enjoying the new Jerry Williams book

[Donna Halper]

At 11:03 AM 3/9/2008, kvahey@comcast.net wrote:
>BTW we have had this discussion before of who as the first to put
>callers on the air and the book hints that it happened in 1934 at WJSV
>in Washington which I assume would later be known as WTOP. The station
>put a young man in a studio at the transmitter and he invited people
>to call in so he could find out how far the signal went.

Umm, not exactly.  In my new book, I've traced putting callers on the 
air back to St. Paul MN (KSTP, still on the air, btw) where a 
performer named Johm Little who was on tour asked the announcer if 
people who had since his band would call in, and a bunch of calls 
from as far away as Texas were put on the air.  That was in 1929.

As with the KDKA myth, it's hard to document "firsts" from back then 
unless somebody wrote about it or unless somebody was actually there 
doing the particular thing.  In the case of Little, a reporter for 
Associated Press was there covering something else and found it 
amusing to see a call put on the air.