it-registrationsstlmediahistory

A new radio broadcasting station with headquarters in the Hotel Chase took the air recently over a wave length of 239.9 meters. The station, organized under the laws of Missouri, is being operated by the Greater St. Louis Broadcasting Corporation, which has acquired the good will, assets, apparatus, call letters and wave length of station KFVE.

The new corporation is headed by Thomas P. Convey, president; David W. Hill, vice-president of the International Life Insurance Company, holds similar office in the new body, and George T. Thompson, vice-president of the Hotel Chase, is secretary.

One wing of the ninth floor has been reconstructed and converted into a transmitting studio, offices and reception room.

The station is not operated on the unit basis, Convey states, but toll rights are being allotted to individual concerns and organizations on a contract basis. Only professional talent is to be used, quality rather than quantity being the policy of the station. In order to insure good programs, all contracts provide that a stipulated budget must be set aside by the contracting companies for talent.

“In organizing this station, we proceeded on the theory that rather than ask for a new wave length and further congest the air, we would take an existing wave length and utilize it,” Convey said. “As our corporation name implies, we intend to use the station to further any plan looking to a better and greater St. Louis. In this connection we have invited the Chamber of Commerce, Convention and Publicity Bureau, Better Business Bureau, the Advertising Club, the American Retailers’ Association, Salesmanagers’ Bureau and other civic bodies to join.”

“It is our aim to give a short program each evening.”

The Chamber of Commerce has appointed a committee composed of W. Palmer Clarkson, Charles A Pearson and J. Will Finlay, to inquire into the feasibility of broadcasting programs over the new station.

Convey, who came to St. Louis in January, 1925, has been intimately identified with radio for a long time. He organized and developed the St. Louis Radio Trades Association, the Southwest National Radio Show and Station KMOX. He had a leading part in the Hoover radio conference in Washington in October, 1925, and served on a special publicity committee of three. During the latter part of last year he was identified with the Chamber of Commerce on special work.

The new station will be flexible and capable of operating on from 500 to 2,500 watts, but it is the intention to increase this by fall to 5,000 watts.

(Originally published in Greater St. Louis April, 1927).

Ted Mangner, 38-year-old assistant professor radio extension in the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois, has been appointed director of farm programs of KMOX, replacing Charles Stookey.

Mangner had written and broadcast 2,275 consecutive farm programs on the University of Illinois station WILL. He also has syndicated a farm column which was used by 38 radio stations.

(From the St. Louis Advertising Club Weekly 9/11/1944).

There was a time when the radio disc jockey was a true celebrity. It was a status that was earned and deserved. One of those stars in St. Louis was Gil Newsome. But it was his work prior to becoming a DJ that made him stand out from the crowd.

As a college student vacationing in Newport News, Va., he got a radio job from a station manager impressed by Gil’s voice. He took an offer in Richmond, Va., because they offered him more money – a whopping $15 a week. He moved up to Cincinnati, then Philadelphia and then to the big time.

In the 1940s, Newsome worked as a fill-in announcer for the Glenn Miller Band on the “Chesterfield Time” radio broadcast on CBS. The gig was enough to get Newsome noticed by some of the big guys in programming, and he was hired as the first master of ceremonies for “Coca Cola’s Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands,” a national broadcasting job he held for four years.

The program traveled to military installations around the U.S. during World War II and did remote big band broadcasts in front of the troops. John Dunning, writing in his “Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio,” quotes a typical announcer’s script for the program: “As Charlie Spivak signs his musical signature in Coca-Cola’s guest register, it’s been night number 731 for the Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands, and we’ve marched 896,415 Spotlight miles.”

Gil Newsome hit St. Louis in 1945, taking a DJ job at KWK, and he became one of the hardest-working personalities in the market. Stella Pollack, writing in the May 1950 issue of “Prom” magazine, noted, “His work doesn’t end when he gives that familiar sign-off at the end of a radio show; it’s just beginning!
“From the station he’s off to emcee a youth program, officially open a new teen town, appear at a high school or at a church. In the past five years Gil has made over a thousand public appearances for his favorite fans, the teenagers of this area! Get paid for it? Not exactly – Gil says it’s so much fun he’s more than well-paid.”

Gil Newsome’s first contract at KWK was for one year. He stayed at the station for 16 years. In 1946, Newsome began a Saturday morning show called the “Teen Thirty O’Clock Club.” Originating from the KWK studios at the Chase Hotel, the record show gave the teenage members of the studio audience a chance to win record albums by giving the correct answers to questions on the air.

Soon the crowds of teens exceeded the studio capacity and the show was moved to the big auditorium at St. Louis House at Jefferson and Lafayette, where over 1,000 audience members could be accommodated.

Over his years at KWK, Gil Newsome became the voice of St. Louis teenagers. He was honored by the Mound City Press Club (The area’s “Negro Press”) for furthering teenage race relations and received dozens of letters of praise from high school principals, civic leaders and parents, praising him for all his work with kids.

His programs were a regular stop for the top entertainers of the day: Bob Hope, Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Sammy Kaye, Stan Kenton, Johnny Desmond, Billy Williams and Bill Haley and the Comets. Often he’d treat them to one of his wife’s home-cooked meals afterward.

Just how good was Newsome? He was ranked among the nation’s top 30 DJs for the movie “Disc Jockey,” was voted the top disc jockey in the country in “Variety” magazine, and later was written up in the book “The Deejays” by Arnold Passman. In 1951 he was paid a salary of $35,000 a year.

In 1961, Gil Newsome left KWK for an announcer’s job at KSD, making a logical musical progression to an adult audience, many of whom had grown up with him. He died of cancer in 1965 at the age of 49.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 7/2006)

It’s probably a part of life for many teenagers. One day while listening to the radio, there’s that exclamation to one’s self: “I could do what that disc jockey’s doing, and I could do it better.”

While there may be a lot of truth to that statement today, it’s a sentiment that’s been around as long as there’s been radio. In the very early days of the industry, people were literally taken off the street and put in local radio studios to help fill air time as piano players or singers. Within a few years, each station had its own stable of talent, but managers were still interested in what the public had to offer.

Regular auditions were held by stations looking for more talent. Here in St. Louis stations provided on-air exposure for amateurs. KSD ran a show called “Stars of Tomorrow” which the station called “A radio broadcast given entirely by boys and girls of the St. Louis vicinity who are not more than 16 years of age.” One of the top performers on this show in 1933 was 12-year-old Marshall Zwick, who appeared several times playing Sousa march music on the xylophone.

Radio & Entertainment, a weekly equivalent of today’s TV Guide, even ran a two-page feature story encouraging people to audition, but noting in the headline, “You have three chances out of 500 to become a radio star, if you have talent.” One can imagine a weekly cattle call of people, all of whom think they have what it takes to be a star. And since many people were stretching to make ends meet during The Depression, some were willing to do whatever it took to put food on the table.

Studio auditions were held at KWK each Friday morning. Amateurs had to perform before a screening committee made up of members of the station’s musical and on-air staffs. At WIL, program director Franklyn MacCormack was the decision maker, often offering advice on how applicants could perform better. KMOX pianist Margo Clark handled all musical auditions at the station, which was only fitting since she herself had obtained her job through the same process several years earlier.

KMOX even held an audition on the air each week, which was a tradition at the station for years. Over 30 hopefuls were given a tryout on the airwaves and feedback came in from listeners. It was through this process that KMOX hired its chief announcer Woody Klose and one of its well-known hillbilly stars, Roy Queen.

Not that all the applicants were star quality. One local man showed up at his audition saying he could play 14 different instruments, and he had made each one of them himself out of soap and cigar boxes.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 6/06)

“There was a joint across the street from KMOX, a tavern. We used to hang out in that tavern.”

The speaker is Harry Gibbs. He’s talking about how he got started in the radio business with the help of his friend Chuck Barnhart.

“Chuck was one of the most talented guys I’ve ever known. He was remarkable. He used to go on the air about 5:30 in the afternoon on KMOX and he would do a one-man soap opera. He played all the parts, and he did it strictly by winging it. He didn’t write it. I used to go down there and bum with him. “He was a copywriter. He was a show producer. Whatever you needed he could do. I needed a job bad and I had narrated this housing show on KMOX with Chuck.”

Barnhart, along with Post-Dispatch drama critic Jack Balch, took up Gibbs’ cause and pitched him to one of their acquaintances.

“They talked to Mike Henry at WTMV and they said ‘You’ve gotta take this guy.’ They bugged him every day. They’d call him and ask if he’d hired me yet. He finally said ‘Okay. Send this paragon of everything over to see me.’”

The broadcast career of Harry Gibbs is usually associated with his many years on KSD-TV (Channel 5) as Texas Bruce, host of the Wranglers’ Cartoon Club. Few people realize he started here in radio in the late ‘40s.

WTMV, at that time, was an interesting place. Located in East St. Louis’ Broadview Hotel on the mezzanine, the station, according to Gibbs, was much more free-wheeling than the business is today. “Mike had employed quite a few people who really needed work. Ray Schmidt, the sports guy, was one of those Mike referred to as his ‘crippled children.’ Ray would get pretty well loaded and he had a habit. In the middle of his sports cast, when he came to a stopping place, he’d put his head down on the table and sleep a little bit.”

Staff members in the small but mighty radio station were expected to wear many hats. “There was a program that I did at 11 in the morning,” says Gibbs. “It was just a sort of a thing where I talked to myself for an hour. It seemed like forever. I’d just open the mic and wing it. I was talking to anybody who was listening.

“I also wrote copy for the whole station. I can still remember writing ‘Merry Christmas’ spots for the funeral parlor. Anything that they were going to put on the air, I wrote. I had a sort of an office right next door to the men’s john and everybody went through there at one time or another.”

The radio business itself was very loose compared with later years. Gibbs’ voice could often be heard on several different stations in the same week, often on the same day. “I’d sit in that little office and write copy and then I’d come back across the river and do ‘Land We Live In,’ and then eventually the Pet Milk program.”

Musicians were the same way, with their groups playing on whichever stations found sponsors for them. And the pay was so low that anyone who had a family to support would take whatever work was available.

So when the opportunity to do a show on a network came along, Gibbs grabbed it. The show, sponsored by Pet Milk, was a conception of Gardner Advertising, headquartered in St. Louis. They wrote all the scripts, hired the talent, bought the time on the networks and produced the show at local radio studios. Mary Lee Taylor was heard on NBC and CBS during its run.

Harry Gibbs remembers that the Mary Lee Taylor Show started out as a women’s program that gave out recipes, but then Gardner decided to expand the offering. “They’d decided that the Mary Lee Taylor thing, which was just recipes, needed to be goosed up, so they threw this 15-minute soap opera into it.”

And that meant more work for St. Louis actors. “I was Jim and Tommye Rodemeyer was Sally.

Little Eddie Stemmler played Spud. Sue Cost was Mary Lee Taylor.”

Since the show was heard nationally, the work schedule was a lot more complicated than one might imagine. “We would do a broadcast from the KMOX studios in the morning for every market from St. Louis east. Then we’d come back in the afternoon and do it for everything west. Then we’d go to Technisonic Studios and do one special show for Utah, where Pet Milk was marketed under the name of Sego. That show was transcribed and shipped out.”

And in those days of wearing many professional hats, it was necessary to become a chameleon, adapting to one’s surroundings to meet the needs of station management. In addition to his appearances on a weekly network program, Harry Gibbs also found himself hosting a women’s show on another St. Louis station.

“There was a time when I was doing a morning talk show on KSD. Then I’d head over to KWK for a noon show sponsored by Biederman’s. The concept was that women in the listening audience would come to the studios with the most useless thing they could find in their house and then describe it on the air. The winner would get me for the rest of the day. I did all kinds of chores – whatever they wanted – and then would take them to the Chase for dinner.

“My favorites were two little girls from East St. Louis who won. They wanted to go to the Forest Park Highlands. I rode that roller coaster so much that I could practically drive it from memory by the end of the day.”
After several years of a professional roller coaster in St. Louis radio, Harry Gibbs jumped at the chance to host a kids’ show on the newest medium – television.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 5/2006.)

You can’t ever tell how Marvin Mueller, announcer at KMOX and star of the Uncle Remus Stories, will greet you. He has a perfectly normal voice but he scarcely ever uses it. One time he says hello or comments on the weather with a distinctly English accent or in a broad German – the next time he’s a tottering old Ozarkian or a kindly old Negro of the Southland. It’s no trick at all he says to change rapidly from one person into another by a simple modulation of the voice but whether it is or not – he’s a real artist at it.

Because of this unusual talent, Marvin figures in all of the dramas produced by the KMOX Players and his characterizations are so perfect that the illusion of the actual presence of as many as ten characters at once is created by him.

During the last four or five months since he’s been at KMOX he has “been” Calvin Coolidge, Joseph of Nazareth, Samuel Insull, Abraham Lincoln, George Bungle, Herbert Hoover as well as several hundred original characterizations. He is now heard as the kindly old Uncle Remus, the Optical Service Physician, and has a full-time announcing position.

He was in charge of a banquet at Washington University several years ago and since he was a constant radio listener, he decided to burlesque several of the most notable programs as a means of entertainment. He couldn’t seem to find the right people to help him with the idea and so he did it all himself! Later he decided to try his hand at radio and as an inspiration, he wrote a play titled “The Adventures of Lord Algy” in which he portrayed a ridiculous Englishman seeing the sights of America. He tried out at KWK and the program was such a success that it ran for twenty weeks.

Since that time he has been on WIL where he was featured in the Pirate Club program as Portugee Joe, Professor Pete, The Spider and other colorful figures.

Marvin is a Junior at Washington University – although he has now abandoned the idea of being an English and French professor – and makes excellent grades. Although he has never had any training in elocution, he is a member of Alpha Phi Omega, the national debating fraternity, and has studied public speaking.

For the most part, aside from his real talent, he is a merry sort of chap with deep brown eyes, brunette hair and a ruddy complexion. He is acclaimed as being one of the best authorities on the presentation of classical music programs on the air because of his studies of foreign languages.

His voice comes to you many times each day in plays or regular programs and if you didn’t know his trick, it would seem that he is a different person each time. As Uncle Remus, he glorifies Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox with a humor that is appealing to all ages of listeners and when the script calls for it, this amazing young man adds the singing of Southern songs to his list of accomplishments.

(Originally published in Radio & Entertainment 3/4/1933)