Chapter 2

Technology was the key which opened the door to a whole new world through broadcasting. But technology alone, as legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow once said, "is only wires and lights in a box." The magic was in how people used that technology to forge human connections.

From the beginning, some individuals had a unique ability to project personality and credibility past the microphone and through the camera lens, and connect with an unseen audience. Personalities have been a key factor in both the power and success of the electronic media.

(Top row: Field, May; Bottom Row: Palmer)

Men such as Henry Field, Earl May and B.J. Palmer were among the first to grasp that. They were anything but slick performers by the standards that emerged later. Neither was Tait Cummins.

The voice and persona of Tait Cummins became as familiar and trusted as that of a favorite uncle to thousands of people across the electronic landscape which the WMT stations dominated. Here's a sample of Cummins' play-by-play call of the Cedar Rapids Regis/Cedar Rapids Jefferson high school basketball game in 1963: "And if you think I sound confused, you oughta see these guys down here. I mean this is the wildest thing that's come along since Mae West sold her tent show. 44 Regis, 42 Jefferson. Both coaches are planning to play before this is over."

Cummins with world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis.

Fundamentally, Tait Cummins was a journalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize as a news reporter before he started writing sports for the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

When he switched to radio and WMT, something else kicked in -- the Tait Cummins personality. Cummins came across to the audience as a friend: amusing, believable, trustworthy.

In an interview recorded shortly before her death, Tait's life and professional partner, Dottie Cummins, tells a story which says a lot about how strong her husband's bond with their audience was.

They were running a radio campaign to match Tait's weight in coins, as a benefit for the March of Dimes. "We got this little wooden box from a lady in some little town in northeast Iowa, and she had sent her wedding ring, stick pin and some gold rings and spectacles and this watch and she said (to) take it to a jewelry store," Dottie Cummins recalled. "So we took all that to one of the jewelry stores here in town and it just wasn't worth anything at all; you know, old spectacles and old wedding rings. And Tait felt so bad about it because he didn't want this sweet little old lady to think that her heartfelt contribution wasn't worth more than that, so Tait paid something like 25 or 50 dollars for the watch and gave it to me as a valentine."

Counting Tait's cash contribution for the valentine watch, the Cummins promotion brought in $30,000 in listener contributions -- and that was in 1940's dollars. The story is just one anecdote, among many, testifying to the power of Tait Cummins' personality to build audience loyalty and station success.

As television came into the picture, another influential personality shared the WMT platform.

Trivialization of television weather was the norm when the commanding officer of a naval unit in western Iowa had a better idea. Motivated by naval recruiting possibilities, he persuaded a new Sioux City TV station, KCAU, to let one of his staff who had been trained as a meteorologist audition to be their weatherman. That staff member was Conrad Johnson, who recalled the KCAU job interview. "He (the manager) said we got a couple/three other applicants and we'll get back to you. And I thought, 'Boy, I got rid of this in a hurry,' because I didn't think I did any good at all. At four o'clock that afternoon, he called up. The commanding officer came down where I was sitting and he said, 'You're on -- we go on the air next Wednesday.' That was on Friday. That's where I got started."

So, wearing his naval uniform, Johnson began his television career, moonlighting as Channel 9's weatherman. But he brought to that term, and to the job, the new dimension of professional television meteorology -- one of the first in the country to do that. He took that philosophy with him when the Navy transferred him to Cedar Rapids in 1957, and he was hired by the WMT stations. On both radio and television there, Johnson forged his professional weather knowledge with the communication power of radio and television -- crafting forecasts tailored to the stations' service area and pioneering the use of cutting-edge tools.

"We had the first television radar system west of Chicago -- and this was in 1959, I believe," Johnson recalled. "It was a five inch scope."

While Tait Cummins was somewhat flamboyant in his media personality, Conrad Johnson, as WMT's resident meteorologist for two decades, was all business. He took weather seriously. In agricultural Iowa with its fickle climate, so did the audience.

Conrad and Tait were among many personalities who stayed at local stations to work through their careers. For others, the path of broadcasting led from Iowa to the networks and beyond.

Allison with her famous puppet friends during a skit on the "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" show.

One of the most successful from the early WMT days was Fran Allison of Kukla, Fran and Ollie fame.

Allison started her career at WMT's Waterloo studios in the early 1930's about a year before Howdy Roberts, who later became WMT's long-time morning personality and host of "The Musical Clock" program. Allison was doing the homespun character known as Aunt Fannie, which she had developed on the Waterloo station.

As Roberts tells the story, someone associated with Chicago radio traveling through the area heard Fran's act, and suggested that WBBM audition her. "So they sent and asked to do an audition, and so Fran came to me and said, 'Would you announce this thing for me?' And we put it on disc and I did all the big, heavy introduction, carrying on, and it went in and she got the job," Roberts said.

From there for Fran Allison, it was on to the ABC radio network and years doing Aunt Fannie on Don McNeal's "Breakfast Club".

A promotional photo of Allison as "Aunt Fannie".

Fran Allison, seen during visits "home" to appear on call-in programs on WMT.

However, Allison reached the pinnacle of her career when she teamed up with puppeteer Burr Tillstrom to create Kukla, Fran and Ollie, which became an early hit on the NBC television network.

Like Fran Allison, most of the Iowa personalities who made it to the networks came from the two big regional stations. Jack Kerrigan recalls the beginnings for the most famous graduate of the WHO barn dance. "Andy Williams and his three brothers worked on the barn dance, and I used to lift Andy up on a box so he could be tall enough to sing over the microphone," Kerrigan remembered.

Andy Williams, the little brother from Wall Lake, who stood on a box to reach the microphone, grew up to make it big in the music business.

But of all the historic personalities who started in Iowa broadcasting, none traveled as far or as high as Ronald Reagan.

The career of the great communicator, who served two terms as president and sat in the leadership councils of the world, was incubated at the Palmer stations in Iowa.

President Reagan made his radio name on WHO, but his first job was at WOC. He reminisced about those times at WHO's 50th anniversary luncheon in 1974, recalling how, as a 21-year-old bent on being a sportscaster, he finally got inside the door of a radio station, at WOC in Davenport. He auditioned for a station official named Peter McArthur by re-creating part of a football game he had played in college.

"And I started with a chill wind coming in through the end of the stadium and the long blue shadows settling over the field and there we were embattled down there and trailing by six points and I took us all the way up finally to my own 35 yard line and this 20 second dash for the touchdown and across the goal line and I grabbed the microphone and said, 'That's all.' And Pete came in and in those depression days said the golden words: 'Be here Saturday. We'll give you five dollars and bus fare. You're broadcasting the Iowa/Minnesota game,'" Reagan recalled.

From that start on WOC, the young sportscaster was transferred to the big voice of WHO in Des Moines, and "Dutch" Reagan's career as a communicator was off and running. To Holly wood in 1937 and huge success in the movies, then into politics in California, and on to the presidency in 1980.

"It's hard to make a younger generation in this space age comprehend the hold that radio had on the American people. Nothing has ever been known that quite matched it for impact and for the grip that it had on the people," Reagan recalled in the 1974 Des Moines remarks. "The miracle of sounds of the outside world, the magic world of entertainment with an infinite variety was brought into the living rooms of even the most remote cabins."

Radio was where it all began. For Ronald Reagan -- for Iowans -- for millions around the globe -- it opened a whole new world.