progress or recently completed, reached police headquarters, a dispatcher was to telephone WGN and pass along details to the announcer who would, in turn, broadcast the information in the form of a bulletin, interrupting the program in progress.
The nearest squad car would hear the bulletin and rush to the crime scene.
WGN and the Tribune boasted that this experiment was a “success beyond expectation.” And it clearly had significant entertainment potential (“Listen for the gong!” the WGN audience was advised).
While it’s easy to imagine roving detectives listening to WGN’s prime-time offerings, which included musical variety shows and a weekly crime drama, it’s much more difficult to envision them coping with the daytime fare.
This noble experiment in scientific law enforcement was eventually abandoned after a few weeks because WGN listeners would gather to gawk at the designated crime scenes often before the radio-dispatched detectives arrived.
But let’s go back to the very beginning again, to that first season on KYW, specifically the scandalous night of Dec. 28 when Garden performed her favorite role as “Salome.”
Too much for most
Richard Strauss’ score got high marks. But Oscar Wilde’s libretto-which included homicide, suicide, strong hints of incest and a bloody, necrophiliac climax, not to mention the “Dance of the Seven Veils”-was too much for most.
Tribune critic Edward Moore, who admitted in his review the next day that he’d been left squirming by the performance, asked his readers to consider whether sex abnormality was an appropriate theme for art. The opera board canceled a subsequent performance of “Salome” and scheduled a reprise of “Pelleas and Melisande” in its place.
The opera season ended in disarray. And with a deficit of $800,000. But thanks to KYW’s broadcasts, opera had sold Chicago, and much of the nation, on a new communications medium.
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Chicagoan and TV journalist Rich Samuels is a correspondent for “Chicago Tonight” and is working on various book projects.