It's 1984 And You're Watching KDKA TV-2...

[Scott Reppert]

[EZ103.3FM]

Brings back memories of watching cable at my grandparent's house in Elkins. Since they couldn't get anything over the air there, they had cable going back to the late 60's if I recall correctly. It included the Pittsburgh network stations (2,4,11) and PBS station plus channels 7 (Wheeling), 12 (Clarksburg) and 5 (Weston) and later they got channel 8 from Charleston. They also had a channel that panned back and forth over analog weather dials (temp, pressure, wind, etc) and another channel that was either the raw AP or UPI broadcast wire with music playing in the background.

[Big Media]

What's the story with the KDKA instead of WDKA? Anyone know? Are there other exceptions to the Mississippi rule?

[genlock]

KYW.

[Scott Reppert]

KDKA, KQV, KYW immediately come to mind.

From "The Early History Of Radio"...


The KDKA Anomaly
Showing partiality to vowels, the next major blocks drawn upon for ship stations were four letter KI--, KO--, and KU-- calls. After exhausting the vowels, and with KA-- to KC-- not yet assigned to the United States, the first available consonant, KD--, was drafted for ships beginning June 1920. At this point an anomaly occurred. The Bureau, perhaps caught up in a burst of egalitarianism, began assigning the last of the KU--, and the new KD-- calls to most stations, whether land or sea. The result, on October 27, 1920, was that a new Westinghouse station in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, KDKA, was sandwiched between the ships Montgomery City (KDJZ) and Eastern Sword (KDKB). The "KD-- for everyone" policy continued until April, 1921, when the original three-letter land station policy was reinstated. This meant that, in May, 1921, when the second Westinghouse broadcast station, WJZ in Newark, New Jersey (now WABC, New York City) was authorized, the original call policy had been restored. Much speculation has been made about the unique status of KDKA's call, but this uniqueness actually is just a fluke, due to the fact that no other surviving broadcaster was licenced during this short anomaly. Had KDKA been licenced a few months earlier or later it most likely would have gotten a three-letter W call like everyone else.

I haven't found any explicit reference to the temporary switch to predominantly four-letter K assignments for commercial land stations, but the pattern is clear when reviewing the new station grants listed in the Commerce Department's monthly Radio Service Bulletin. By my count, in the 8/1/1919 through 6/1/1920 RSBs there were 39 non-government land station grants, with 33 (85%) of these getting three-letter K or W calls. But during the next month fully 15 of the 21 grants received four-letter K calls, and, for the entire 7/1/1920 through 5/2/1921 period, 49 (73%) of the 67 grants received four-letter K calls, including KDKA. Then there was an abrupt switch back to three letters, with all 18 of the land station grants in the 6/1/1921 to 9/1/1921 period getting three-letter assignments.

Dawn of the Four Letter Calls
The flood of broadcasting service authorizations that began in earnest in December of 1921 served to overload the recycling three-letter land station calls. Before the crunch the Bureau was able to assign three-letter callsigns to about 200 broadcasters.

It was the more saturated East that was the first to feel the pinch. On April 4, 1922 an application from the Times-Picayune of New Orleans broke new ground with the assignment of WAAB (now WJBO, Baton Rouge) as its call. [NOTE: WAAA was skipped as no sign was permitted with the same letter three times in a row.] The progression continued in alphabetical order, with "A" fixed as the third letter, i.e. WAAB, WAAC, WAAD... WBAB, WBAC... etc. This explains why so many pioneers such as WBAP Fort Worth, Texas, WCAU Philadelphia (now WPHT), WEAF New York City (now WFAN), WHAS Louisville, Kentucky, WKAR, East Lansing, Michigan, WMAQ Chicago (now WSCR), WOAI San Antonio, and WTAM Cleveland share this same middle letter. In later years it became the norm for broadcasters to ask for distinctive calls. However, if they had no preference they were assigned calls from blocks used for a variety of radio services. Starting April of 1923 calls centering on "B" were issued, including WBBM Chicago, WCBM Baltimore, Maryland, and WMBD Peoria, Illinois. In mid-1928 there was a jump to the middle of the W-D- block, which yielded WHDH Boston (now WEEI) and WRDW Augusta, Georgia. W-E- calls followed beginning in early 1931, including WDEV Waterbury, Vermont, WEEU Reading, Pennsylvania, and WFEA Manchester, New Hampshire. In 1934, W-F- calls started to be assigned, including WMFJ in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The West held out until May 8, 1922, when western broadcasters started sharing the four-letter ship blocks. KDYL in Salt Lake City was both the first authorization and last survivor of this group. When it became KCPX (now KFNZ) December 21, 1959 all thirty-two KD-- authorizations from this switchover had either expired or changed calls. The KF-- block, begun June 1922, boasts a few more noteworthies, including KFBK Sacramento, California, Doc. Brinkley's infamous KFKB, KFNF Shenandoah, Iowa (now KYFR), KFQD Anchorage, Alaska, and KFYR Bismarck, North Dakota. The KG-- group was tapped July 1926: KGEZ Kalispell, Montana and KGFX Pierre, South Dakota are two that survive to this day. (A ship station was not as fortunate. KGOV was assigned to the Morro Castle, which went on to burn spectacularly off the New Jersey coast in 1934. However, surprisingly KGOV is currently unavailable for use by broadcasting stations, since it is technically still assigned to the ship, according to the FCC's online Call Sign Query page). KH-- calls were reserved, beginning in 1927, for a new service category: Commercial Aircraft Stations. Surprisingly this group included a short-lived broadcast authorization, KHAC, issued in late 1927 to Flying Broadcasters, Inc. in San Francisco, for "Airplane (unnamed)". The KI-- block was drafted in early 1932, which resulted in KIEV Glendale, California (now KRLA), followed over the next few years by such stations as KIUL Garden City, Kansas, KIUN Pecos, Texas, and KIUP Durango, Colorado.

Original K/W Dividing Line
In the early teens most non-amateur land stations engaged in ship-to-shore communication, and were found clustered along the coasts. As other services were developed stations crept inland, and a dividing line between the western K's and eastern W's was needed. As noted earlier, coastal land stations in states along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, including Texas, received W calls. Thus, using the Texas-New Mexico border as a starting point and heading north, the original boundary ran along the eastern borders of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.

I've never found any official specification for the original land station dividing line between the K's in the west and the W's in the east. However, there were enough inland stations to require some sort of continental dividing line. My working theories were:

1. A specific line of longitude.

2. The division between the mountain and central time zones.

3. Some sort of grouping of the nine Radio Inspection districts.

I took a graphical approach, i.e., I bought a big map of the United States, and plotted the land station assignments reported in the Radio Service Bulletin from 1915 through 1923. From this it became clear that none of the above three theories was correct -- two of the radio inspection districts were split between K and W calls, (compare Map of the K/W Division with Radio Inspection Districts Map) and the calls didn't break out by longitude or time zone.

West Texas proved to be particularly informative. Stations in El Paso got W calls, even though El Paso is west of Colorado Springs and Denver, Colorado, and Laramie, Wyoming, all of which got K calls. The overall pattern: during this period virtually all the inland stations in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas got W calls, while all the land stations in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico got K calls. Therefore, I've concluded that the original dividing line was based on state boundaries. Because it was a Gulf coast state, Texas got W calls. Then the line went north to the Canadian border, running between the states listed above.

Switchover to the Mississippi River K/W Dividing Line
It was only in late January of 1923 that the Mississippi River, the current standard, was adopted as the dividing line. This meant new call grants in North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and western Minnesota and Louisiana became K's rather than W's. However, existing stations west of the Mississippi were permitted to keep their now non-standard W calls. Thus, pioneer broadcasters such as WKY Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, WOI Ames, Iowa, and WHB Kansas City, Kansas remain as monuments to the period before the boundary change.

Reviewing the stations on the AM band, many people have noticed that some of them have the "wrong" first letter for the side of the Mississippi River on which they are located. Going over the last eighty years of call letter assignments for AM stations, I came up with six categories of non-conforming stations:

1. Stations located east of the Mississippi which were assigned calls from the KD-- ship block, instead of W--, during a June 1920 to April 1921 anomaly. (For some reason, during this anomaly almost all new land stations, east and west, got KU-- or KD-- four-letter calls. This included two broadcasting stations that just happened to be first licenced during this time: KDKA and KDPM).

2. Stations west of the Mississippi River that were licenced before the late January 1923 boundary shift, and were located in the slice of W territory that existed west of the Mississippi prior to the shift. (Originally about 170 stations, not including Minnesota and Louisiana. However, due to very high deletion rates plus later call changes, only eleven of these original calls survive: WEW, WHB, WKY, WOC, WOI, WBAP, WDAY, WJAG, WNAX, WOAI, and WTAW).

3. Portable stations (prior to 1928), which got W call letters because their original owners were located east of the Mississippi, but settled in a permanent home west of the Mississippi. (Four stations: WBBZ, WIBW, WLBN, and WMBH. There are no examples of a portable crossing in the other direction, i.e. no K portables "anchoring" in W territory).

4. Regular stations that changed their community of licence to the other side of the K/W divide. (Five stations: KFKX, KSGM, KWEM, WKBB and WPLX. NOTE: This omits Louisiana and Minnesota.)

5. Owner requests--examples: WACO in Waco, Texas; WDBQ in Dubuque, Iowa; WMT (Waterloo [Iowa] Morning Tribune).

6. Assigned by the Government--three stations. KTGG in Spring Arbor, Michigan reportedly got a "K" callsign because someone at the FCC thought that the "MI" postal code stood for Missouri, a west-of-the-Mississippi state. Also, two additional call assignments appear to have been selected by government regulators: KYWA Chicago, a booster station for KYW, and KOP, licenced to the Detroit Police Department.

Although KOP clearly was specially selected for the Detroit Police Department, to me it seems most likely that, instead of it being a requested call, someone within the Department of Commerce chose it, as a joke. I'm not sure that police in this era really liked being called "cops", or that they knew enough about radio to request call letters. But this is pure speculation -- eventually I want to get the original Form 761s for the KOP and KYWA applications and see they have any additional information. L. A. Corridon

Side note: according to a photograph appearing on page 734 of the October, 1925 Radio Broadcast, at that time L. A. Corridon was the person responsible for selecting callsigns.

Finally, there are about a dozen stations for which I can not come up with any apparent reason--perhaps someone momentarily forgot about the policy, or where the boundary line was, or maybe I just need to do more research. The most prominent of these "undocumented" stations are KQV Pittsburgh, KSD Saint Louis (assigned before the boundary shift--now KTRS), and KYW Chicago (later Philadelphia and Cleveland).

Although I haven't been able to find out the exact date that the K/W boundary for land stations switched to the Mississippi River -- the change was barely reported in the press -- I have been able to narrow it down to late January, 1923. In reviewing the call letter assignments for broadcasting stations in the original W-west-of-the-Mississippi territory, it appears that the change took place sometime between January 19th and January 29th. The first date is when the State Normal School in Mayville, ND was assigned WRAC and the Taylor Radio Shop in Marion, KS was assigned WRAD. These apparently were the last two stations to fall under the old scheme. The next call assignment to a broadcast station located in the original W-west-of-the Mississippi territory that I am aware of did not come until ten days later. This station, licenced to Fred Mahaffey, Jr., in Houston, TX, was assigned KFCV, and from this point on K calls were issued to virtually all stations west of the Mississippi. (KFCV was deleted January 5, 1925).

I've only found a couple contemporary references to the adoption of the Mississippi River dividing line -- one paragraph writeups in the April, 1923 issue of The Wireless Age and the June, 1923 Radio News.

Northern K/W Boundary Demarcation
The source of the Mississippi River is in upper Minnesota, so using it as the K/W boundary leaves a gap in the northern part of the state. In 1987 the Federal Communications Commission noted that the current staff practice was to define the remainder of the boundary as "a line from the headwaters of the [Mississippi] to a point [at the Canadian border] just east of International Falls".

[Dave Loudin]

www.earlyradiohistory.us Don't go there unless you have plenty of free time.

The author still hasn't found an explanation for KQV.

[Big Media]

Good read. Thanks, Scott.

[Scott Reppert]

Okay, now I'll get to the funny part of this story...

I make my videos such as these at home in my spare time. I do, however, transport them here to the office to upload them...seeing as how on Time-Warner's $34 a month service it would take three hours to upload those videos (or longer) and here on ComCast's $119 a month service it took nine minutes.

I never have any fear of uploading things to YouTube. If they catch me on initial upload or afterward (that is why I have never been able to upload my Larry Norman & The Monkees "Christmastime" video), I have no problem with it. Since I have never uploaded anything that had to do with Major League Baseball, I was a little bit more than apprehensive with these clips.

As the final of the three clips were being uploaded, the phone rang. I looked at the caller ID. It said "KDKA". I immediately, out loud, said, "NO!!! Not THAT quick!"

I answered, sensing a stern lecture coming on from the ghost of Bill Burns.

"Hi, is this Scott? I'm Jack Rosenberger, your new Account Representative for WPCW".

Happy ending to the story? Absolutely! Along with the fact that the underwear DID wash out...

[weaver]

Ah, the Gunner. Those were the days. I had no idea Jon Burnett had been at KD so long, though!