On the Very Air We BreatheOn the Very Air We Breathe
Dr. Clayton E. Crosland, associate vice president of one of the Southeast’s finest finishing schools, wasn’t precisely sure what to say, but he did not wish to be misunderstood.
“This is Ward-Belmont, Nashville,” he said, a bit too loudly, into his “microphone.”
The contraption wasn’t entirely foreign—quite like a telephone without the ear-piece—but it was most modern. After a pause, Crosland spelled out the name of the school, as if to make sure: “W-A-R-D—B-E-L-M-O-N-T.”
He continued, “We have today installed a radio sending station and will tonight broadcast the concert by Mr. Philip Gordon, the distinguished American pianist.”
Crosland may have been on the air, but he was also on a stage. In the auditorium before him, a large gathering of poised young ladies in ruffles and bows, some attended by their even more put together mothers and fathers, canted forward in hushed curiosity, taking it on faith that Dr. Crosland’s voice was, in fact, spiriting out through the open air and reaching somebody—up to two hundred miles away, they’d been led to understand. Center stage, beneath a grand piano, sat two more microphones. Black cables converged at stage left, where a rolltop desk held glowing vacuum tubes and black machinery, all connected to a wire that ran out into a hallway and up to the roof.
The assembler of this electrical conduit, a sixteen-year-old with a severe haircut and a long jaw, stood off to the side. He was listening through hard plastic headphones plugged into a warm monitoring amplifier of his own construction. John H. DeWitt Jr., “Jack” as he was called, was well known to Crosland and the other school officials. He lived just a block away, in the shady green bower of Belmont Heights, a brow of hill capped by the wedding-cake splendor of Ward-Belmont’s campus with its fountains and statues. By this evening, in the spring of 1922, he was well established as the local radio boy. The broadcasting antenna he built in his back yard was a neighborhood landmark. He rode around on a bicycle rigged with electrical gear and a spiderweb antenna, listening to his friends transmit from his homebuilt sending station. Jack had already visited the Ward-Belmont campus two years before, when he demonstrated his wireless telegraph to the girls of the Agora Club. He had tuned in and decoded odd, buzzing dots and dashes from as far away as the Great Lakes, which the young ladies had found “novel and unusual.”
Moreover, as Dr. Crosland well knew, Jack’s family meant a great deal to the school itself. His mother was Rebekah Williams Ward, whose father William was the Ward in Ward-Belmont. He had founded Ward Seminary, a finishing school that merged in 1913 with Belmont School. Hailed as one of the finest academies for Southern women, Ward-Belmont rarely trafficked in things futuristic, yet here it was making local history. WDAA, as it was called, was the third radio station licensed in Tennessee and the first in Nashville.
The recital by Mr. Gordon was enthusiastically received, and before it was over four or five messages came in through the school’s telephone switchboard from people who were picking up the program clearly and with great satisfaction.
The news sent a flush of surprise and wonder through the auditorium. Invisible waves really were spreading out from the school’s roof like ripples in an ethereal pond—racing north right through the walls of the sturdy homes on Sixteenth and Seventeenth Avenues and over the noisy automobile and trolley traffic of downtown. They rippled east, across Centennial Park with its mute, majestic Parthenon; west, across the Civil War battlements of Fort Negley; and south, to Franklin, Brentwood, and dozens of surrounding burgs.
The waves radiated out to and over the city’s hilly perimeter and across vast acreages of the farms, verdant forests, and meandering creeks of Middle Tennessee. They crackled against the bell towers of the city’s mighty universities—all-white Vanderbilt and all-black Fisk. They outran the steam locomotives that pulled passengers and freight out of the city toward Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Atlanta, and points beyond. They pierced the miasma of oily smog that roiled up out of the railroad gulch and cloaked the clock tower of Union Station. They ricocheted off the broad shingle roof of the Ryman Auditorium. They raced up and down the serpentine Cumberland River, which churned with paddle wheelers, packet boats, and cargo barges. They went unnoticed by the evangelists and anarchists who bellowed and proselytized where Broadway, the city’s aortal artery, terminated at First Avenue and the river. They overpassed the shacks and flophouses of Black Bottom, the African American ghetto south of Broadway, which rang with blues music and violence. They moved at the speed of light, carrying a message of unstoppable change.
“I think my interest in radio broadcasting first came about when I heard my first voice over the air,” wrote Jack DeWitt, years after he retired as president of WSM, Inc. “I believe that was 1920. Dr. Frank Conrad, who was chief engineer of the Westinghouse Company, had a ham radio station in Pittsburgh, 8XK, which later became the famous KDKA.” From Nashville, DeWitt could listen as Conrad talked with other broadcasting pioneers, just as radio was evolving from talk among hobbyists or “hams” to broadcasting stations aimed at the general public, of which KDKA was one of the first. Radio was a magic thing for DeWitt, a mixture of romance and science that captured him early, and he soon discovered he wasn’t alone.
DeWitt was born February 20, 1906, to a Vanderbilt-educated lawyer, some six years into his practice. Household passions included history and music. They had an Edison cylinder phonograph and later a gramophone record player, along with a record collection that reflected the era’s best sellers—Enrico Caruso, Antonio Scotti, and John McCormack. These tenors had voices that could cut through the limited fidelity of the early 78-rpm records, and they stirred in Jack a lifelong love of opera. “I really don’t see how anyone can live properly and comfortably without some music around part of the time,” DeWitt wrote years later. Although he was very much expected to make something of himself, he felt no pressure to follow his father into law. “I would have been no good as a lawyer,” he said. “I was interested in radio from the beginning, and my mother and father helped me.”
Jack wanted to know how things worked, especially things electrical. At age seven, he fixed the doorbell of a neighbor, who wrote him a check for a dollar. When he was twelve, Jack earned a Boy Scout merit badge for wireless telegraphy, constructing his first crystal receiver with a wire coiled around the family rolling pin. (The cook had to roll out biscuit dough with a syrup bottle for a time.) By 1921, DeWitt was transmitting in Morse code over a homebuilt transmitter, reaching people in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Illinois. He confirmed the reach of his set as part of a trial conducted by the American Radio Relay League, which dispatched a man to Scotland to see how many U.S. stations he could pick up. There, in the records of the test, were DeWitt’s call letters, 5FV. In the Dewitt backyard, Jack and a friend built a tower that he recalled being sixty or seventy feet high. It supported a wire antenna strung to a pole on the roof of the house, and it worked until the day a mule being used to dig a swimming pool in the yard next door tripped over one of the guy wires and sent the whole thing crashing to the ground. Easily rebuilt, it served for many months as DeWitt’s chief antenna, while he delved further into transmitters that could send voices through a microphone. He taught himself higher-order mathematics and electrical engineering. He kept notes of his contacts in Tennessee and well beyond. He made friends over the wireless and then had them over for long nights of sending and receiving. Mrs. DeWitt would call upstairs in the morning to ask how many for breakfast.
DeWitt and his friends were part of a national movement, fueled by “the genius of the American boy,” as then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover famously put it. All over the nation, wrote Erik Barnouw, “amateur-made transmitters were suddenly leaving garages, attics, and chicken coops, and some of them were turning up on the roofs of newspapers, department stores, hotels, factories.” KDKA’s debut in late 1920 broadcast election returns, ushering in the era of instant news. In the middle of 1921, the nation marveled at blow-by-blow coverage of a Jack Dempsey fight from Jersey City. In 1922, WEAF, a New York station owned and operated by RCA, broadcast the first commercially sponsored show, a pitch for apartments from real estate brokers in Queens.
Soon the air overflowed with signals. When DeWitt became chairman of the electrical committee of the local radio club, he participated in contentious meetings about who could broadcast at what hours. “Civil war almost broke out in Nashville with the advent of the early commercial radio sets,” wrote one early magazine profiler of DeWitt. “An enthusiast would have his earphones clamped on listening to the latest jazz or an obscure newscast when his ears would be assaulted by the powerful dot and dash signals of the local short wave operators.” Cities began implementing weekly “quiet nights” when local stations had to remain off so enthusiasts could receive distant stations with less interference. Yet interference was part of the price of listening in.
As fast as the air filled with broadcasts, it filled with utopian predictions. Radio Broadcast magazine speculated that “elected representatives will not be able to evade their responsibilities to those who put them in office” and that a “people’s University of the Air will have a greater student body than all of our universities put together.” When opening one of the many new college-based stations that sparked on during the fall of 1922, North Carolina statesman and future newspaper publisher Josephus Daniels predicted that with radio, “nobody now fears that a Japanese fleet could deal an unexpected blow to our Pacific possessions. . . . Radio makes surprises impossible.” Naive but optimistic, pundits portrayed radio to Nashvillians as a new wonder of the world. “What a day for dreamers!” declared syndicated columnist William Ellis in the Banner. “The radiophone has outrun prophesy; already we see that it holds possibilities of transforming almost the entire organization of human life upon this planet. . . . The whole earth is made one neighborhood.”
Ward-Belmont’s WDAA “broadcast on an irregular basis” for about six months, DeWitt recounted later. “When some prominent speaker or artist appeared at the school, a microphone was placed in front of him and the proceedings could be heard over a fairly wide area around Nashville.” The school’s voice teacher, Gaetano de Luca, took pleasure in playing Caruso records over the air from his Victrola. It was a modest legacy to be sure, but with stations coming and going like lightning bugs on a summer’s evening, it wasn’t long before further opportunities presented themselves, including one with a young man whom Jack would know, not always cordially, for decades.
His name was Harry Stone, a polished and ambitious man in his early twenties who had recently moved with his family from North Carolina, where his father had owned a Coca-Cola bottling plant. In Nashville, Harry and his younger brother David worked in their father’s machine shop, but they were drawn to entertainment. Whereas David branched out with jobs in local theater companies, Harry began to forge a career in radio in a town virtually without radio by teaming up with the right people and by launching his own stations. He approached Jack about starting a radio station for a men’s organization called the American Business Club.
Jack obtained a license for the call letters WABV, giving him permission to convert his ham radio rig into a full-service broadcaster. His ever-supportive parents bore most of the costs of Nashville’s second radio station. Mrs. DeWitt sold her Dominicker hens and let Jack convert the family chicken coop into a transmitter house. The boys nudged furniture aside and set up microphones in the drawing room. A family diary noted the first broadcast on December 7, 1923. Mack Rowe, owner of a phonograph shop, played violin, accompanied by a friend on the DeWitt’s upright piano. They played contemporary popular songs (“My Sweetie Went Away,” “End of a Perfect Day,” and “My Buddy”) and light opera numbers from Cavalleria Rusticana. Jack’s friend from radio overnights, George Reynolds, acted as assistant engineer. And Jack’s brother Ward stepped up as announcer for the broadcasts. Before long, Stone recruited two of the town’s young orchestra leaders—Francis Craig and Beasley Smith—to set up their groups in the cramped quarters. A prize of $5 for the furthest reception of the 50-watt station was claimed by a listener in Pennsylvania.
Jack DeWitt, George Reynolds, Harry Stone, Francis Craig, and Beasley Smith would soon form the core of a far more professional and permanent radio station. But there would be a few more stops along the way for DeWitt. He was approached by one W. A. Marks, who, like many others then and since, was inspired to spread the word of God over the air. Marks, a member of the Business Men’s Sunday School Class at the First Baptist Church in downtown Nashville, secured volunteers from his class and put up $1,500 to launch a station, which Jack built. It debuted with a Sunday morning service on April 6, 1924. Its call letters stood for the Baptists’ penchant for evangelizing: WCBQ—“We Can’t Be Quiet.”
That spring DeWitt graduated with honors from Duncan School and set out on his first worldly adventure. He applied to the United Fruit Company for a job as second radio operator on a ship. He was assigned to the S.S. Ellis out of Tela, Honduras, a cargo boat with a Norwegian crew, which mainly hauled bananas from Central America to New Orleans. On his maiden voyage, which lasted just two or three weeks, the eighteen-year-old witnessed his rum-buzzed commanders slipping upstairs with Jamaican prostitutes, turned down a proposition from a woman who wanted to give Jack a pet monkey in exchange for sex, and became violently seasick after eating green bananas on the trip home. “I decided sea was not for me,” he wrote later.
When he entered Vanderbilt that fall, DeWitt wasn’t ready to set aside his passion for radio to apply himself to courses in trigonometry, French, and history. There was no electrical engineering for freshmen, and what there was looked irrelevant—civil engineering, street car electrical systems, and other tedium. He continued to build radios and improve the ones he’d built, and in his second term, he was suspended for academic indolence. He completed some make-up courses in the summer, but after a floundering fall in his sophomore year, he dropped out.
From father DeWitt’s point of view, there was only one, depressing recourse: Jack would have to enroll at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, 180 miles east. It would be a minor embarrassment to the family, but perhaps no worse than Jack’s leaving school altogether. “It was almost expected for local boys growing up in Nashville in the early part of the twentieth century to go to Vanderbilt,” says Jack’s nephew Ward DeWitt Jr., a Vanderbilt alumnus, whose grandfather and great-uncle also attended the school. “There was a great chasm between Vanderbilt and the U of T in those days. I remember my daddy saying, ‘Son we don’t just dislike the University of Tennessee. We hate ’em.’ It was a big thing.”
Jack fared no better at UT. “I became interested in a broadcasting station which was owned by a local telephone company and spent my time at it rather than in studying,” he recalled. And yet he had been studying, not only radios and how they worked but how to design them, how to improve them, and how to communicate in the hieroglyphics of electrical circuit diagrams. He came home for the summer of 1925, through with college forever—at least as a student. But he wasn’t idle. Another local project attracted him. An insurance company—a big one with lots of money—was assembling what would be Nashville’s most powerful radio station. He found his way there through a friendship with a man who had sought out his radio expertise some years earlier, a businessman with a peculiar dream—Edwin Craig.
Edwin Wilson Craig spent his early years in a prosperous, comfortable home in the countryside community of Pulaski, Tennessee, about seventy-five miles south of Nashville. As a boy he was dressed in satin Buster Brown outfits and taken to boating parties. At boarding school, he knew a future surgeon general of the United States. At Vanderbilt, his fraternity brothers included Prentice Cooper, a future governor. Edwin could have gone any number of directions, but he wanted to join the family business, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, and though his obituaries said he graduated, he left Vanderbilt early to do so. He was, in fact, the son of the company’s senior founder, but nobody could say Edwin didn’t work his way up the ladder. He “walked the debit,” the same door-to-door circuit of sales and account management made every day by the other two thousand National Life agents. In small towns all across the South, on dirt streets, in mud, cold, and miserable heat, properly dressed “Shield Men” fanned out in a highly regimented, year-in-year-out campaign. By his midtwenties, Craig was an exemplary Shield Man, so named for the National Life blue shield logo, and he seemed destined for leadership, over sales and probably much more.
When Edwin was born in 1893, his father, Cornelius Abernathy Craig, ran a drug store in a partnership with his older brother Edward and another brother who practiced law. Edward had been successful in banking and business in Giles County, Tennessee. That same year, 1893, Governor Peter Turney invited Edward to Nashville to become treasurer of the state. Brother Cornelius followed, liquidating his holdings in the drug store and moving his family to Nashville to climb up a rung. Soon he was working for Edward as deputy commissioner of insurance and gaining experience which he parlayed into the acquisition, at a 1901 auction, of a young and shaky company called National Sick and Accident Association. The following year, Craig and his partners changed the name to the more upbeat National Life and Accident Insurance Company.
The new business forged a bond that would last for decades among its five foundational families. Asked how they related to one another initially, Ridley Wills II, grandson of a founder, described the group with a Bible Belt–dweller’s frame of reference. “Dr. Fort was a Baptist from Robertson County who had married a sophisticated woman from Boston,” he said. “Runcie Clements [president of National Sick and Accident when it was sold] was a Roman Catholic. The Craigs were members of the West End United Methodist Church. The Wills were Presbyterians. The Tynes were Catholics too. So it was a wonderful mix. And they all got along beautifully—respected each other. It’s interesting to me how well they got along with those different backgrounds. But all of them were from small towns.”
Cornelius, by virtue of his leadership in the origins and organization of the company, was president and later chairman of National Life between 1902 and 1943. A bookish man with sandy hair parted severely in the middle and round, horn-rimmed glasses, C. A. was known improbably as “Neely” by his colleagues and family. As upright a businessman as one could hope to meet and a self-styled business philosopher, C. A. made his presence known with solemn, didactic letters to his field sales force, issued regularly for decades through The Shield newsletter. One early version of his guide for agents noted characteristically that “moral excellence and business honesty are not the fruits of regulation. They are inborn and of higher source but more to be desired than the most rigid adherence to fixed statues.”
About his company’s core product, the elder Craig said, “National Life . . . felt . . . that the industrial classes needed, above all other forms of insurance, a policy providing benefits that would replace the pay envelope when they were sick or disabled by accident, and would also carry sufficient life insurance to provide a Christian burial.” Shield Men collected premiums door-to-door, sometimes a mere quarter at a time. And although National Life’s policies have often been criticized in retrospect as paltry “burial insurance,” they may have been a modest advance in thrift for a largely hand-to-mouth population.
When Edwin Craig left Vanderbilt in 1913 and went to work for National Life, he did so not in the Nashville headquarters but in Dallas, as a regular Shield Man. His father had admonished the Dallas officials to “forget [his] name and require of [him] a full day’s work every day, showing no consideration not extended to every other man in the district.” Craig arrived by train from Memphis with Eldon Stevenson Jr., a fraternity brother from Vanderbilt. The young men settled into the YMCA and hit the dusty streets in tumble-down neighborhoods where the company was utterly unknown and began knocking on doors one-by-one. The early client base of National Life was almost entirely black or Mexican, a point that goes unmentioned in official company histories. “He didn’t have a white policy holder in Dallas,” his son Neil has said.
Craig advanced through strata of positions and titles as scintillating as only the insurance industry could conjure: from superintendent to district office cashier, to district manager, to field supervisor, to auditor. In 1916 he married Elizabeth Wade from Tennessee’s Giles County. Two years later the couple moved to Nashville and had a daughter. During World War I Craig organized and managed the company’s new “ordinary life” department. By 1924 Craig was a vice president and manager of the much larger industrial department. The Shield called him “extremely popular, not only at home in both a business and social way, but [he] is considered by the National Field Force as a friend and counselor.” During those years, perhaps as early as 1921, Craig began to bother his father and the National Life board about a company radio station.
Craig could see businesses spawning radio stations by the score, from local concerns to national giants like Sears, Roebuck and Co. whose Chicago-based WLS stood for “World’s Largest Store.” Craig could have tuned in early Tennessee broadcaster WMC, launched by the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper, beginning in January 1923. Newspapers, radio equipment makers, churches, and telephone companies were starting radio stations, with varied agendas and uncertain prospects. There weren’t any standout examples of insurance companies or similarly conservative financial services firms taking to the airwaves, and Edwin Craig began asking himself why not.
About this time, probably early 1922, Craig sought out young radio guru Jack DeWitt. Neither left a record of their first meeting, but it marked the beginning of a lengthy and prolific friendship. Craig was not interested in building homemade sending sets. He wanted to hear the revolution on the air, so he consulted DeWitt in setting up a receiver before they were easily available in stores. Daughter Elizabeth remembered it as a long, boxlike contraption: “The radio sat up on feet, and the battery boxes slipped under it,” she said. “People that we didn’t even know would call up and say, ‘Could we just come by and hear the radio for just a few minutes?’ So there was a stream of people up to the sleeping porch.” Craig was especially fond of the spirited programs coming from WWJ in Detroit, WSB in Atlanta, and WBAP in Fort Worth. He sent telegrams of appreciation to some of the popular radio personalities of the day: George D. Hay, “The Solemn Old Judge” from WLS in Chicago; Leo Fitzpatrick in Kansas City, who called himself “The Merry Old Chief”; and “Little Colonel” Lambdin Kay, director of WSB. Craig even visited Fitzpatrick on several occasions when his business took him to Kansas City, and one account says those meetings inspired Craig to imagine broadcasting himself.
Edwin Craig’s growing passion for radio reflected forward-thinking enthusiasm shot through with corporate pragmatism. He’d been swept up by the national mania for broadcasting. And he knew what the National Life sales force—by then 2,500 men in twenty-one states—confronted day to day as they walked the streets. “The company didn’t have enough money to buy advertising” town by town, said Neil Craig. “So he conceived the idea of a radio station that would support our agents. That’s what that station went on the air to do.” DeWitt wrote that Craig “saw the possibilities in radio for the nationwide advertisement of” National Life. And company historian Powell Stamper wrote that the station was to earn its keep by “extending company identity, service to the community, the influence of public relations, and supporting the company’s field men in their relations with both prospects and policyholders.”
National Life president Ridley Wills once wrote that “Mr. Craig faced serious resistance in selling the idea to the older executives, but kept hammering away for some three years.” Accounts surfaced that Craig almost quit National Life over the matter, but Neil disputes that, saying that Craig’s identity and family were tied too closely to the business. The more likely scenario is that the elders of the company, although initially skeptical about radio’s potential to be both effective and dignified, were brought around to a point where at least they thought it couldn’t hurt. The station’s so-called old guard are said to have patronized the idea, calling it Edwin’s “toy” or his “plaything.” Daughter Elizabeth Proctor says with confidence that her grandfather C. A., Edwin’s own father, was one of the hardest to convince. “And finally, in a board meeting, Daddy brought it up again, the need for the company to have a radio station,” she recounted. “And the other men said, ‘Oh, Neely, let the young man have his radio station. It’s not important. We don’t want it. But it won’t do any harm. Let him have it.’ So Grandfather heaved a sigh maybe of relief, and said, ‘All right. Go ahead and investigate as best you can about what you want.’ ”
Craig seems to have won his permission by February 1923, the date of an official announcement that National Life was about to lay the cornerstone of a new headquarters building. Vice President W. R. Wills described the planned new office to the sales force as “the South’s most beautiful insurance home”—60,000 square feet rising five elegant stories above the corner of Seventh Avenue North and Union Street. Craig’s idea was at least on the drawing board. “The fifth floor,” wrote Wills, “is for a recreation room, emergency hospital, and assembly room. The roof is a playground, and perhaps a broadcasting station.”
Craig faced other obstacles, however. Easy access to radio licenses was over. The airwaves were crowded, and the government was rationing signals. In a telegram to the New Orleans–based Radio Supervisor’s Office of the Department of Commerce in April 1924, Craig requested an available wavelength (a channel on the radio spectrum) so engineers could start construction of a 500-watt station by that August. Mr. D. B. Carson, commissioner of navigation in Washington, arbiter of broadcast licenses, replied that there were no more wavelengths available. He suggested that National Life work out a signal-sharing arrangement with the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper’s WMC, but that was a far-fetched solution. WMC was, by this time, a veteran in Tennessee broadcasting and highly unlikely to give up its prime-time hours.
Broadcast licenses were, however, transferable. Craig discovered that James D. Vaughan, owner of a music school and a gospel songbook publisher in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, eighty miles south of Nashville, had been running 250-watt WOAN since November 1922 at 282.8 meters, an attractive wavelength. With the slogan, “Wake Up America!” WOAN broadcast only an hour each night, mixing live gospel music with pitches for Vaughan’s songbooks. On April 7, 1925, National Life reached an agreement with Vaughan, in which the company would take over Vaughan’s signal with its own, much stronger transmitter, and Vaughan could supply the programming between 9:00 and 10:00 on weeknights and 9:15 to 10:15 on Sunday nights. It wasn’t an ideal solution for Craig, but it was all he had to work with. By April 10, the deal was in Carson’s hands, along with a cordial letter from National Life general counsel Thomas Tyne, asking for permission to go ahead with the time-sharing plan.
Now things moved forward rapidly. Craig, doubling his initial power requirements, ordered a 1,000-watt transmitter from Western Electric, promising to make his the only station in the South equal to Atlanta’s WSB. Early plans were to transmit from the roof of National Life’s headquarters at Seventh and Union, over a horizontal wire antenna, strung like a laundry line between two towers. In May an amusing illustration ran on the cover of The Shield, imagining the elegant building topped out with two ungainly radio towers, each taller than the building itself. Completion was scheduled for August.
Also by this point, National Life was more willing to take credit for the idea. “The erection of this mammoth broadcasting station by The National has been on the program of the Shield Company’s plan of progress for more than two years,” the company announced. “And after much thought and earnest consideration the executives of the Company have succeeded in giving to the radio world one of its greatest broadcasting stations.” Programming, the company said, will be “varied and of an outstanding nature. Lectures, sermons, music, sports and many other attractions for which Nashville is noted will be given to radio fans all over the country.”
When they said “all over the country,” they meant it. As Jack DeWitt found out firsthand with his homebuilt transmitter, radio signals in the early twentieth century carried vast distances, in part because the airwaves were relatively uncluttered by other broadcast media. There is also a physical phenomenon called a “skywave,” in which nighttime radio signals bounce between the earth and a charged layer of the atmosphere, over thousands of miles. National Life officials predicted that under the right weather conditions, its station could reach Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and (inaccurately, it turned out) Europe.
Moreover, the purpose of the station became clearly defined within the company well before it went on the air. In a May 19, 1924, newsletter, a cartoon pictured a Shield Man sitting on top of the world while the Home Office floated in the clouds. The rooftop antenna flashed out lightning bolts and the messages: “Musical Programs,” “Insurance Talks,” and “Publicity Helps.” Then, on May 26, another cartoon cut to the bottom line. This time the Home Office had a radio horn coming out the top, and the Shield Man had his hat out. Flying out of the horn and wafting down like pieces of confetti were papers that said: “New Business,” “Opportunity,” “Service,” “Prestige,” and a big money bag marked “PROFITS.”
In July 1925, Edwin Craig received clearence fron the Federal Bureau of Navigation to use the call letters WSM. He seems to have had a clear preference for the name, as he reportedly negotiated with the Navy to have the letters reassigned from a ship. All that remainied was a slight refocusing of the company’s slogan, so that as with Sears and most other radio owners of the day, the call letters could reinforce a brand. Ever since the company had adopted a blue shield as its trademark in October 1922, the logo had often been accompanied in advertising by the slogans “The National Life and Accident Insurance Company, Incorporated, Shields You” or “Shielding Millions—Are We Shielding You?” After the inauguration of the station, “We Shield Millions” became the de facto motto of Nashville’s fastest-growing insurance company and its newest, most prestigious broadcaster.
By August the idea of using towers on the roof had been abandoned in favor of a transmitter on a hill two miles away and just a few blocks from Ward-Belmont. Each of its two towers was 165 feet tall, with a flat-top antenna strung between them. A lead ran down into a tidy clapboard-sided broadcast house, which doubled as a home for the station’s chief engineer. Half of the house was occupied by generators, transformers, radio tubes, and cooling pipes; the other half comprised a cottage with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a small dinette. Its first occupant, Vanderbilt graduate Thomas L. Parkes, could claim radio experience that predated World War I. In 1913 he’d been noted in Nashville as a ham telegrapher. Then he’d been around the world on steam ships, surviving a ferocious North Atlantic storm. He’d seen his ship’s boiler explode in Greece, killing an engineer. Now twenty-three years old, he’d been married for just four months. His job was to be on call twenty-four hours to maintain the new Western Electric behemoth. The property was surrounded with a five-foot-high cyclone fence topped with barbed wire. One can only imagine how the young Mrs. Parkes felt in 1925, setting up the couple’s first long-term home at Fifteenth Avenue South and Weston Street, with her husband in the next room, tending to large, humming machines.
On the fifth floor of National Life’s headquarters on Seventh and Union, WSM’s lone studio was small but luxuriously appointed. Though the company described the room to be “as perfect in acoustics as inventive genius can make it,” it was deadened with carpet, oriental rugs, and pleated bur-gundy velvet drapes that lined the walls and hung from a central point in the ceiling, like the interior of an Arabian tent. It was a typical approach for the day. Radio stations discovered that bright, reflective rooms produced an unbearable echo effect over the air. Lacking the panels that would soon come along to absorb sound, stations commonly draped their studios or put bands outdoors. WSM’s room was furnished like a parlor, with an ebony Steinway grand piano, wingback chairs, frilly floor lamps, a rococo desk, and a crystal chandelier. The studio abutted a small control room whose console resembled a manual telephone switchboard. Master control was connected to the transmitter house on the hill through three private phone lines, one for the regular broadcast signal, one for emergencies, and one for regular communication between the studio engineer and the chief engineer at the transmitter.
Having sunk about $40,000 into the station’s physical plant (more than $400,000 in today’s dollars), National Life went to great lengths to promote its broadcast debut as a major community watershed. The company crafted a supplement to the Tennessean and the Banner, offering a wealth of information about the station’s capabilities and possibilities. Both newspapers independently acknowledged the historic proportions of the event and offered inexpensive crystal radio sets as a premium for new subscribers. Many Nashville homes had well-used radios by this point; picking up Atlanta, Cincinnati, or Louisville was by then routine entertainment. Newspaper ads touted receivers from $10 table sets to $130 floor-standing models. Thousands of homes acquired radios from furniture dealers and hobby shops in the weeks running up to WSM’s launch.
Everything was ready by the first of October. The country was anticipating the World Series. Nashville had its traditional “moving day,” a peculiar occasion when most of the city’s leases expired and thousands of people simultaneously moved. The economy was heady, and speakeasies flourished. The chamber of commerce unveiled a stilted “Sell Nashville To Itself” campaign, a nine-month display of boosterism that featured facts about Nashville’s business prowess on streetcar placards, movie screens, and elevators. That first week of October, Nashvillians learned that the city roasted over 100 million pounds of coffee every year, anchored by hometown company Maxwell House. It was amid this ordinary activity that Edwin Craig received approval of his license by telegram on Sunday, October 4, with but one day to spare before opening night, October 5, 1925.
Engraved invitations for the gala inauguration featured the WSM call letters etched as lightning bolts. Among those accepting were Nashville mayor Hillary Howse and Tennessee governor Austin Peay. The men who’d helped get WSM licensed were there, too. Commissioner of Navigation Carson traveled from Washington, and Major Walter Van Nostrand, regional director, came from Atlanta. Perhaps the greatest acknowledgement of WSM’s instant prestige, however, was the presence of three giants of the airwaves: Lambdin Kay, Leo Fitzpatrick, and George D. Hay. The newspaper supplement bragged on them as “the three most popular announcers and radio executives in the world today.” Kay is said to have invented musical station identification, including the three-note chime that would be famously adopted by NBC. Fitzpatrick, Craig’s friend, reached a national late-night audience as a jovial emcee and leader of a band called the Nighthawks, first from Kansas City, then Detroit. And Hay was a major personality at WLS in Chicago, with a rustic, old-time variety show—The National Barn Dance—that was putting “hillbilly music” on the American map.
The VIPs were accommodated in the studio and in the hall just outside the studio window, where they could listen over loudspeakers. Police minded hundreds of onlookers who gathered at dusk in the streets outside the Seventh and Union headquarters of National Life. Larger loudspeakers had been mounted outside of the building (almost certainly by Jack DeWitt) to relay the signal that would be going out over the air. A band from the Tennessee Industrial School assembled on the building’s roof, taking in a view that included the capitol spire two blocks away. The Al Menah Shrine Band, resplendent in fezzes and billowing pantaloons, gathered on the street outside.
National Life arranged with Western Union for a special wire to handle a flood of telegrams. Across the city, in private homes and in radio stores, restaurants, and cigar stores, Nashvillians twiddled knobs in anticipation. A few young people put battery-powered radios on the backs of automobiles and drove around during the broadcast. Shield Man W. A. Scott placed a gold leaf lettered message on the rear window of his car encouraging people to “Tune in on WSM.” A New Orleans–based agent named T. E. Brenan set up a radio on the front steps of his home, and dozens listened from his leafy lawn. In Chattanooga, National Life sales superintendents helped assemble a crowd to listen in from a fire hall, and before the night was over, they sold a policy to an enthusiastic fan.
A wide range of other artists assembled for the broadcast: the Knights of Columbus Quartet, a male vocal group; the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a celebrated local black ensemble that sang formal spiritual music; and various duos and trios of local instrumentalists and vocalists. Two remote broadcast hook-ups were in place at the nearby Hermitage and Andrew Jackson hotels, where Francis Craig and Beasley Smith, respectively, stood by with their orchestras, and with considerably more room than had been available during the early broadcast sessions from Jack DeWitt’s living room. DeWitt, nineteen years old, manned master control just off the studio, where the signals converged and were dispatched to chief engineer Parkes, two miles away at the transmitter site.
Shortly after 7:00 p.m., DeWitt, from behind the control room glass, gave Edwin Craig the cue to begin. Craig stepped to the microphone and let his voice pierce the airwaves: “This is station WSM—We Shield Millions—owned and operated by the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, Nashville, Tennessee,” he said. There followed a prayer, the national anthem performed by the Shriners’ band, and an hour of congratulatory speeches, announcements, and music. C. A. Craig officially dedicated the station “to the public service” and rhapsodized about radio, the very invention he’d sniffed at two years before, recognizing it as “the greatest agency we have for communion over our vast country, and that such communion tends to make us a homogeneous people.”
The first vocalist to perform on the station was Joseph MacPherson, a local baritone. The mayor and governor spoke of the station’s potential for public service and for spreading awareness of Tennessee. Major Van Nostrand observed that WSM would cover rural areas not previously served well by radio. The rest of the long evening was devoted to music. The Fisk Jubilee Singers got a full half an hour, performing songs like “Shout All Over God’s Heaven” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Beasley Smith’s orchestra introduced its swinging sound, and the guest announcers took turns on the microphone. George D. Hay blew his signature wooden whistle for emphasis. Francis Craig’s orchestra didn’t even start playing from the ornate ballroom at the Hermitage Hotel until midnight, and National Life employees and friends held an impromptu dance party on the building’s fourth floor. A little before 1:00 a.m., Craig and his band packed up and headed for the studios two blocks away. There, a free-form jamboree had ensued with Smith’s boys and others, emceed by local entertainer and polymath Jack Keefe. He and WSM’s first program director, young Bonnie Barnhardt, led an on-air party that lasted until after 2:00 a.m.
Congratulations poured in. Mr. W. E. Ward of the Baird-Ward Printing Company wrote, giddy that he’d received a signal over a two-dollar receiver aided by a water pipe, a bedspring, and wire screen. Messages came from Ithaca, New York; New Orleans; Houston; Parkersburg, West Virginia; and all over Tennessee. The staff of Memphis radio station WMC, which took the night off the air to listen to its new Nashville colleagues, wrote, “you are leaping the mudholes to Memphis as no automobile has yet done.” The Banner declared the city had “radiolitis” and editorialized with foresight: “Doubtless the radio station will prove a splendid advertisement for the company which is sponsoring it, but it will be no less so for Nashville.” National Life joined happily in the hype. The Shield’s story about the dedication of “the Voice of the Athens of the South” reported in all modesty: “the most pretentious and elaborate array of superlative talent ever assembled at one time in Tennessee . . . WSM’s debut into the world of broadcasters was by far the most brilliant ever achieved by any station in America.” Ridley Wills proved more accurate and more poetic when he announced that thanks to WSM “the name of the National is now on the very air we breathe.”