(excerpted from a variety of chapters...)

THE THIRTIES

Cue the organist to give us a little of "Caprice Viennoise," then hold under, and cue Peter Grant, who will say...
Down the valley of a thousand yesterdays
Flow the bright waters of Moon River,
On and on, forever waiting to carry you
Down to the land of forgetfulness,
To the kingdom of sleep.
To the realm of
Moon River,
A lazy stream of dreams
Where vain desires forget themselves
In the loveliness of sleep.
Moon River,
Enchanting white ribbon
'Twined in the hair of night
Where nothing is but sleep.
Dream on, sleep on
Care will not seek for thee,
Float on, drift on,
Moon River ... to the sea.

Peter Grant was not the only announcer on Moon River to recite poetry, there were many others. One man who was fired was hired back really fast. Ken Linn "broke" the sweet and romantic format by reciting The Shooting of Dan McGrew at the lovers out there in radio land. The reason he was hired back, according to the story, the poem ahd been requested via cable from the Ducjess of Edinburgh. Moon River, at the time, was heard everywhere because that was in the thirties and WLW broadcast with 500,000 watts.

The story of the show's origin shows how radio was back then. The Moon River program began in 1930. Its creator was Edward Byron. Or, was it Powel Crosley, Jr.? Each had a hand in it, as did a violinist at WLW.

Mary Wood, a columnist for the Cincinnati Post & Times recalls: "Eddie Byron told me himself. It seems that up on Court Street during those Prohibition Days there was this place you could get a beer or whatever might interest you from the waitresses because it is rumored the place was run by a madam. Every night, after WLW signed off, Eddie and some of the staff musicians would go there for a beer. Well, one day Crosley called Eddie into his office and told Eddie he had just purchased a new organ for WLW. It was the organ he dedicated to his mother. Also he told Eddie, 'Beginning tomorrow night I'd like to have a nice program at midnight, featuring organ music and poetry. You'll need a nice theme song and a poem to get the program going. Oh, and have it on the air tomorrow night.' That was the way Crosley was: he wanted things done yesterday. After Eddie closed up the station that night he went down to join his friends for a beer. The WLW staff violinist was with him, playing music to entertain the ber drinkers and the ladies in attendance. While the rest of them relaxed and enjoyed themselves, Eddie drank beer and scribbled dozens of false starts on paper. After much beer, according to Eddie, what he wrote began to sound pretty good to him. So he recited it to the ladies while the violinist played "Caprice Viennoise" inthe background. There the ladies were, all in their kimonos, weeping. That was when Eddie knew he had a winner. And that was where Moon River was conceived."

Lots of people got fired while they were at WLW. but one woman holds two records: one for being fired the most from WLW, and then collecting cash for staying home and listening to herself on radio. Barbara Cameron was a wonderful singer who joined the singing DeVore Sisters when one sister decided to leave the group and get married. This was a moment in time when Moon River was recorded and sold to other stations, one of them being a southern city. Later, during one of Barbara's many departures from WLW, she tuned into the station and listened to herself on Moon River. She listened patiently to herself perform for nearly a year, realizing the station was rerunning some of the old transcriptions of former Moon River programs. Finally, she sent WLW a bill for her services. Poor WLW had to pay, because--simply put--that is the way union things are: perfromers are to be paid for their efforts whenever the station uses those efforts, whether "live" or from the library of yesteryear.

In the thirties WLW used 500,000 watts of power, got Moon River requests from Europe, and--as Mary Wood recalls--WLW blanketed the world. Around the Cincinnati area, you didn't even need a radio to hear the station. Turn on a faucet and out came WLW.

On May 2, 1934, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed a gold key on his White House desk (the same key President Wilson had used to open the Panama Canal twenty years before) and that was the moment, exactly at 9:30 p.m., the 500,000 watts of WLW were to activate themselves. It didn't quite work out that way, though. The 500,000 watt transmitter tubes were still warming up. But no matter, it's the thought that counts. WLW was then the most powerful station in the world, coming out of radios and water faucets everyhwere.

Powel Crosley, Jr. said, that evening meant so much to him, "It has been our ambition to increase WLW"s power from time to time as rapidly as techincal obstacles could be overcome in order to bring the voice of this station to those in remote parts of the country who might experience difficulty in getting good reception because of interference of static and other atmospheric disturbances. With each increase in power a large number of people have come to rely on WLW for the things that only racdio can bring into their homes. With this greater and greater audience has come a greater and greater responsibilities. The programs of this station must be built to please the greatest number of people possible. It must be regarded as a public service and always operated as such. We feel fully this responsibility to our listeners and I pledge again that we shall continue the operation of WLW for the good of the listening public."

The new 500,000 watt transmitter had twenty 100,000-watt tubes. These tubes got so hot they were cooled by water, five hundred gallons of water each minute. This was distilled water as in your electric steam iron. This water in turn got hot so it was cooled by 700 hundred gallons of tap water each minute. To keep the city from running out of water, WLW built a pond seventy-five feet square near the transmitter to re-cool the tap water and use it over and over again. Needless to say the pond never froze over in winter!

Radio hams will be pleased to note that six mercury vapor rectifier tubes rated at 450 amperes were used in the transmitter, the modulation transformers weighed in at near fifty tons and contained fourteen hundred gallons of oil. The 500,000-watt transmitter used nearly 15,500,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year. The antenna was new, too. Most broadcast stations started out with horizontal antennas, a line swaying in the air between two towers. By the time WLW came on the air with 500,000 watts, only four or five other radio stations were using vertical antenna: that is, a tower that stood straight up in the sky. The new antenna at WLW stood 831 feet tall, cost $46,243 to build, and changed forever the flight of sparrows. More than two hundred tons of downward pressure from the guy wires support it from the pushing and shoving of the wind. On a hot day, the tower "grows." It grows as much as six inches. The tower itself weighs 136 tons, and all of that weight rested on a piece of porcelain shaped like a cup.

But the new power posed nasty engineering problems, as has been suggested. So much power radiated from the tower that in some nearby homes the house lights would not turn off. It was also learned, though it was no surprise to the non-technical gaping at the thing, that the high tower was a dandy lightning rod. A special relay--orcut off--was rigged.Operated by an electric eye, it managedk to turn off the transmitter's plate voltage to the final amplifier--whenever lightning decided to have an electric go at the tower.

There were also problems outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. By the fall of 1934, CFRB in Toronto, Canada (690 kc) complained that WLW was causing interference at night. So, the FCC decided on December 21 that WLW could still broadcast at 500,000 during the daylight hours, in every direction, but it would have to be directional at night. The engineering staff created the first directional antenna for vertical angle suppression.

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The Beginning

The Forties

J. Shouse and Public Service