KNX LOS ANGELES - A 2020 CENTENNIAL STATION
By John F. Schneider, 2020
With the assistance of Jim Hilliker
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KNX LOS ANGELES - A 2020 CENTENNIAL STATION By John F. Schneider, 2020
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www.theradiohistorian.org Copyright 2020 - John F. Schneider & Associates, LLC (Click on photos to enlarge) Fred Christian (left) visits KNX many years after founding the station. The California Theatre in Los Angeles. A 1924 advertisement for KNX, the "California Theatre Radiophone". KNX 500-watt transmitter in 1926. Paul O’Hana is at
the
controls.            |
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In 1920,
Fred Christian left his employment as a Marconi shipboard radio
operator to
become the manager of the Electric Lighting Supply Company in Los
Angeles. In
addition to selling lighting fixtures, he began to offer the radio
parts that
tinkerers needed to build their own homemade radio sets. From a
back bedroom of his home, Christian also operated his 5-watt amateur
radio
station, 6ADZ. On or about September 10,
1920, he began broadcasting phonograph records borrowed from a local
record
store. Music transmission was not
prohibited by amateur operators at that time, and dozens of hams around
the
country were broadcasting on informal schedules. Christian,
operating at the bottom of the ham
bands on 200 meters (1500 kHz), was only the second radio station to
broadcast
in Los Angeles to that time. His aim was
to promote the sale of radio parts in his store by giving his customers
something to listen to. In 1920,
there were still no fixed regulations governing broadcasting, and the
first
stations operated under a variety of license classes, such as amateur,
experimental, or “commercial land station”.
(The renowned pioneer station KDKA debuted with a new
category called
“limited commercial” license under the call sign 8ZZ.)
But starting in December, 1921, the
Department of Commerce required all stations broadcasting news or
entertainment
to hold a “Limited Commercial” license, and so most of the handful of
stations
already broadcasting by that date obtained new licenses with new call
signs. By
March of 1922, there were 66 such licenses issue. Regrettably,
they were all required to
transmit their programs on one of just two frequencies– 360 meters (833
kHz)
for entertainment, or 485 meters (619 kHz) for market and weather
reports. Thus, Christian’s station 6ADZ
acquired the
call sign KGC, and it was now sharing a single frequency with about
eight other
broadcasters in the Los Angeles Basin.
Those stations met periodically to agree on a shared
operating schedule,
and KGC was only able to operate a few hours a week. In May of
1922, Christian made arrangements to broadcast live music from the
California
Theatre, a prominent silent movie house.
He built a new 50-watt transmitter (soon increased to 100
watts), and
moved his entire operation into the theatre.
The move necessitated a change in operating license, and
he was assigned
the new call sign, KNX, with the old KGC license being deleted shortly
afterwards. Christian’s was one of several
stations that
changed licenses that year, considered by the government then to simply
be the
transfer of a station from one license class to the other without an
interruption in service. Both licenses
were in the name of the Electric Lighting Supply Company, and Fred
Christian
was listed as the station manager and operator in both instances. Calling
itself “The California Theatre Radiophone”, KNX was now broadcasting
live music
four or five days a week, featuring Carli Elinor’s California Theatre
Concert
Orchestra and the music of the theatre’s organ.
A nightly newscast was also featured.
But finances to support the station were limited --
advertising was not
yet condoned on broadcast stations, and so the entire operation was
being
supported by the sale of radio parts at the store.
In
October, 1924, Christian sold KNX to Guy C. Earle, publisher of the Los
Angeles
Evening Express newspaper, who had the means to turn it into a
first-class
operation. Starting in 1923, stations
that agreed to transmit with at least 500 watts and abstain from
playing
recordings were eligible for the new Class “B” license and their own
dedicated
frequency, so Earle bought a new Western Electric transmitter and moved
KNX to
890 kHz. KNX was now “The Voice of
Hollywood” – on the air from morning to late night with sports, news,
informational talks, drama by the “KNX Players”, and live evening
broadcasts by
Abe Lyman’s Orchestra from the Hotel Ambassador. Earle
hired Carrie Preston Rittimeister to be his program director. She had experimented with paid programs at
another Los Angeles station, and soon had KNX on a paying basis five
nights
each week. The sponsors were local
companies seeking name recognition, and there was a minimum of direct
advertising in the programs themselves.
By 1925, KNX was showing an operating profit of $25,000. In 1929,
Earle signed a five-year contract with Paramount Pictures, moving the
KNX
studios onto the Paramount movie
lot. KNX was now the “Paramount-Express”
station. Taking advantage of its
Paramount connections, KNX became the first station to broadcast the
Academy
Awards in 1930. In 1929, KNX
was awarded 1050 kHz, one of two new clear channels the Federal Radio
Commission had assigned to Southern California.
A new 5,000-watt transmitter plant was erected in Sherman
Oaks in the
San Fernando Valley, and a star-studded 24-hour dedicatory program was
planned
for November 11, at which time KNX would debut its new powerful signal
for the
first time. When the dramatic moment
came to switch over to the new transmitter, radio listeners heard only
a
tremendous screech on the new frequency, and then – silence! After a few moments, the old 1 kW
transmitter was coaxed back onto the air.
It was several days before the engineers could sort out
the problem and settle
KNX into its new channel. Then they
discovered a new problem – the new 5,000-watt signal was not being
reaching out
as well as the old signal. Consulting
engineers were brought in from across the country to puzzle over the
case, and
they eventually determined that the fault was in the antenna – a 179
ft. wire
cage suspended between two 250-foot supporting towers.
The towers were resonating at the 1050
frequency, disrupting coverage. The
problem was ultimately solved by inserting porcelain insulators at the
base of
the towers. Guy Earle soon
sold his interests in the Evening Express newspaper and devoted all of
his
energies to KNX, now operating as the Western Broadcasting Company. One of California’s renowned engineers,
Kenneth Ormiston, , went to work planning to increase power on the
clear
channel frequency – to 10,000 watts in 1932, 25,000 in 1933, and
finally 50,000
watts in 1934. In all cases, the 1929
Western Electric 5,000-watt transmitter was used as a driver for the
high-powered
amplifiers built by Ormiston. After WLW
in Cincinnati was allowed to operate experimentally at 500 kW, plans
were drawn
up for a further increase to 250 kW, but the idea was abandoned in
favor of a
new half-wave self-supporting tower, constructed in 1935, which greatly
increased signal strength at a fraction of the cost of a huge
transmitter. In 1935,
Guy Earle bought the 20,000 square foot Motion Picture Hall of Fame
building at
5939 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, and rebuilt it into the new KNX
studio
building at a cost of $250,000. It
featured six studios suspended on floating floors. Studio
“A” was 30 x 60 feet, and Studio “B” featured
a new $35,000 Morton organ. Brand new
RCA studio equipment was installed throughout. KNX was
now a powerhouse station, with a powerful signal covering eleven
Western states
a night. It’s 1935 gross income of
$675,000 ranked it among the six highest-billing stations in the
country. But the F.C.C. became aware that
much of that
revenue was coming from the advertising of patent medicines, which the
Commission was seeking to eliminate from the airwaves.
It decided to make KNX into a test case, and
it set its license renewal for hearing over its advertisement of
Marmola, a
miracle fat-reducing product that the Federal Trade Commission
determined to be
ineffective and dangerous. The hearing
in October, 1935, did not go well, and the KNX license was now in
serious
jeopardy. In 1936, under
pressure over the license hearings, Earle sold KNX to the CBS network
for $1.25
million. It was the highest price ever
paid for a single radio station to that date.
KNX was now CBS’s key station on the West Coast, and would
soon become the
home base for CBS’s Hollywood program origination. In
January, 1937, CBS moved its Los Angeles network affiliation to KNX
from KHJ
and the Don Lee network, which caused a major realignment of network
affiliations up and down the West Coast.
Then on April 30, 1938, KNX and CBS moved into its new
$1.75 million Columbia
Square studio complex at 6121 Sunset Boulevard.
It would be the origination location for dozens of CBS
radio shows heard
nationwide over the next decade, featuring stars such as Jack Benny,
Bing
Crosby, Burns and Allen. (KMPC then moved
into the former KNX Sunset Boulevard building.) In
September, 1938, CBS debuted a new KNX transmitter complex on a 5-acre
parcel
in Torrance. A gleaming new RCA 50-D
transmitter was showcased in a streamlined domed building that was open
to the
public for regular tours. A new 500-foot
guyed tower propelled the KNX signal across all of the Western states
in the
evening hours. In March, 1941, KNX moved
to its present frequency of 1070 kHz after the nationwide NARBA treaty
adjustment. As network
radio transitioned to the disc jockey era of the 1950’s, KNX adopted a
middle-of-the-road format, featuring personalities like Steve Allen and
Bob
Crane, who broadcast his popular KNX morning show from 1957 to 1965
before
leaving to become the star of the TV series “Hogan’s Heroes”. In
September, 1965, vandals cut a guy wire, destroying the KNX tower. The station operated
from a 365-foot unused tower acquired
from KFAC until a new antenna could be built.
An experiment using both antennas as a directional array
during the 1960’s
was abandoned, but both towers still exist today. The 365-foot tower is
now the
KNX standby antenna, located inside a city park in Torrance. In April,
1968, KNX adopted an all-news format, which has successfully maintained
it as
one of the top ten news stations in the country. Entercom
Communications acquired KNX in 2017
when it merged with CBS Radio. KNX will
celebrate its 100th anniversary on September 10, 2020.
This article
originally appeared in the June 10, 2020, issue of RADIO WORLD REFERENCES:
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