Re: NERW - 3/12 -- KDKA garage

[mwaters@mail.wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>NERW wrote:
*From PENNSYLVANIA comes word of the imminent demolition of a radio
landmark.  The garage on Penn Avenue in Wilkinsburg where Frank Conrad
put amateur station 8XK on the air in 1920 will soon be removed to
make way for a fast-food restaurant, and the National Museum of
Broadcasting/The Conrad Project is trying to raise the money needed to
dismantle the building and put it in storage for future restoration.

What's the big deal about an old garage?  Only that 8XK evolved, later
in 1920, into a little station called KDKA down the road in
Pittsburgh.  Whether or not you buy the Westinghouse PR machine's
"first radio station" claim, there's no doubt that Conrad's work was
significant and that the loss of the garage would be a tragedy.

We'll keep you posted as efforts continue to raise the needed money...
>
        I take a contrary view on this. Unless it has some historic
significance to broadcasting other than the absolutely bogus Westinghouse
claim that KDKA was "first," I say put it in the nearest dumpster and bring
on the cheeseburgers. Treating the garage like a shrine just adds to the
totally bogus Westinghouse claim that KDKA was the "first" station, if
that's all there is to it. Or deliver it to some freeway underpass in
Pittsburgh and the homeless people can live in it. Or ship it to the Public
Relations Hall of Fame because that whole KDKA deal is one of the greatest
shyster capers in the history of flakdom. What did Conrad and 8XK do that
others were not already doing -- for example, at that time in Detroit, or,
in the case of the station in S.F.,  since around 1910?