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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Garage meeting launched KMED Last week, I wrote about early radio broadcasting in Portland. This time it's Medford's turn. KMED radio went on the air on Sept. 23, 1922, and had bragging rights to being the first commercial station in the state. Amateur broadcasters all over the nation were building little 5-watt stations and putting them on the air as a hobby. Such was the case in Jackson County one fall evening in 1921 when several young men gathered in an old Ashland garage and built a primitive broadcasting station. After playing records by putting a phonograph in front of a microphone, and after saying hello to all their friends, they tired of the game and gave the equipment to one of their number, Bill Virgin. His father owned a flour mill in Central Point that would provide a high place from which to string the antenna. The tiny station used the call letters KFAY. It was hard to make a small station commercially viable. In 1926, Bill Virgin entered into a partnership with Robert Ruhl, publisher of the Medford Mail Tribune, who bought a half interest for $1,500. Ruhl changed the call letters to KMED and moved the station into the Sparta building downtown. The transmitter's antenna on top of the building consisted of two 85-foot farmer's towers with the windmills removed and the antenna wire strung between them. A few months later, Ruhl lost interest, saying he could see no worthwhile future in commercial radio, and he gave his half-share back to Virgin. The station slowly began to reach the break-even point. Virgin died in 1928, and his wife, Blanche, became the nation's first woman radio station owner and manager. Shortly after the war, Blanche Virgin sold the station to Gibson Broadcasting, an out-of-state corporation. The FCC ruled that only local interests could buy the station. Luther Gibson appealed that all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won the battle, but lost the war. After spending $40,000 on the case, he decided not to buy the station after all. In 1948, Blanche Virgin hired a young engineer, Ray Johnson, who later became manager. Johnson developed plans for expansion that included television and FM stations, all to bear the call letters KMED. All of that came true. In 1972, 50 years after the founding of KMED, the late Art Chipman, national sales manager and local historian, wrote a small book about the history of the station from which I have taken much of the above. In those days, the FCC required that broadcasting "should operate in the public interest," and the station managers had to prove that every time the license came up for renewal. One easy way was to interview business and professional leaders on the phone as to whether their concerns were being met by the station. Johnson decided to do more than that. Several times a year, he and his department heads would have lunch with a couple of dozen local civic and political leaders, who would express concerns and wishes about the station. The dictum that broadcasting should operate in the public interest has fairly well disappeared. Radio stations hire "shock jocks'' -- Howard Stern and others -- who use words that would have gotten them fired in earlier decades. Nationally, some of the stations have been fined for the jocks' language, but the owners probably see such a fine as a cost of doing business. Also, where a company once could operate only one AM and one FM radio station in a market, they can now buy many of the radio stations in a market and house them all in the same building. Oh for the good old days when healthy competition and public service were the watchwords of broadcasting. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA