THE VERY EARLY STATIONS

WOC, Davenport - 1922
WJAM, Cedar Rapids - 1922
KFJB, Marshalltown - 1923
KFNF, Shenandoah - 1924
WHO, Des Moines - 1924

Vaughn Gayman worked in organized broadcasting as news director at radio station WDBQ in Dubuque.

But long before that, in 1914, he built a radio transmitter, using a schematic published in a Boy's Life magazine.

"When I got my transmitter going, I went down and talked to the hardware man. I said, 'What frequency am I on?' He said, 'All of them.' "

"Did you have get any response from your transmitter? Well, the transmitter was spark -- wireless. No, nobody ever heard from that, except the hardware man," Gayman said.

KFJB, Marshalltown

At about the same time Vaughn Gayman was tinkering with his spark transmitter, Merle Easter, an engineer who worked for a Marshalltown electrical company, was one of those who figured out he could grid-modulate a Morse-code wireless rig for voice transmission. Intrigued by what his employee was doing and the potential of electronic communication, his boss, Earl Peak, asked Easter and his friend Chauncy Hoover if they could build a radio-telephone station, as it was then called. They proceeded to do just that.

Peak's son Eugene was a boy of about 10 when his father put that station on the air in a corner of the building which housed the Marshall Electric Company which Earl Peak operated at the corner of 16th and Main Streets in Marshalltown.

"Realizing the value of communications -- he was very interested in what Marconi had done -- he decided it was worth making an investment in," Eugene Peak said.

Earl Peak's investment became KFJB -- one of about a half-dozen very early stations which broke the ground for organized broadcasting in Iowa. Using this home-made transmitter, which Easter and Hoover had built, and a five-wire antenna mounted on poles on the west side of the building, KFJB started programming. They broadcast what had to be Iowa's first play-by-play sports program, and one of the first anywhere.

"We put the line in, in the fall of 1922, and we broadcast high school football from Franklin Field -- they had just graded the field -- and we broadcast football then," Peak said.

The Marshalltown station was formally licensed in June of 1923 and KFJB became a community institution, which Earl Peak operated until his death in 1947. It is still in business under those call letters today.

KFNF, Shenandoah

In southwestern Iowa, another station with a home-built transmitter was licensed to broadcast early in 1924. It was commissioned by a man named Henry Field and was located in the seed and nursery business he operated in Shenandoah. Through appearances on another pioneer midwestern station, WAOW in nearby Omaha, Field had learned what a powerful communication device radio was, and he built a radio station in Shenandoah to market his nursery business.

Ironically, Field's competitor Earl May learned the same lesson in exactly the same way on WAOW and May put his own station, KMA, on the air the next year, in 1925.

Both men used their radio stations to promote their competing mail-order seed company businesses. Both were highly successful with their home-spun messages which amounted to early versions of the infomercial.

"Or you can buy either kind separate...you'll find the description and price on page 21. We have others if you want big melons," Henry Field said in a broadcast quoted in the program "Old Time Radio in Shenandoah".

In the beginning years, both Field and May operated their radio stations primarily as extensions of their primary businesses -- selling seed and nursery stock. However, they also gained an early understanding of the capacity of this new medium to entertain and inform.

In addition to their own sales pitches, they developed programming which attracted thousands of listeners and drew many of them to Shenandoah to attend the live broadcasts which originated from the Field and May stations in southwestern Iowa.

WOC, Davenport / WHO, Des Moines

Across the state, another very early station was acquiring a voice which was to grow into what probably was the single most influential broadcasting dynasty in Iowa.

WOC in the Quad-Cities traces its ancestry all the way back to 1907 when Robert Karlowa of Rock Island began experimenting with radio. He licensed his station in Davenport under the WOC call letters in February of 1922. In May of that same year, the license was transferred to the Palmer School of Chiropractic in Davenport, which was headed by B.J. Palmer.

As Field and May had done in the seed business, in the early days, Palmer would use WOC to promote the chiropractic school which he headed. But he also was one of the visionaries who sensed the broad potential of radio as a commercial mass medium.

From his chiropractic school base in Davenport, B.J. Palmer engineered a corporate move by which his company would own both WOC and a station in Des Moines which the Bankers Life Insurance Company put on the air in 1924. That station was WHO.

"The station had been owned by the Bankers Life Insurance Company, the forerunner of the Principal Group. When Bankers Life -- I sometimes think they must regret this -- decided that radio wasn't any way to make money, they sold the station to B.J.," according to Jack Shelley, former news director at WHO radio.

As the situation was to evolve, WHO became the 50-thousand watt clear channel radio voice which was to set the pace for much of what would happen in Iowa broadcasting in the next three decades.