It was 80 years ago today...

In spring 1922, the United States Commerce Department granted the Gimbels Department Store licenses to install and operate radio stations in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, assigning the call sign WIP to Philadelphia, but giving one of the first of the new four-letter call signs, WAAK, to the Milwaukee store.

Of course, getting a government license for a station was only half the battle. Someone still had to be found to build and install the studio and transmitting equipment. Here in Milwaukee, Gimbels called on one Clarence Bates, Milwaukee's first professional broadcast engineer.

Bates built a 100-watt transmitter for Gimbels and erected a 40-ft. tower on top of the downtown store. Studio decor at the time demanded heavy drapes and wall coverings, so Bates covered a 17x25-ft. room on Gimbels' third floor with dark maroon velvet to provide the proper acoustic ambience.

Nearby stood the wind-up record player for transcription concerts, along with the studio microphone. In those days, the carbon-button microphone was wired directly across the high-voltage power supply of the transmitter, so to protect the announcing staff, Clarence suspended the microphone from a handsome brass birdcage stand supplied by the store.

Programming for WAAK was supplied by a local musician and producer named Raymond Mitchell, who promptly shanghaied Bates' assistant engineer, Daniel Gellerup (later chief engineer at WTMJ) to announce the programs.

Recruiting talent for WAAK was a matter of scouring the local theaters and recital halls for visiting artists and obtaining their (usually willing) cooperation. Mitchell's show business connections were essential, since it was believed listeners took a dim view of the transcription broadcasts (like today's automated stations), and thus demanded a steady supply of live voices and music for their listening pleasure.

In preparation for the first broadcasts at WAAK, Gimbels established "listening posts" throughout the store, where shoppers were invited to pause and listen to the programs on individual earphones. It is important to remember that the general public was not yet sold on the utility value of a broadcast receiver in the home -- the very factor that WAAK was designed to address.

Bates continued his fine-tuning and testing of WAAK through the month of April 1922. On Sun., April 23, the strains of W.T. Purdy's "On Wisconsin" were heard in a music test.

More formal "tests" were heard on the following Monday and Tuesday, when violinist George Lipschultz was presented over WAAK for an audience assembled in the Strand Theatre. One of the local papers remarked that "Every note could be heard with equal distinction." Such tests were actually a means of making sure all the equipment would work for the extended amount of time required to present a full evening of programming. Such testing may also have been a Gimbels company policy, since the other Gimbels station, WIP in Philadelphia, beat a rival department store as "first on the air" by claiming such tests as their first "broadcasting," although their official sign-on was in fact the next day.

In any case, the first "official" broadcast over WAAK was presented by Dan Gellerup at 7:30 p.m. Wed., April 26, 1922, on the only frequency authorized for domestic broadcasting: 360 meters, or about 830 kHz.

And what became of WAAK?

The ground-breaking Milwaukee station lasted less than a year. The following spring, new federal regulations mandated the installation of expensive wave-metering equipment at all radio stations. By then there were three other stations on the air in Milwaukee and Gimbels decided to pull the plug on WAAK, thus ending the pioneering experiment in Milwaukee broadcasting.

(This story excerpted and adapted from Terry Baun's article in "Once a Century," the annual publication of the Milwaukee Press Club, Volume 89, 1985. Special thanks to the Milwaukee Press Club)