Posted 7:18 PM by Gene

I've long dreamed of a show-business encyclopedia; failing that, we can hope for a Wikipedia. The Web is surfeited with information and information hobbyists, but it's so disjointed and hard to use as to make searches fruitless, as with so much Internet research. Browsing today I came across a site that claims to list America's first 100 licensed radio stations (who actually broadcast first may never be known), led by three of Westinghouse's. They're still on. (Remember Westinghouse? Founded by the inventor of the air brake, and once a rival to GE Bancorp? Now the stations are run by the sleazeballs of VIACON, and the trademark is shared among British Nuclear Fuels, a lighting distributor and a company making cheap HDTVs.) Many stations vanished by the mid-twenties, like A. C. Gilbert's WCJ in New Haven -- yes, the maker of the Erector set. Already the newspapers were thinking of their afterlife: nine on the list had publisher parents, like the current WWJ and WSB. There's KYW, born in Chicago, moved to Philadelphia, then to Cleveland, then back to Philadelphia. The Detroit Police Department owned KOP (!). Department stores owned them, Bamberger's (who?) most famously with WOR, long one of our blah-blah-blahiest outlets; John Wanamaker's of Philadelphia had station WOO (like Wanamaker's, long gone), while its soon-to-be-vanished competitor Strawbridge and Clothier ran WFI, which shared a frequency with another retailer's station WLIT (Lit Brothers); the two merged to form WFIL, predecessor of the TV station that gave us Dick Clark and IF IT BLEEDS, IT LEADS; the nearby Gimbel's owned WIP, later the second station nationally (it says) for the FRED FLINTSTONES of SPORT. Oddly enough, RCA, that powerhouse of radio and the G000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000GLE of the Twenties, is on the list but once, with the short-lived WDY in north Jersey. Some brothers named Warner started a station in Oakland, now KDIA -- not those brothers, who entered the biz three years later in Los Angeles with KFWB. (Just think; if they'd had Ken Fellata by their side they could have owned every broadcaster in America!) Outfits named Doron Brothers and William B. Duck ran stations, suggesting something dubious in the medium even then. The YMCA owned one (we can imagine what it would broadcast now). There were broadcasters named Portable Wireless Telephone Company in Stockton and the Radio Telephone Shop in Frisco; cellular was INEVITABLE. A list of our oldest continuous stations is no less interesting, not least for the startling fact that one of the oldest 100 is WDAS (originally WIAD), today a noxious mix of faux-black power and CHEAP CHANNEL P&G-PLEASIN' BABBITTRY. We'll give the last word to Buffalo: perhaps the first station to get a "temporary" federal license was owned, aptly enough, by two newspapers, one the Express, and Mark Twain would have appreciated its prophetic call letters: WPU.