KNX, KFI, KTLA: What is the story behind radio and TV name letters?

Does the alphabet matter in broadcasting any extra?

Individuals hearth up their telephones or tablets, and the best way they leap out and in of video and audio, they most likely couldn’t let you know which channel’s experiences they’d simply watched or heard.

Channel? What’s that?

The radio and TV stations whence come the music and the information might get much more anonymized: Many automobiles are coming off the meeting line lacking that democratizing medium of the twentieth century, AM radio. ( you, Ford and Tesla, and the remainder of the Radio Free Detroit et al. pack.)

If the net makes it straightforward to uncouple sights and sounds from their sources, what is going to individuals keep in mind of stations’ four-letter identifiers, these signifiers of delight and place, the decision indicators?

Radio stations and even TV stations could change their musical or speak or information codecs, or their community allegiances, or they could change their hometowns altogether. However federal laws insist that they at all times establish themselves originally of every hour by their name letters and the “metropolis of license.”

This name letter enterprise obtained codified in 1912, at a “radiotelegraph” convention in London not lengthy after RMS Titanic sank, so the ability of wi-fi communication was very a lot on delegates’ minds.

The convention handed out call-letter prefixes — C for Canada, X for Mexico, F for France, and so forth. The U.S. obtained Okay and W, together with two army designations: N for Navy, A for Military and ultimately aviation companies; Okay west of the Mississippi, W east, some exceptions.

And shortly, the push was on. (Some early beginner ham radio operators had already been placing materials on the air. In 1908, college students at L.A.’s Polytechnic Excessive College underneath the instruction of the magnificently named Professor H. LaV. Twining have been constructing and experimenting with wi-fi gear and transmissions. That February, The Occasions witnessed a pupil electrical exhibition in a campus basement. The category had cobbled collectively a home made Tesla coil, and wi-fi messages have been despatched from the basement to the college auditorium by college students who, The Occasions adjudged, might “deal with juice most familiarly.”)

The alphabet turned the stations’ playground.

Some obtained fortunate: L.A.’s KFWB radio, now a Mexican regional music station, and for a few years one of many area’s two information station, started transmitting 99 years in the past. It was co-founded by one of many Warner Brothers, whose studios opened right here in 1923. The WB within the name letters led individuals to conclude it was a deliberate “get” for Warner Brothers, nevertheless it was the luck of the draw. KFWA had simply been assigned, and KFWC obtained handed out proper afterwards.

Some did get what they needed. Cowboy singing star and businessman Gene Autry landed the decision letters KOOL for his TV station in Phoenix, and KOLD in Tucson. KOLD continues to be on the air in Tucson; KOOL now seems to be working as radio-only, in Nebraska and, fittingly, in Alaska.

KGUN, one other Tucson station, was initially KDWI, however the man who purchased it, H.U. Garrett, was a Texas gun collector and lover of all issues Western, and had the decision letters modified to KGUN in 1957.

Garrett purchased the station from a lumber man named D.W. Ingram, who had used his personal monogram as the decision letters. Because the native legend goes, Garrett modified the decision letters to KGUN partly as a result of he liked previous weapons, and partly as a result of he thought KDWI would make listeners consider drunk driving. The truth that, in accordance with Merriam-Webster, DWI had solely entered the vocabulary in 1950 makes this attractive story sound a leeeetle far-fetched.

On an area Tucson information website, proper after the Parkland, Fla., faculty bloodbath in 2018, a author argued for altering the identify of the station, nevertheless it broadcasts as KGUN to today.

L.A.’s earliest radio stations included KNX, KFI, and KHJ. In April 1922, The Occasions started broadcasting as KHJ from the rooftop of The Occasions’ constructing downtown, “the primary newspaper in Southern California to rearrange for the institution of a strong radio station.”

That first broadcast included “vocal and instrumental music of the best caliber obtainable” — these being moments from the opera “Tannhauser” — adopted by “transient talks by notable males, a bedtime story by one among America’s biggest poet-humorists, and the newest information in bulletin kind.”

Individuals with radios hosted “listening events” in every single place, from the Chamber of Commerce to a campground up within the Arroyo Seco. “Your singer was so fashionable on this family,” wrote Miss Jean Califf of Pasadena, “that even the cook dinner forgot all about luncheon and burned the muffins.”

The KECA-TV studio on a classic postcard from Patt Morrison’s assortment. Earlier than ABC ran KECA as a TV station, the KECA radio station was owned, from 1929 to 1944, by Earle C. Anthony (therefore ECA), an only-in-L.A. character. Anthony constructed an early electrical automotive (prime velocity 6 mph), owned a Packard dealership downtown (seventh and Flower) and began KFI-FM (now defunct). Anthony was additionally an authentic “doxxer,” asserting the names and residential cellphone numbers of L.A. Metropolis Council members on the radio when he thought they have been dragging their ft to get the Dodgers right here.

In 1947, The Occasions’ dad or mum firm acquired KTTV — name letters for Okay-Occasions-Tele-Imaginative and prescient — tv; it bought its curiosity in 1963, when cross-ownership guidelines frowned on a newspaper proudly owning a TV station in the identical market. Paradoxically, greater than 50 years later, the Tribune Co. was allowed to personal each the Los Angeles Occasions and KTLA.

Attempting to trace the evolving name letters and house owners and areas of TV and radio stations is like attempting to determine the household timber of royal dynasties of Europe: in case you’re not already loopy sufficient to attempt, you’ll actually be pushed mad by the point you end. Additionally like royal dynasties, some name letter stations simply appear to die out.

KTLA — with its blissful acronym for television-Los-Angeles — went on the air in January 1947. Simply over two years later, it established itself as L.A.’s premier hometown station, and a information pioneer: For one thing like two days, it broadcast dwell from a discipline in San Marino, the place all method of staff have been attempting to rescue a 3-year-old woman named Kathy Fiscus from the uncapped nicely she had fallen into. Kathy died, however dwell, on-the-scene TV information was, in essence, born.

So: Within the metastasizing 3-D multiverse of media, the place nearly anybody with smartphone proficiency can create a private video channel, will these legacy letters even register with most people more often than not?

1

2

1. A classic postcard from Patt Morrison’s assortment exhibits Columbia Sq., as soon as residence to KCBS and KNX. Right this moment the complicated within the 6100 block of Sundown Boulevard is the Hollywood location of a members-only workspace and a sushi restaurant, amongst different companies. Doubt they served sashimi on the Radio Heart Restaurant. 2. And the nighttime view, on one other of Morrison’s postcards.

Craig Curtis is a radio guide, and was this system director at KPCC — now referred to as LAist — after I hosted a two-hour speak program there. A great individual to ask.

“Name letters have at all times and solely been merely a random set of letters with no important which means to listeners,” he mentioned, “apart from the model worth that grows as a station establishes itself and its format available in the market, and works arduous to make use of the decision letters in every single place doable.”

One instance he provides is KHJ, as soon as the L.A. Occasions radio station, and now, greater than a century later, an affiliate of a Catholic radio community. It had a energetic number of incarnations in between.

“For Angelenos of a sure age,” mentioned Curtis, “it meant ‘Boss Radio,’ one of the crucial necessary pop music stations within the nation within the ’60s and ’70s.”

In the identical vogue, KPCC radio, licensed to Pasadena Metropolis Faculty — PCC — however broadcasting throughout the area, “turned an necessary information model, not as a result of ‘KPCC’ itself means something, however as a result of KPCC turned related to NPR and native information.”

When radio stations expanded into tv, some tacked on “-TV” to their name letters, or simply added a “T.” That’s what KNX did when it added tv to the radio model KNX, and voila, KNXT, a number one station right here from 1951 till it modified its name letters to KCBS-TV in 1984.

The reverse of this classic postcard from Patt Morrison’s assortment says NBC’s Burbank hub was the “first coloration tv studio in the USA.”

My book-group pal Kelly Lange, a pioneering girl nightly information anchor on Los Angeles tv, spent a lot of her profession on the NBC community’s owned-and-operated affiliate right here, KNBC.

She recalled that at KNBC — as evidently additionally occurred on the L.A. O-and-O stations KNXT/KCBS-TV in addition to KABC-TV — “we have been instructed by New York that we might now not trouble with the Okay designation, and would consult with ourselves as NBC-4. … Utilizing simply the NBC moniker was merely extra highly effective.”

In order that’s why you see adverts for NBC4 Southern California, ABC7 Los Angeles, and CBS2 Los Angeles, quite than their full (and extra local-sounding) name letters.

As a result of radio name letters fired up greater than 100 years in the past, a few of them bear the quaint hallmarks of a brand new medium in that older age.

Name indicators for many stations east of the Mississippi River start with a W, and for stations west of the Mississippi, a Okay. Past that, the creativeness ran riot.

Atlanta’s two newspapers hustled to change into the primary to broadcast radio applications, and a couple of month earlier than The Occasions went on the air with KHJ, the Atlanta Journal despatched up a radio transmission on WSB. As many stations tried to do, this one got here up with a call-letter origin fantasy, that WSB stood for “Welcome South, Brother.”

The decision letters for WHYY, the PBS TV and NPR radio stations broadcasting from Philadelphia, stand, ambitiously, for “Wider Horizons for You and Yours.”

In Chester, S.C., the radio name letters’ acronym, WGCD, represented “Great Guernsey Heart of Dixie,” for the caramel-and-white-colored Guernsey cows cultivated by the native radio pioneer’s father.

For KAGH radio in Arkansas, the acronym was wrought into “Maintain Arkansas Inexperienced House.” Miami’s WIOD turned “Great Isle of Goals,” and in Kentucky, WMTC meant “Profitable Males To Christ,” later broadened to “Profitable Many To Christ.”

In 1950 or early 1951, an bold broadcaster supposedly wrote to President Harry S Truman for the go-ahead to make use of the initials HST for his radio station, However after Truman controversially fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur as army commander in Korea, in April 1951, the would-be broadcaster bailed on HST.

Broadcast towers on Mt. Wilson on a classic postcard from Patt Morrison’s assortment. The reverse of the postcard misidentifies the San Gabriel Mountains and reads: “On the summit of Mt. Wilson, within the Sierra Madre Mountains, 6,000 ft above sea degree, are the tall tv towers for the varied networks in Southern California. From this excellent vantage level, applications are transmitted to all elements of the nation.”

I additionally besought Michael Harrison for his insights. He publishes Talkers, {a magazine} for and in regards to the speak media enterprise, and he thinks lots about radio broadcasting’s problem to refresh its relevance “earlier than the world forgets there was as soon as a factor referred to as radio, and it got here out of a cool place often known as a radio station.”

Radio stations “nonetheless make the most of name letters, dial positions or some sort of slogan to establish their model.” However “what they name themselves isn’t the important thing problem. It’s what they do between station identifications.

“The job of program director has largely been corporatized in lots of locations to model supervisor. The issue they face is radio is now not one among comparatively few locations the place individuals can get their information, speak and music. These merchandise at the moment are obtainable on a number of utilitarian platforms in a quickly increasing digital universe. Radio, as soon as a universe unto itself, is changing into only one button on an excellent bigger media dial.”

Name indicators can nonetheless have worth, so far as Curtis is anxious, “although much less so now than when conventional broadcasting reigned. … And there’s no motive name letters can’t be used to additionally model digital or any form of content material, which numerous well-known firms do. ESPN is an efficient instance. Hardly anyone is aware of what ESPN initially stood for (‘Leisure and Sports activities Programming Community’), any greater than individuals know what IBM stood for.”

Los Angeles is so huge that it embraces a number of low-power neighborhood stations, KCLA in San Pedro, KQBH, run by the Boyle Heights Arts Conservancy, and KLBP in Lengthy Seashore amongst them.

And within the late Nineteen Nineties, for just a few, a only a few, superb years, KBLT broadcast its pirate applications from Sue Carpenter’s home in Silver Lake. She’d executed the identical factor in San Francisco with KPBJ, each name indicators honoring sandwiches.

She obtained busted by the FCC, handed over her $500 or so price of apparatus in lieu of a $10,000 positive, and went to work writing about bikes and sundry adventures for the L.A. Occasions, then for the Orange County Register, and wound up again on the radio, speaking about trendy mobility — for LAist (89.3 in your FM dial).

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a fancy place. On this weekly function, Patt Morrison is explaining the way it works, its historical past and its tradition.