I’ve always been fascinated by radio; in fact, one of the first things I did when I retired from the Navy and returned to Hattiesburg in 1996 was to start my own weekly radio program, “Brother Benny, Your Radio Pastor.”
I was teaching full-time at Sumrall High School, driving a school bus morning and night and serving as the interim pastor of a small Baptist church on 28th Avenue. I asked the church deacons if they minded if I “went on the air;” they said, “go for it,” if I paid for my own airtime. So, every Friday for the next year and a half, I would head over to the station on 4th Street, which has since burned down, que up my theme song, sung and recorded for free by my brother-in-law, and lay down on tape 15 minutes of world-shaking, gospel revelation to be played at 6:00 A.M. the following Sunday morning. If anyone was awake and listening, I’m sure they were amazed.
My radio odyssey started when I was a kid. I had an old battery powered Silvertone radio, Sears and Roebuck’s best, which had belonged to my grandmother but nobody in the family had wanted, and I would take it under the covers at night, marveling at the melodious sounds fighting to be heard over the hum of the tubes glowing in the dark. For some reason, my listening to the radio upset my daddy, who generally ignored me.
I can remember my mama and daddy arguing about the propriety of my listening to what was then called “race,” and later “rhythm and blues” music. My favorite station, late at night, was WLAC, Nashville, Tennessee; and my favorite program was Ernie’s Record Mart, located at 179 3rd Avenue, Nashville.” The announcer’s name was “John R.” As far as my daddy was concerned, my listening to that program, with mail-order records for sale by such artists as Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Lonesome Sundown, Howling Wolf, etc., was the road to perdition. To my way of thinking, the argument was like the one to be found in John Lee Hooker’s song, “Boogie Chillen” (1948), which I would have heard when I was about seven years old:
One night I was laying down
I heard mama ‘n papa talking
I heard papa tell mama
Let that boy boogie-woogie
It’s in him, and it’s got to come out
And I felt so good
Went on boogie’n just the same.
The only differences between the song and my situation, of course, was that mama was on my side, and that I wanted to keep on listening to the radio instead continuing to boogie.
I always had a little money growing up, working at the gas station after school, pumping
gas - “Working in the fillin station, too many tasks, wipe the windows, check the tires, check the oil, dollar gas;” “Too Much Monkey Business” (1957), and too often changing tires on loaded stump trucks. When I had wheels, I would head up Highway 11 to Pal’s Music Store on Front Street in Hattiesburg, usually stopping first down the hill at Gus’ Lunchroom #2 for some spaghetti and meatballs, and then to the store where the super nice owner, Mrs. Nick Fokakis, would cheerfully order even the most obscure song title that I had heard over the radio while working at night. To be honest, I often never made it to Gus’ Lunchroom, having already stopped out on Broadway drive for a barbeque sandwich at the Choctaw Drive In.
For those of younger generations, it may be hard to appreciate the impact of early radio on popular culture, especially in rural areas. Radio was the housewife’s daytime companion, then the friendly voice for the whole family that cut through the nighttime gloom, bringing sounds transported mysteriously from faraway lands. It was hailed as the world’s greatest source of information and knowledge, the creator of international harmony, and the invention that would stop all wars. My wife can remember, as late as the 1940s, when neighbors would gather around her grandfather’s front porch in the Darbun community, out from Columbia, on Saturday night and sit in the yard listening to the Grand Old Opry on the family radio, one of the first in the area. I can remember hearing, around the same time, the honey-voiced announcer, Henry Dupree, saying that he was broadcasting from the “luxurious ballroom, high atop the Roosevelt Hotel in downtown New Orleans,” on WWL radio, and thinking it was the height of sophistication.
I knew very little about the technical side of radio until the Navy sent me to a year’s worth of electronics school. When I was in my first ship out of that school, I was dismayed to see the little sea birds and sea gulls that had landed for a rest on the ship’s radio transmitting antenna drop dead after being fried from the inside out by the outgoing bursts of electronic energy. It’s no wonder that men and women serving in the Navy “rate” or specialty of “Radioman” (Not gender specific. Radio Person?) are colloquially known as “Sparks.” I don’t think that’s still an issue with the more modern equipment. By the way, the cognoscenti knows that someone onboard a ship is “in” it and not “on” it.
Radio works by transmitting and receiving electromagnetic waves. The radio signal is an electronic current moving back and forth very quickly. A transmitter radiates this field outward via an antenna; a receiver then picks up the field and translates it to the sounds heard through the radio. An antenna to catch waves, some electronics to turn them into sounds, and a loudspeaker so you can hear them – that’s about all there is to a basic radio receiver. In AM (Amplified Modulation) radio, the strength (amplitude) of the signal is changed (modulated) to make the sounds. In FM (Frequency Modulation) radio, it is the speed (frequency) of the signal that is changed. Most of our modern radio stations have switched to FM transmission, using very little power.
The Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi, first developed the idea of radio, or wireless telegraph, in the early 1890s. Although there are differing opinions, many believe that the first wireless radio was produced by Nikola Tesla in 1893 in a St. Louis, Missouri, plant. This is the same Mr. Tesla who inspired Elon Musk to name the brand of electric automobiles after him that we are beginning to see on Hattiesburg roads. The “wireless” as early radio was first known, was originally used to transmit Morse code for ship-to-ship communication between vessels at sea. It was not until Christmas Eve, 1906, that the first transmission of voices began through American airways. Wireless operators on ships off the East Coast were mystified to hear the voice of a woman singing “Oh Holy Night” through their earphones. The sound originated from the experimental radio station of Reginald Aubrey Fessenden in Brant Rock, Massachusetts. What one might think of as the first commercial radio station, KDKA, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, came online in 1920.
Unfortunately, being basically unregulated by the government, which had taken it over completely during World War I for national security reasons, radio by the late 1920s had become a vast wasteland where chaos ruled the airways. Broadcasters routinely jumped their assigned frequencies and indiscriminately boosted their transmission power to ensure their own signals got through. It wasn’t until 1934 when the federal government passed the Communications Act and created the Federal Communications (FCC) that order was restored. Four years earlier, the government had established sixty so-called “clear channel” frequencies where stations winning the rights to these special AM frequencies (WWL in New Orleans, WGN in Chicago, KWKH, Shreveport, etc.) could broadcast day and night with at least 50,000 watts power. If you are older than 60, such stations are the ones you heard driving around at night during your teen age years. The rationale behind these powerful, clear channel stations was to provide reliable radio coverage for the thousands of Americans who lived in the vast rural areas of the United States.
The sky wave, or ozone skip effect, like sliding a rock across a pond, enabled the signals of these super-powered stations to travel incredible distances.
But again, “Murphy’s Law” (Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong”) reared its ugly head. This new order in the airways, unfortunately, did not pertain to advertising standards, and the nation was consequently flooded with dozens of questionable, even harmful consumer products. For example, some stations sold “Marmola,” a fat reducer composed of thyroid extract and bladder wrack, which caused headache, delirium, and fever for some unfortunate over-eaters. “Koremlu,” another big radio advertiser, was a depilatory made from thallium acetate, a rat poison that caused abdominal pain, nausea, and blindness, as well as loss of all body hair, sightly or unsightly.
Not all the advertising excess resulted in physical problems. There was growing concern about the mischief caused by “false preaching, fortune-telling, occultism, spiritualism, astrology, phrenology (diagnosing illness by feeling the bumps on a person’s head), palm reading, numerology, and mind reading. Criticism grew so loud among the public that in 1937 the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) decided to start policing itself and to work more closely with federal regulators. The stage was now set for the “border blasters” to move south of the border along “la frontera,” to escape the scrutiny and oversight such policing would certainly bring.
Although there were several border blasters, totally unregulated, extremely high-powered radio stations, located in Mexico, known as the “Big Xs,” and broadcasting into the United States and around the world, such as XEXO in Nuevo Laredo, XELO in Juarez, XEMO in Tijuana, the story of XER, later XERA, in Villa Acuna, Coahuila, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass, Texas, is representative. Founded by “Doctor” John Romulus Brinkley, a conman who had lost his Kansas radio license for advertising his fraudulent cure for prostate issues, male impotence, and male virility, the “cure” involved the transplanting of goat testes into a man’s scrotum. Brinkley established an immensely popular hospital in Eagle Pass where the operations were performed, and men from all over the nation responded to the border blaster’s clarion call. Supposedly, the governor of Louisiana, Huey P. Long, was scheduled to undergo such an “operation” a few weeks after his assassination in 1935.
In addition to pushing his dangerous and other sketchy medical services, Brinkley programmed the 50,000 watts, 24/7 broadcasting schedule with a format soon followed by all the other blasters: fantastic deals on weight loss pills, baby chicks, folding pocketknives, prayer cloths, and pictures of Jesus, - promoted by faith healers, evangelistic preachers, hucksters, and hillbilly singers. Some of the more “prominent” characters that you might be familiar with include W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, two-time governor of Texas and later a U. S. senator, who some say was the model for the stereotypical Mississippi governor in the movie, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000); the evangelist Brother J. Charles Jessup, originally from Gulfport, Mississippi, and who drove around Eagle Pass in a gold Cadillac. He reportedly owned a home in Pistol Ridge, south of Lumberton, but I’d have to check with my long-gone mama to be sure. There was also the flamboyant Reverend Frederick Eikerenkoetter II, better known as Reverend Ike, one of the first of the “prosperity preachers” (“You can’t lose with the stuff I use”); and my favorite of them all, the Wolfman – Wolfman Jack, who slam-dunked border radio in the 1960s with his fast talking, sly jive, and white-hot rhythm and blues:
Wherever ya are, and whatever ya doing,’
I wancha to lay ya hands on da Raydeooo,
lay back wid me, and squeeze ma knobs.
We gonna feeeel it ta-night. . . . . .
OOOOOOWWWWWWOOOOooooooooooo
When I retired from the Navy, I took some of my mustering out pay and bought myself an up-to-date single sideband shortwave radio receiver (Drake R8A), thinking I could keep up with world events. It worked well for a few years; however, as the internet and world-wide web came online, I transitioned to an inexpensive “internet radio,” which can pick up the transmissions of every radio station in the world that also sends its signal out over the internet – literally thousands. So, almost every night, I listen to the local news on several stations in Paris, Hawaiian music on KIME in Honolulu, and then build my character on Vatican Radio Channel HD (Statio Radiophonica Vaticana) in Rome, which is operated by the Jesuit Order. Marconi would be proud.
Light a candle for me.
—
Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
