Chapter 2

Two Iowa stations with large, powerful signals, dominated huge areas of the state. Today, they are both owned by the same large corporation. But until the decade of the 1990's, both were independently-owned and operated by entities with strong Iowa ties.

As WHO grew into a regional station with a signal that reached virtually all of Iowa, WMT would establish a similar dominance in eastern Iowa, southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois. However, it was born out of another set of call letters -- WJAM.

The song "Don't Send Me Posies When It's Shoesies That I Need" was heard on the evening of July 30, 1922, coming from a transmitter located in a garage in southwest Cedar Rapids. The station was WJAM. The financial backing for it came from the Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Seronado Radio Company. But it was engineered by a radio pioneer named Douglas M. "Tex" Perham who, according to broadcasting historian Rick Plummer, came to Cedar Rapids from California, where he had worked with two of the most famous inventors of radio technology -- Lee Deforest and Philo Farnsworth.

The scratchy sound which came from Perham's garage on that July night in 1922 evolved into a powerful radio station which also would be a standard-setter in Iowa broadcasting.

WJAM became WMT when it was sold in 1928 to Harry Shaw, the owner of the Waterloo Morning Tribune. Shaw moved the station to Waterloo and changed the call letters to reflect the name of his newspaper.

The elder statesman of Iowa broadcasting, WMT's Bill Quarton, tells how the unorthodox Shaw switched the station's frequency without bothering to tell the FCC. Shaw's legal adviser was appalled.

"The lawyer said, 'You did what?' He (Shaw) said, 'Well, I got this thing on 600; boy, it's great.' He (the lawyer) said, 'You can't do that, you're going to have to go back to your original .' He (Shaw) said, 'The hell I am, this is too good,' " Quarton related. "They got so tired of seeing him over there that they said, 'Oh, hell, let those Czech haymakers have it.' That's how he got 600 kilocycles."

WMT was known for live musical performances by area groups.

That established WMT in the highly favorable dial position which gave it the broad signal pattern that was part of the station's success.

But more important was the commitment to quality, public interest broadcasting which motivated Bill Quarton, who succeeded his brother Sumner as manager in the early 1940's and guided the company for three decades.

"Any manager of a broadcast station that doesn't realize that isn't gonna be very successful. You've got to be part of the community, way up to the hilt -- and that sometimes is the difference between success and also-ran stations," Quarton said.

A sequence of ownership changes brought WMT back to Cedar Rapids in the 1930's. And with Quarton at the helm, it became one of the big-signal, full service radio stations that anchored the golden age of radio and became an indispensable part of the lives of Americans.

WMT's presence was often seen at various
community events and activities.

Another was WHO, and B.J. Palmer was about to make a hiring decision which would greatly influence the development of that station.

A man named Joe Maland left his Minnesota general store business to get into radio after he saw how fascinated farmers were with the market information they could get from the primitive radio in his store.

Maland was hired by Palmer to develop WHO. His one-time news director, Jack Shelley, says Maland's role in the history of Iowa broadcasting has not been properly recognized.

"Joe Maland knew that a 50,000-watt, clear channel radio station could provide a service to people in the small towns and the farms, in addition to the cities -- but particularly for people in the rural areas -- that they had never know before. Just a whole new world opening up for them. And so he made it his mission to build a news department that would serve those people -- a farm department that would serve the farmers specifically, and a sports department. And I still think it's such a crying shame that his name is almost unknown to people of the middle-west when he did really so much to bring to -- not only in Iowa but in a vast radius around Iowa (in the) daytime and much of the country at night -- a kind of information service they had never known before," Shelley said.

It was a distinguished information service which Shelley headed for years. He was one of the most familiar voices in Iowa as a newscaster, and was one of only a handful of local station reporters to serve as a war correspondent.

Shelley was one of the few reporters who covered the war from both Europe and the Pacific. He capped that achievement by interviewing the crews of the American B-29s that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan.

"I lined up about eight people -- (Major) Tibbetts, Major Sweeney, the pilot of the second plane, a number of the fliers from both planes, some of the scientists and at the end, the fellow who had looked so interesting to me at the beginning who I couldn't place, was a classmate of mine from the University of Missouri who had become an M.D. and who was a radiation officer, a radiologist who was there to protect from the standpoint of nuclear safety the people involved in the mission and in the putting together of the bombs. So that's what I got."

What Shelley "got" was the only sound-recorded interviews that were made with the crews in the period immediately following the fateful nuclear missions.

Both Shelley and WHO's legendary farm director Herb Plambeck -- who also served as an war correspondent -- were hired by then-WHO news director H.R. Gross. Plambeck agreed to quit his newspaper position in Davenport and take the $120-dollar-a-month job in radio. He was then told by Gross that he would have to start work the next morning.

"So I went up to Gross and I said, 'Alright, Mr. Gross, I'll accept the job. When do you want me to start?' 'Tomorrow morning,' (Gross said). Of all the unreasonable..." Plambeck said. "As I think back on it, it was remarkable that he had that kind of confidence, that kind of determination. People had recommended me. Here was a new opportunity , and I always thought if it doesn't work out, I could still go back to newspaper work."

Of course, Plambeck did not go back to the newspaper. He built one of the great farm broadcasting services on WHO's powerful platform and was the architect of WHO's national plowing matches which attracted thousands of people who came to watch the contests.

The crowds attracted presidential candidates -- such as Harry Truman, who spoke at the 1948 event, part of the Truman campaign which led to his upset victory over Thomas Dewey.

WMT also made the commitment to a strong news service, and their farm department put on a national corn-picking contest which also drew large crowds. It had attracted a relatively obscure young senator from Massachusetts, as well as the President of the United States when this historic image was captured on film in 1958 -- JFK shaking hands with Ike at a WMT stations-sponsored cornpicking contest just two years before Kennedy turned back Nixon's bid to succeed Eisenhower as president.

Building a strong information service was as deliberate a decision by Bill Quarton as it had been for Joe Maland, and Quarton's choice to establish the WMT news department was a wire-service journalist -- Jim Borman.

"We got a fellow from AP (named) Jim Borman. We were thinking about this and we didn't have much knowledge of what to do, and we hired Jim. (It was) the best thing we ever did," Quarton said.

Borman built a hard-hitting, professional news operation at WMT. It was later recognized by Walter Cronkite, who served as a Washington correspondent for a group of local radio stations which included WMT before he became famous as the CBS television network anchor man.

In his book, A Reporter's Life, Cronkite wrote, "As far as the daily news coverage of my clients went, it turned out the news editor at only one station had any idea how to use a Washington bureau...only Jim Borman at WMT in Cedar Rapids, Iowa had the concept, knowledge or interest to do so."

Borman left WMT for Minneapolis where he was news director for WCCO, another distinguished regional station, for the remainder of his professional life.

Borman, Shelley and Russ Van Dyke of KRNT, another Iowa news pioneer, were all founding members of the National Association of Radio News Directors. Each of them also served a term as president of that organization, which was the forerunner of RTNDA, the Radio-Television News Directors Association, which is the leading professional society of broadcast journalists today.

On the foundation of their strong news services, the regional giants -- WMT and WHO -- stood astride Iowa's electronic landscape as intensely competitive but respectful rivals.

According to Robert Harter, the retired CEO of Palmer Broadcasting, "WMT, as a matter of fact, was the principle rival of WHO in terms of its coverage, in terms of its programming, also in terms of the sale of advertising time. But happily we were friends and we had a very high regard for WMT, as well as all the members of its staff," Harter said. "Very competitive, but on an honorable basis.