San Francisco Bay Area radio fanatics will be in 7th heaven tomorrow, when a bunch of California Historical Radio Society (CHRS) events are taking place. The morning starts with a vintage radio swap meet in Berkeley at the historic KRE building beginning at 9am. Then, from 11:30am to 3:00pm the Bay Area Radio Hall of […]
On Wednesday, radio fans all over the globe celebrated the 75th anniversary of the famed “War of the Worlds” broadcast, a radio drama directed and narrated by Orson Welles that presented a chilling H.G. Wells story about a Martian invasion. At the same time, there are questions as to whether or not listeners were actually […]
![Students being dragged down the stairs during the May 1960 HUAC protests [source: foundsf.org]](https://www.radiosurvivor.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/huacstairs-250x125.jpg "The KCBS reporter who informed for the FBI")
I am reading Seth Rosenfeld’s extraordinary book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. There are many radio references in the 734 page tome. Among the most interesting to me are mentions of KCBS radio reporter Dick Leonard, who offered “clandestine help” to the Federal Bureau of Investigation after the […]
Commercial radio in the UK turns 40 years-old this week. Here in the US we tend to take for granted that broadcast media would be funded by commercials interrupting our programs several times an hour. But the rest of the world came to embrace the commercial system much more slowly. The development of commercial broadcasting […]
On its recently launched You Tube channel, The California Historical Radio Society is archiving a treasure trove of materials related to radio history. Included are some “Living History Series” interviews with radio luminaries like Carter B. Smith, Terry McGovern, Rosie Allen, Ben Fong-Torres and Stan Burford. Additional videos chronicle various events from Radio Day by […]
I love college radio history and couldn’t be more thrilled about the exhaustive effort undertaken by the University of Maryland in its new exhibit, Saving College Radio: WMUC Past, Present and Future. Curated by sound archivist, ethnomusicologist and WMUC DJ Laura Schnitker, the exhibit can be viewed in the university library in College Park, Maryland […]
As we reported in July, the Pacifica Radio Archives has received a $128k grant to preserve and publish around 1,644 historical radio programs (2,013 reel-to-reel audio recordings) documenting the cultural and political activism of women in the United States from 1963 to 1982. The whole project will take around two years. The recordings will be […]
Arcane Radio Trivia’s Jose Fritz (one of the first people who I profiled for my Radio Obsessives series) just wrote up a nifty post about the early days of radio at Temple University in Philadelphia. He unearthed a 1947 account from the Temple University News which reports on the status of the nearly-built carrier current […]
After attending Radio Day by the Bay on the west coast for the past two years, I can only imagine the fun in store for vintage radio fans at the Antique Wireless Association‘s World Convention later this month. The 52nd Antique Wireless Association’s World Convention will take place near Rochester, New York. Featuring informational sessions, […]
I was doing a random search on Twitter this weekend when I ran across a photo of a radio reception stamp for the first Haverford College radio station WABQ. It turns out that some of the current radio station participants at Haverford College found this gem on eBay, just in time for this year’s 90th […]
