Radio: Pioneer

Detroit’s WWJ was born August 20, 1920. Broadcasting was then mostly stutter and static, and reception was mostly a matter of cat’s whiskers and crystals. When the station was just eleven days old, its listeners were invited to hold “wireless parties” in their homes, to hear the first U.S. broadcast of election returns. A month later, WWJ (then called 8MK) aired radio’s first vocal program, a soprano singing The Last Rose of Summer.

Ever since then WWJ has been scoring radio firsts right & left. It claims to have broadcast the first play-by-play accounts of baseball and football games, World Series game (1920), prize fight, full symphony concert (with Ossip Gabrilowitsch and the Detroit Symphony). Walter Hampden, Fanny Brice, Fred Waring, Ty Cobb, Lillian Gish and Thomas E. Dewey (singing with an Owosso church choir) made their radio debuts over WWJ.

Last week WWJ celebrated its 25th anniversary, and reasserted its claim to being the world’s first commercial radio station. That claim used to be pooh-poohed by Pittsburgh’s powerful KDKA. This year the National Association of Broadcasters finally decided the question in WWJ’s favor; KDKA, it said, was ten and a half weeks younger.

The station, founded by Detroit News Publisher William E. Scripps, this year chalked up still another first: it was the first big network station to ban all electrical transcriptions.