radio history

I have a final thought and recommendation to younger readers. Looking back now, I do wish I’d asked my parents and grandparents much more about their lives and the times in which they grew up.

My grandma was fascinated by a new invention in the 1920s called radio. It is she who I can thank for my interest, and later career, in radio and television. I recently came across a small booklet of hers which accompanied the 1929 radio receiver my grandparents purchased from the Nott-Atwater Company of Spokane, Wash., in which she kept track of radio stations she could pick up from her home in Libby.

Root Electric Company at 127 East Cedar (now Broadway) was displaying the Grebe Synchophase radio receiver. The Dickinson Piano Company featured the Zenith Long Distance radio, capable of picking up broadcasts from “as far as 1,500 miles away.” Even the H. O. Bell auto dealership on South Higgins offered the Radiola, priced from “$35 to $425 with convenient terms, if desired.”

In December 1923, Waldemar Kaempffert, a “noted technical expert,” described the transition from the “the first timid experiments” with radio signals to the birth of the “broadcasting business.” That business created a whole new language and job descriptions. There were terms like “Broadcast Studio,” “Power Room” and “Master Clock,” and job titles like “Director of Broadcasting,” “Power Man” and “Announcer.”

December 23, 1950 was a pivotal day in my life, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I was only four years old. A radio station, KLCB (the “LCB” part standing for Lincoln County Broadcasting), signed on the air for the first time in my hometown of Libby.