Chicago's Radio and Television Industry: A Quest for World Class, #5

By Edward Sharp

The story of how Chicago became America's first radio program production center only to see it industry collapse at the beginning of the television era. A history of entertainment program production in Chicago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: World Class Chicago Publishing LLC
• Release date: Dec 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990796909

Book preview

CHICAGO’S RADIO & TELEVISION INDUSTRY

A QUEST FOR WORLD-CLASS

Volume Five in a Series about Chicago’s Popular Culture

A History of the Radio & Television Program Production Industry in Chicago

By Edward Sharp

Published by World-Class Chicago Publishing LLC

www.worldclasschicago.com

© Copyright 2014 All Rights Reserved

ISBN 13 978-0-9907969-0-9

Contents

Prelude to Radio & Television Program Production in Chicago

A History of Chicago’s Broadcast Program Production Industry

1920’s

The first international star of radio comes out of Chicago - Sears launches WLS and the Barn Dance - Robert McCormick becomes a radio broadcaster and tries to convert newspaper comics into radio serials - A television company starts in Chicago before the radio networks form in New York - Amos n' Andy starts the Golden Age of Radio.

1930’s

A WGN radio drama starts the soap operas - The largest program production company grows in Chicago - NBC makes Chicago a center of program production - A Chicago ad-man starts the syndicated program business -

1940’s

Radio quiz and game shows become popular - A Chicago producer becomes a master of the giveaway radio show - Another Chicago producer has a hit quiz show using kids - The Prairie Farmer becomes the largest entertainment company in the Midwest - Four television stations start broadcasting in Chicago without a supply of programs -

1950’s

Chicago's radio quiz shows are the first to television - A Chicago producer becomes a pioneer of filmed and syndicated filmed programming - The television soap opera starts in Chicago - The largest producer of television entertainment programs is a former furtive radio producer - Network program production ends in Chicago -

1960’s

ABC kills a Chicago entertainment institution - The Barn Dance is reborn on WGN-TV - A Chicago mercantile magnate becomes a media mogul - UHF television stations commence broadcast - A small Chicago UHF station produces more local programs than all the larger VHF stations - Soul Train starts at the Board of Trade -

1970’s

Marshall Field builds a broadcasting empire - The Tribune Company builds a transcontinental broadcasting company - The last Chicago independent producers are bought out -

1980’s-2000’s

Field sells their Chicago media company to a national conglomerate - The Tribune Company buys a Los Angeles studio and competes against Chicago's independent producers -

Lessons Learned from History

REFERENCE SOURCES

Prelude to Radio & Television Program Production in Chicago

The networks that own us need our profits and must continually nudge us for more profits. This city is not their creative zone. This is their vital money zone.

Sterling Quinlan, Vice-President of ABC, Chicago,1961

"’Kick in teeth’ to Chi Seen in Grab of Garroway Time" and in the inimitable journalese of Variety, the demise of Dave Garroway’s ill-fated Garroway at Large television show was headlined in the May 16th, 1951 issue. Variety’s headline may have been figuratively inelegant; but nonetheless accurate, for the Garroway at Large show was the keystone of Chicago’s television production industry, and its termination marked not the end but the beginning of the end of Chicago as a national television programming production center.

During the early years of television before the national broadcast networks had assumed near total control over program production, a small television program production community, by necessity, had developed in Chicago. For the creative community of Chicago, television offered a new opportunity to perform and provided an alternative employment. But when NBC abrogated Garroway at Large, despite the show’s high national ratings and innovative content, Chicago’s future as a television entertainment production center was portended: it would shortly be no more. The last network programs originating from Chicago left the airwaves by 1957 and thereafter the only television program production in Chicago under network auspices were local talk or soft new shows produced only for compliance with Federal Communications Commission regulations. During the 1970’s, the best locally produced television program with a network sponsorship, in the view of the local television community, was such a soft news program, Sorting It Out, a typical fare being exotic pets of Chicago including a pizza eating crab. From Garroway at Large to a pizza eating crab, perhaps, there was no other way for Variety to be more accurate than ‘Kick in Teeth to Chi’.

The disassembling and destruction of Chicago’s television entertainment production community by the New York-based broadcast networks was hardly a surprise to knowledgeable observers of network behavior. The networks had done it before to Chicago. It was in Chicago, not New York or Los Angeles, where the soap was added to opera to form a new mass entertainment art form. Before television, radio provided entertainment to the masses and Chicago was one of the main production origins. Radio to Chicago would be as theater is to New York or motion pictures to Los Angeles. The radio and television broadcast business is one of the most Government regulated and controlled industries in the modern economy and yet it is unique in that it was the industry that sought regulation from a reluctant Government to save the industry from ruin. When radio was in its infancy the elected national leaders did not want to meddle in a business that they might inadvertently impair but by the mid-1920’s radio broadcasting was in a state of anarchy as too many broadcasters on the same frequencies caused interference. The Congress had to bring order out of chaos and an era of Government law and regulation commenced. Success in the broadcast industry would be as much determined in a Government committee hearing room or in the Senate cloakroom as in the consumer marketplace. And yet even when the Government was formulating new laws or regulations that would determine the destiny of Chicago’s broadcast and program production industry, Chicago’s powerbrokers, its vested interests, its opinion makers never became involved in the established political process and never leveraged its considerable political power to protect the City’s cultural corporate assets so it wasn’t too difficult for the New York-based corporations to do what they wanted to do. In the city that was one of the origins of the broadcast entertainment industry, the tradition of both Chicago’s civic leaders and its citizenry has been to ignore the industry and allow history to repeat. It is a self-inflicted wound.

A History of Chicago’s Broadcast Program Production Industry

1920’s

Barely a year after the Great War (World War I) mercifully ended, the commercial radio era commenced in America when the Westinghouse Corporation received the first Government license for a commercial radio station, KDKA, in Pittsburgh. Less than a year later Westinghouse started broadcasting in Chicago at station KYW, the first station in Chicago. Within months, hundreds of small radio stations were broadcasting across America but mostly in the Eastern more populated half. Americans were fascinated by the box with sound in it just as they had been fascinated two decades earlier by pictures that moved when a viewer looked into a box built by Thomas Edison. Yet neither the radio broadcaster nor the radio listener was too sure what radio was supposed to be. It was the technology that fascinated them not the programming. One Chicagoan immediately saw radio not as a novelty but as a grand opportunity and he would become America’s first radio star: Wendell Hall.

Wendell Woods Hall was a young musician, song composer, singer and war veteran working in Chicago for a music publisher, Ted Browne, as a song-plugger. Prior to the war, Hall had had some local success as an entertainer known as the singing xylophonist. One day in early 1922 while working in a loop music store, someone had a radio and demonstrated it for Hall. Hall immediately realized how this technology could change the world; at least his world. Hall spent his day trying to sell music by singing to people who came to him but with radio he, in effect, would be going to them. Wendell Hall resolved to become a radio singer and a store song-plugger no more. Hall evidently possessed musical talent as well as karmic perfect timing. When Hall went to KYW, Chicago’s first radio broadcaster had been on the air only half a year and had broadcast nothing but the Chicago Civic Opera with its popular native diva Mary Garden; but the opera season was ending, forcing the station to look for something else to broadcast just as Wendell Hall arrived. As a published composer and veteran of the live music circuits, Hall had credentials and he was more than willing to work for nothing. After the opera season ended in spring 1922, Wendell Hall, the singing xylophonist, premiered on KYW with several other local singer-entertainers. Several days after the broadcast, mail arriving at KYW’s studio indicated it was Wen Hall who had had the most audience impact. Hall already knew that because the day after his broadcast, sales of his sheet music in the Loop music stores had significantly increased. Wendell Hall had become Chicago’s first radio star.

Following the example of Wendell Hall, more musicians and song-pluggers willing to work for nothing beseeched KYW for an opportunity to perform. But performing on radio was a different world than performing in a theater. KYW, as with all of the early broadcasters, did not have a house orchestra; therefore, the performer had to sing without backup or provide it themselves. Hall, himself, quickly tired of hauling his xylophone into and out of a radio studio everyday so he switched to the more portable ukulele, better known then as a banjo uke, and the singing xylophonist became the red-headed music-maker. Worse yet for some, singing in a small windowless room in front of a large piece of iron proved too daunting. Musicians who had performed in front of large crowds without fear would lock up when alone in front of a piece of metal; other performers gave flat lifeless performances when they did not have an audience for immediate feedback. Wendell Hall was the first to understand this aural, blind entertainment medium. When he was not singing, he would tell a little joke or do a monologue. He would not allow dead air to lose the unseen audience’s attention. Hall was able to project personality and establish a relationship with an audience that was unable to give immediate reaction. Every musician, comedian or disc-jockey who followed has had to do likewise to be successful in radio. Wendell Hall established the model of the successful radio personality.

Wendell Hall’s inaugural at KYW had been so well-received that the station offered him a job as a staff artist in 1922. He well may be the first artist to draw a check for working in Chicago radio at $25 dollars a week or about fifty cents an hour. Radio was not yet a road to riches, but Hall’s radio exposure did stimulate increased sales of his musical compositions at sheet music stores. With a daily regularly scheduled radio program, Wendell Hall was the first to discover what every talent to follow would: radio, or any mass-market entertainment distribution technology, devours original material at a prodigious rate. A performer on the old Vaudeville circuits with a successful act could go years before it was necessary to develop new material; but with radio, repeating the jokes or monologues risked losing the audience. Hall had to continue composing new songs throughout his stint at KYW in 1922. One song penned in 1922, It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’ became his signature song. While exposure on KYW stimulated sheet music sales in the local music stores, eventually Hall realized if he was going to expand his music to a national market, he would have to leave KYW and go to the nation.

In 1923, Wendell Hall borrowed his father’s car and left KYW for a radio tour, the first known national radio tour. Without advanced planning, scheduling or advertising and while sleeping in his father’s car, it was more barnstorming than touring; but again Hall’s timing was propitious. The radio stations in the provinces surrounding Chicago had just began broadcasting and they were having difficulty finding programming. Even though broadcasters were not yet taking any money from commercial sponsors, phonograph record companies threatened to sue if they played their records as did ASCAP (American Society of Composers and Producers) which thus limited the broadcaster to local musicians who would sing classic music if the station was to avoid my risk of a possible lawsuit that they did not have the funds to defend. When Wendell Hall arrived at a radio station and asked to perform his own copyrighted material for free, the station owner was only too willing to oblige Hall with a microphone and all the airtime he wanted. But before going to the radio station, first Hall would go to the town music stores to assure they had an ample inventory of his sheet music. After exhausting his material in one town, Hall would travel to the next town that had a radio broadcaster. Over four months and 35 cities starting in Iowa, Wendell Hall’s national reputation grew. When he arrived in New York City, the Victor Phonograph Record company signed Hall to a contract and released It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’. It became a bestseller, the first song to become a hit due to radio exposure.

Wendell Hall’s radio barnstorming in 1923 had made him a national recording star and his perfect timing continued. In late 1923 the National Carbon Company decided to sponsor a radio musical variety program for their battery division, the Eveready Battery Company. (National Carbon was a trust company formed in Chicago in 1899 from six existing carbon companies. It was bought by the Carbide Company of New York who then built the landmark Carbide and Carbon Building on Michigan Avenue that was restored as a hotel in the first years of the 21st century). National Carbon’s motivation was not commercial advertisement. Other than the product name in the show’s title, there were no commercial messages during the broadcast; on the contrary, National Carbon made money every time someone purchased a home radio as the first generation receivers required a battery to operate. National Carbon hoped the Eveready Hour would spur sales of radios and thus Eveready batteries. And who better than Wendell Woods Hall, radio’s first celebrity, to headline the Eveready Hour?

The Eveready Hour premiered in December, 1923, broadcast from an A.T.& T. owned radio station in New York. The newspaper critics loved it as did the listening audience. Early in 1924 the Eveready Hour was broadcast simultaneously over all of A.T.&-T.’s radio stations, the first regularly scheduled network entertainment program. National Carbon was estimated to be spending $5000.00 a week on the Eveready Hour, but radio and battery sales increased by far more. By mid-1924 National Carbon sent Hall, now known as Eveready Red, on a radio tour of Canada, England and France. The French didn’t seem to understand American vernacular or humor but the English and Canadians did. It Ain’t Gonna to Rain No Mo’ proved as popular there as in the American Midwest. When Wendell Hall returned to Chicago in 1925, he was America’s first international radio star. Like star athletes later in the century, Hall was asked to do product endorsements. The Ludwig Instrument Company of Chicago, perhaps better known later as Ringo Starr’s drum-maker, signed Hall to endorse a line of ukuleles. Hall genuinely seemed to like the instrument and his endorsement immediately boasted sales. Wendell Hall had demonstrated how to use radio as entertainment, he also certified the commercial power of radio.

Yet five years after the first commercially licensed radio station, KDKA Pittsburgh, had commenced broadcasting in 1920, radio entertainment programming was still rather callow and uncertain, offering little but various music genres and news events. The Eveready Hour had shown what a musical variety program could do, but many recording or Broadway stars were still fearful that one badly received performance over radio would permanently end their career and ASCAP continued to view radio the way farmers view locust, as a threat to be feared and destroyed. Wendell Hall had refused to join ASCAP and even told broadcasters they were free to use his music any time and as often as they wanted as long as they told the audience it was a Wendell Hall song. Some New York stations were broadcasting Broadway plays live which weren’t readily compatible with radio as no one described action that the listeners could not see.

These first radio broadcasts may have been pedestrian and awkward but several Chicago businesses came to recognize radio’s commercial possibilities. Sears and Roebuck was a Chicago-based retailer but their main consumer market was rural, small town America. To reach their potential customer base, Sears and the other mail-order giants, had relied on the weekly general interest and literary magazines, such as the Chicago Ledger, Saturday Blade and the Evening Lamp, that appealed to rural residents. With radio, Sears could see a direct channel to their rural customers. Sears was a retailer who endeavored to sell anything and everything that people might want to buy including radio receivers; but, following the same logic that had motivated National Carbon, if you want people to buy a radio you have to provide them with programs that they would want to hear.

On April 12th, 1924, Sears inaugurated its new radio station WLS (World’s Largest Store) from its Westside headquarters with the theme of bringing the world to the farm. The WLS musical variety show, the WLS Barn Dance, premiered a week later on April 19th with musical performers that Sears’ producers believed would appeal to a rural constituency. Wendell Hall, the red-headed music man, was there but the man who garnered the most audience attention was the announcer and master of ceremonies, George D. Hall (no relation to Wendell). Hall seemed to possess a voice and presence congruent with the Country music genre. He quickly became a known commodity across the rural heartland and moved to Nashville, Tennessee to start, produce and announce his own Barn Dance style musical variety show. On one occasion in late 1927, a classical music program was being broadcast prior to Hall’s Barn Dance and Hall, who probably didn’t much appreciate classical music or opera, commenced his Barn Dance program with the announcement, for the past hour we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera; but now we will present ‘The Grand Olde Oprey’ and with that an American musical institution was begot with roots that go back to Chicago via George D. Hall. The WLS Barn Dance did become immensely popular across the rural Midwest and soon spawned America’s first radio Country music star: Bradley Kincaid.

Kincaid had come to Chicago to be a student at the YMCA College (later called George Williams College) and paid for his education by playing with his own musical quartet. In 1926, Kincaid heard that the Barn Dance producers were looking for new talent; he auditioned and his college quartet was given a small slot on the show. Initially Kincaid and his group seemed to be rather ordinary and forgettable, but when Kincaid began to sing old ballads he had learned as a youngster in his native Eastern Kentucky, it found and touched an audience making Kincaid, who called himself the Kentucky Mountain Boy, famous as the dean of folk singers on WLS. He traveled across rural Indiana, Ohio and Illinois looking for and learning traditional Folk ballads that he would then sing on the WLS Barn Dance and publish in a songbook. Eventually the record companies in Chicago took notice