Chapter 2

When broadcasting began, there were no networks and there were severe limitations on the use of recorded music.

So everything was live, and the early radio stations welcomed entertainment talent with open arms, especially if it didn't cost them anything.

That combination opened the door to the experience of a lifetime for many young people.

WMT's "Air Harmony Twins" delighted audiences in the early days of radio.

One of them was Dorothy Ehr Chamberlin of Waterloo. Dorothy and her friend, Florence Brown Peifer, were teen-aged girls who sang together for church and community events in their hometown of Jesup. They had been listening to Harry Shaw's new radio station, WMT, and decided to travel to nearby Waterloo to see if they could get on the radio. Arriving unannounced, they were given an audition and told, "We'll call you." To their joy and amazement, "That week, the telephone rang and they said, 'Do you think you girls could come up Saturday night and sing for us?' " Chamberlin said. "So we went up that Saturday and from then on they said we could come every Saturday and they would have an hour program for us."

Dorothy and Florence's radio career as the Air Harmony Twins ended after a year and neither pursued careers in professional entertainment, but it was a memorable experience in their lives.

Shaw's radio station also beckoned to Waverly's Wilbur Schield and his brother Verne, who at that time were operating a limestone quarry and entertained at community events as "The Limestone Boys". They also decided to try their act on the radio.

"We couldn't advertise, otherwise we'd have had to pay. Well, we didn't have any money to pay for anything but they called us 'The Limestone Boys' and we let it go at that and got a little advertising. Of course, we didn't get paid anything for singing on the radio, we weren't quite that popular. We had a program of 15 minutes and that's about all we could stand -- or they could stand of us," Schield said.

The Limestone Boys were on WMT for about two years in the 1930's. Wilbur and Verne Schield also did not make radio a career.

They went on to establish Schield/Bantam, a crane manufacturing company which became one of Waverly's major industries.

The "County Marshals" performed regularly on KFJB in Marshalltown. Many stations aired programming similar to this, including WHO and its "Barn Dance Frolic."

Much of the programming on the early stations was filled with sounds made by amateurs such as Wilbur and Dorothy. But radio was developing rapidly and by the middle of the decade of the 1930's, the entertainment was becoming highly professionalized. Stations such as KMA, WMT and WHO were broadcasting hours of locally produced entertainment on a daily basis -- shows that generated a huge following.

WMT in Cedar Rapids -- one of the "regional stations" -- featured "Owen's Cowboys" during the early days of radio.

One of the biggest was WHO's Saturday night barn dance. From the isolated farms, the small towns and the outlying cities, Iowans traveled hundreds of miles to Des Moines to see the WHO entertainers who came into their homes on the radio.

Jack Kerrigan was part of the barn dance cast in those days. He says that people came by the thousands. "The barn dance frolic, which was the great big show that they had in what was then the Shrine Auditorium, later became KRNT theater, would seat 45-hundred people and they'd fill it every Saturday night with 45- hundred people."

Kerrigan went on to become program director of WHO radio and later WHO television. He also sang, announced and wrote 1,300 episodes of a comedy program called "Melody Madhouse", which ran at 7:45 a.m., six days a week.

But the barn dance was the keystone program and Bob Harter, who was WHO sales manager during its heyday, says the barn dance was another of Joe Maland's innovations.

"It was again one of these things that was conceived by Joe Maland. He brought that with him from his experience at WLS in Chicago, which in turn and before WHO had a barn dance," Harter said. "They were all a part of the barn dance and the barn dance was the backbone for sustaining that talent staff which at one time totaled better than 65 people...All of those people as a group comprised the production staff of a radio station" which was the size of a small network.

WHO's barn dance left the air in 1958, as the golden age of radio was fading fast. It was a part of radio that could not survive as an even more powerful dimension of the electronic media revolution began to mesmerize the public.