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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Very tight scripting dominated early radio For radio broadcasting and me, it was love at first sound. It is hard to place a date on events in one's teen years, but I believe it was in 1935 when our family acquired our first radio, an Atwater-Kent. It was 10 years old and consisted of a large metal box with five or six control knobs on the front and a horn-like speaker sitting on top. Commercial broadcasting began in a very amateurish way in 1920, but by 1925 when our radio was built, broadcasting was expanding at a phenomenal rate. Our set was not easy to tune, and getting a clear sound out of it required tedious fiddling with the dials, but we had time to do that. The second event that really added to my interest in radio occurred in about 1938 when another teenage boy and I decided to visit a radio station in our town. Physically, there was little about the primitive station to create a feeling of awe, but I was smitten anyway. The studio itself was simply a plain room on the seventh floor of a downtown office building. On a desk in one corner was a small box with rotary switches to control two turntables and a microphone. Next door, in the station's record library, 78 rpm records were stacked on a couple of chairs near the desk. The announcer was a University of Texas senior named Nelson Olmsted. He talked to us about radio while the records were playing. Thirty years later, I met Olmsted a second time when he visited Medford to promote his radio show, "Tales of Pacific Power-land," which was broadcast in seven Western states. I told him how he had influenced my life. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Last week I wrote about the beginnings of commercial radio broadcasting around the nation in the 1920s and '30s. Here's a closer look at the development of radio broadcasting in Portland; next week we'll look at the birth of broadcasting in the Medford area. A couple of radio stations went on the air in Portland in late 1922 or early in '23, and there used to be quite a squabble over which was the first in the state (more on that next week.) In the early '30s, a woman who had been the "continuity director" at the largest Portland station from its inception wrote a "novel" about her experience. As a continuity director in the early '20s, her job was to write practically every word that was uttered on the air, filling a three-ring notebook daily. The announcers were to never deviate from the scripts in the book. Their only ad-libbing was to fill in the blanks, such as, "It's a warm summer morning with the temperature currently at _____ degrees with the forecast calling for _____." This tightly scripted approach to the broadcast day continued for a few years, but the Depression of 1929 led to staff cuts everywhere, and "continuity" directors had to turn to writing ads full time. In her book about Portland radio, the author wrote about the wild antics of a new station manager who arrived after the crash of 1929. One stunt was to avoid paying the telephone company for lines for remotes at businesses in the immediate area around the downtown station. The manager obtained a map of sewer lines downtown. He bought several hundred feet of tough fishing line, which he attached along with broadcast cable to a yellow tennis ball. Then he flushed the ball and the lines down the station's toilet. Several people from his staff waited at open manholes, and when they saw the yellow ball going by, they would herd it with a long stick into the right drain. When it arrived at the destination, the ball was hauled out, followed by the fishing line and the broadcast cable. The phone company didn't make a dime on the remote. Sounds crazy, but when I worked in Portland, several old-timers assured me the story was true. (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