Radio

In the early days of baseball broadcasting, there was no sophistication. It was every station for itself, with three different stations broadcasting all the games in St. Louis.

At first, in 1926, it seemed the baseball clubs gave no thought to having radio broadcast their games. KMOX assigned an announcer to go to the ballpark and give the listeners periodic summaries of what was happening, but this practice was stopped after a few weeks because the station balked at the expense of the service.
Later that year, the Cardinals won the World Series in seven games, and local listeners could hear some of the games through a national chain broadcast.

As a result of this success on the diamond, the next year attitudes changed, and three radio stations were at Sportsman’s Park broadcasting play-by-play for all Cardinals’ and Browns’ home games. On KMOX, listeners heard Garnett Marks (although he took air names requested by his sponsors – Rhino Bill and Otto Buick). KWK’s general manager Thomas Patrick Convey did duty under the air name Thomas Patrick. William Ellsworth announced for WIL.

Listeners had their choice, based on which announcer they preferred. These announcers and their engineers had to set up, not in the ballpark, but on the roofs of buildings outside the park. Within a couple months, Western Union lines were installed and all three stations were invited inside the park.

But two years later management of one station in the trio had a change of heart.

WIL’s William Ellsworth announced his station would no longer carry baseball. He told a Globe-Democrat reporter a special music program would instead be broadcast on game days. It was a response, he said, to “many listeners who have written to Station WIL requesting a musical program during the hours when the whole dial seems to be covered with the pandemonium of explanations and vocal flourishes concerning one set-to in one city to the utter ignoring of any other form of entertainment whatsoever.”

The general manager of KMOX, Nelson Darragh, was not terribly upset with the WIL decision. “We personally remained in baseball broadcasting,” said Darragh, “because I believe Station KMOX is the only one in St. Louis which can reach the section of the country which is particularly interested in St. Louis’ teams.”

Thomas Convey at KWK, took issue with Ellsworth’s proclamations about audience reaction to baseball on the radio, saying, “In fact, I have 16,000 names signed in petitions asking that KWK and its announcers come back on the air in the play-by-play accounts and descriptions of the games which became so popular last year.”

And so it was that in 1929, baseball fans lost one option for their listening pleasure in the St. Louis market. KMOX and KWK continued the broadcasts while WIL broadcast recorded musical selections each afternoon. The Browns posted a record of 79 wins and 73 losses, while the Cardinals finished at 78-74.

One year later, the owner of WIL, Lester A. “Eddie” Benson overruled his general manager and personally returned to Sportsmen’s Park to broadcast the local games for WIL. Two years later, WIL’s sports director Dave Parks described the situation in the Sportsman’s Park pressbox in an article in Radio and Entertainment magazine: “There are three booths near the roof of the grandstand in Sportsman’s Park. The eastern section is used by KMOX, the western section by KWK, and in the middle sits the Old Reporter for WIL. There is no need whatever for him to ask what is going on, because France Laux and John Harrington gave him no opportunity to forget that he’s at a baseball game.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 5/2009)

St. Louis Chamber of Commerce News 11/4/30

With a special program by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra under Guest Conductor E. Fernandez Arbos of Madrid, Spain, “The Spirit of St. Louis” went upon the air over station KMOX Sunday, in the most unusual campaign of civic advertising by radio ever undertaken in America. The program was the first of a series of 20 to be presented on consecutive Sundays at the same time (5 to 6 p.m. Central standard time) which will tell of the romantic and true adventures out of which the Spirit of St. Louis was born, together with the story of the significance of St. Louis in the economic, commercial, educational and cultural life of the United States. It is the first time in the history of American radio that a major symphony orchestra has been used to advertise a city’s resources.

How out of the fur-trading post of St. Louis the great trails – the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and the road to California developed, and how through them the great west was won and made American, was told by “The Spirit of St. Louis” in the first of the series.

The Chamber of Commerce and the Industrial Club of St. Louis are collaborating in providing authentic information about the city and its resources and those things which make St. Louis a great city in which to live and work and play. The St. Louis Symphony Society donates the services of the orchestra and conductor for the broadcasts and KMOX, “The Voice of St. Louis,” has given the time on the air without any charge.

Next Sunday at the same hour, “The Spirit of St. Louis” in its own words will tell of the significance of the railroads of St. Louis.

(Unsigned article)

Kenneth Wright is the new organist heard in KMOX daytime programs. He is also heard as “Sad Sam,” the accordion man teamed with “Sunny Joe” Wolverton , the banjo wizard.

Mr. Wright is well known to theatre and radio audiences in almost all of the Middle West cities. The credit is given him for having originated the use of a microphone in connection with his organ playing in theatres, and he has been billed as the “singing organist.”

He claims Great Bend, Kansas as his home and bachelorhood as his state.

Ruth Hulse Nelson is still featured during KMOX nighttime broadcasts.

(Originally published in Radio and Entertainment, 10/15/32)

It was his first day on the job as the voice of Buster Brown on KMOX in 1926. No one, not even Bryson Rash himself, envisioned that day as the beginning of a career that would lead him to the job of network White House correspondent. 

Rash was 12 years old when he made his debut as the child spokesman for Buster Brown Shoes. He’d won the audition held by the company and thus earned the chance to work on the fledgling station, in which Brown Shoe had ownership interest. He told St. Louis Globe-Democrat reporter Vicki Ostrolenk: “I was on the air Monday and Friday evenings telling tall stories to kiddies, and giving little talks on safety, being neat and clean – the regular Boy Scout routine.”

The job, he said, required him to dress the part, complete with short pants and a bowl-type haircut, which led the kids at school to taunt him as a big, fat sissy. The next year his voice began to change and the radio job quickly ended.

Several years later Rash heard of an opening at KWK and he got the job. Within a year he was back at KMOX, this time as a news reader and commentator. But by then he had accumulated plenty of seasoning from the loose atmosphere at KWK.

That station’s studios were on the ninth floor of the Chase Hotel . Owner/manager Thomas Patrick Convey was a showman and promoter whose wife helped run the station and whose son was one of the main on-air personalities.

Rash was profiled in the Washington Post July 16, 1950, where reporter Sonia Stein wrote of his KWK experience: “He had news scripts set on fire by playful colleagues while he read them, and has had to light matches to read scripts by when some playful character doused the lights.”

The article also told how he gained experience as a sports broadcaster: “He announced…his first wrestling match the night he saw his first wrestling match. Comfortably ensconced behind the station’s sports announcer in a free seat, Bryson was drafted into service by the sports man who was suddenly taken ill. ‘Put the show on for me, will you? I’ll be right back,’ he said. Bryson put it on and kept it on (since the man never came back) with the help of the engineer who kept hissing, ‘That’s a Nelson. That’s a flying mare.’”

In 1936 Bryson Rash left St. Louis to take an offer at WLW in Cincinnati , but within a month CBS had moved him to WJSV in Washington , DC . A year later NBC hired him and gave him some high-visibility jobs. Then the Federal Communications Commission told NBC it couldn’t run two separate networks, so the company spun off the network Rash worked for, making him an ABC employee.

From that point, the star of Bryson Rash seemed to rise quickly. He became a network commentator, chairman of the President’s Birthday Ball in Washington , head of the national fund drive for Infantile Paralysis, P.R. chair for the American Cancer Society and the announcer who introduced the president on ABC broadcasts. In December of 1949, ABC sent Rash to Key West to cover President Truman’s visit. Within months, Rash was named ABC’s White House correspondent. Another up-and-comer, Walter Cronkite, was his counterpart at CBS.

Rash also migrated to television. He was the only broadcaster to cover the test explosion of the hydrogen bomb in 1956. He is a member of the National Press Club Hall of Fame, and became known as one of the capital’s characters, proudly wearing a bowtie on every telecast. He once told a columnist he owned over 100 of them. He also bragged that his “first job was with KMOX.” The original “big, fat sissy” had the last laugh.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 10/06)

Back in 1939, one local brewery’s name was synonymous with sports in St. Louis. They sponsored broadcasts of pre-game and post-game baseball broadcasts on the radio and daily sports updates on five local radio stations. In fact, they practically wrote the book on sports sponsorships and broadcasts. No, it wasn’t Anheuser-Busch.

Sports reporting was a big deal in 1939. There were regular, daily sports programs on KMOX, KWK, KXOK, WIL and WEW. Those men who anchored the shows were well-known among fans, so much so that the Hyde Park Brewery sponsored the shows and then took out adds in local newspapers and The Sporting News telling listeners where and when to tune in for a dose of sports.

While no breweries were involved in sponsoring play-by-play (Those sponsorships were snapped up by companies like General Mills, The Independent Packing Company and Socony-Vacuum Oil Company) Hyde Park managed to snag sponsorships of pre-game and post-game shows on KWK and KMOX, both of which carried the home games.

In those days, the radio play-by-play broadcasts were only of the home games played at Sportsman’s Park at Grand and Dodier. St. Louis had two teams then, so there were broadcasts practically every day of either the Cardinals or the Browns. Interest in the Browns probably waned quickly during the 1939 season. The team ended the year with a won-lost record of 43 – 111, some 64 ½ games out of first place. The Cardinals had a respectable 92 – 61 season.

And the ads for Hyde Park Beer seemed to be everywhere, every day. In addition to the ads heard around the game broadcasts, the Hyde Park Brewery sponsored three daily sports reports on KWK, two daily reports on KXOK, eight reports a day on WIL and a daily sports report on WEW. The latter station is particularly interesting since it was owned by St. Louis University, a Jesuit institution, but beer ads ran on it.

These sponsorships underwrote the programs of all of St. Louis’ celebrity sports broadcasters at the time: Alex Buchan, Cy Casper, Bill Durney, Allen Franklin, France Laux, Herb MacCready, Neil Norman, Johnny O’Hara and Ray Schmidt.

To be sure, there were many other beers brewed in St. Louis, but Hyde Park’s radio advertising was pervasive because of its identification with sports.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 5/09)

Information for this article was provided by the St. Louis Public Library’s Media Archives

Even though they competed for advertising dollars, there have been times when radio has really needed newspapers. In the case of an East St. Louis radio station, the newspaper wouldn’t cooperate.

Lester Cox, a Springfield, Mo., businessman, came to East St. Louis in 1935 to build a radio station. The local economy was still reeling from the Depression, but business investment was starting to pick up. Cox hired William West, the former general manager of KMOX, to run his station, which was incorporated as Mississippi Valley Broadcasting.

A construction permit was issued by the Federal Communications Commission in February of 1935 over the objections of the Pulitzer Publishing Company, Thomas Patrick Convey and Benson Broadcasting.

It seems Pulitzer, which owned KSD in St. Louis, Convey (KWK) and Benson (WIL), didn’t want competition on the east side of the metropolitan area. The companies argued to the F.C.C. that they were already providing adequate radio service to the area. The argument was overwhelmingly rejected.

Lester Cox was very successful in his work. He was president of Ozark Auto Supply and owned two radio stations in Springfield. He was invited to speak to the East St. Louis Chamber of Commerce to tell them of his plans for WTMV. “I make my money someplace else and spend it in radio,” Cox told the forum. “But the Springfield stations are making money and we expect WTMV to do likewise.”

It may have been this sentiment that raised red flags in the offices of the East St. Louis Journal. The local daily paper had given minimal coverage to the new radio station, but in the 1930s, many newspapers viewed the radio industry as a major threat. An ongoing “press/radio war” was being waged to prevent radio from broadcasting news, which was direct competition to the newspapers, and the radio sales staffs went after the same advertisers as did newspaper salespeople.

Possibly for these reasons, Cox and his new radio station were deprived of much of the hoopla that surrounded the sign-on of other stations in the market. There were some published news reports, but once the station was in full operation, there were no features published. For a time, the newspaper even refused to print WTMV’s broadcast schedule, although it ran the schedules of stations in St. Louis. And this means there is very little history of the station available.

Cox and manager West then set out to lure some of the market’s best-known people to help manage the operation. Woody Klose was brought in from KSD as program manager; Fred Liggett resigned as KSD’s chief engineer to move to the same slot at WTMV; and J.C. Etherington left a sales position at KMOX to become sales manager. A contract was signed with the downtown East St. Louis Broadview Hotel to locate studios on the mezzanine level, and the station’s broadcast tower was erected on the roof. Klose got the immediate attention of the public when he announced open auditions for on-air talent.

Over 100 applicants showed up the first day. It was, after all, still a difficult time economically, and many people needed the income that might be derived from appearances on the radio. Klose immediately announced that auditions would continue for a solid week to handle the crowds, and special night auditions were scheduled for “working girls” who couldn’t get to the studios during the day. Chief announcer Jack Edmunds, who had worked with NBC, was enlisted to help screen applicants.

There was another promise made to the Chamber of Commerce during that speech by Cox: “Every dollar of profit out of the station will be put back into it, until you have a station second to none in the country.” Things have certainly changed in the radio business.