1922 Part 4 - June and July, WFAL, WGAB, Houston and WHAB, WIAC, Galveston

The month of June saw four new licensees receive approval in the area in all. In addition to WEAY a license was issued to the Houston Chronicle for WFAL to operate both on 360 meters and 485 meters on June 12, 1922 and on June 14, QRV Radio Co. of 1213 Prairie Ave. received a license for WGAB. The Commerce Department annual official list of broadcast stations issued June 30, 1922, shows both of these stations on the air but WFAL was not to make it to the year’s end, it was struck from the Commerce Department’s list November 17, while WGAB lasted only until March 23, 1923.

A brief note in the Chronicle on May 17th foreshadowed the launch of WGAB without ever mentioning the radio station. The front page, 4 line item, mentioned that George Lacey, fingerprint expert of the Houston Police Department, was starting a radio store at 1213 Prairie Ave., the address of the QRV Radio Company. Lacey kept his job at the Police Department and the connection proved useful to the store when, on August 2, two teens tried to steal some parts for making a radio from the QRV Radio Store. The manager apprehended them and called his ‘silent partner,’ George Lacey, who hauled them down to the police station and called their parents.


The QRV Radio Company billed itself as the only exclusive radio store maintaining a radio station in ‘this section of the country,’ and by late 1922 was doing so well that a second store was opened at 1118 Capitol.

The first mention of WGAB in the listings published in the Post came on Wednesday, July 5 and it would have made the producers of ‘Cops’ and ‘America’s Most Wanted’ proud. WGAB’s schedule included police reports at 8:30am and 4pm and a Noonday Concert at 1pm. That seems to have been the extent of WGAB’s programming activities for some time but later that year the Post schedule noted that WGAB had suspended programming for remodeling. Then on Tuesday, October 24, it was reported QRV was installing a broadcasting station at the Houston Conservatory of Music, Main at Alabama, to carry weekly concerts. Ingraham S. Roberts of QRV said the station was due to be operational November 19.

In order to cut down on interference, no more than 2 stations in any city were to be licensed to operate on 485 meters; WFAL was Houston's second, after WEV (the separate frequency for weather forecasts was subsequently dropped by the Commerce Department as unnecessary). But WFAL apparently never made it on the air on either 485 meters or 360 meters. Between June 12 when the license was issued and November 17 when it was deleted, I have found no mention of it in the Post, not surprisingly, but neither have I found any mention of it in the Chronicle, which held the license. The Chronicle seldom mentioned radio, although, like the Post, it carried articles from elsewhere about radio developments, including a lengthy daily series on how to build a receiving set. When the Chronicle did carry a story about a local radio station, it never gave call letters.

There were several instances in the period between June 12 and November 17 when stories and promotions in the Chronicle seemed to be building up to the launch of WFAL. There was a big promotional tie-in with WEV in early July. Although the big 2 page ad announcing the contest was headed “Let’s all ‘Listen in’ on Radio,” the contest actually involved deciphering Morse Code messages in each of the print ads of the 13 co-sponsors of the contest. The top prize was $25.

On the 18th of July, the Chronicle launched a ‘Miracle Radio’ giveaway, offering a set to any boy, girl, man or woman who turned in four 6 month subscriptions, and a week later, on the 23rd, an even bigger set was offered, a C-R 1004 Radio Receiver, a $200 retail value, to any club, lodge, American Legion Post, Church or other organization for ‘very little effort.’ A representative of the Chronicle would come to a meeting of the organization, demonstrate the set, and explain what the group had to do to get one.

A teaser ad in the Chronicle on August 25 seemed to indicate something was going to be announced on September 1st, but the date came and went with no news of a new station.

When the national election was held in November, the Chronicle bragged that it would be making the results available not over the air, but projected on the side of the Chronicle Building by a Stereopticon device, as the paper had done in previous elections. People were invited to come out and stand in the street all evening to read them.

Why the station never got on the air is not known at this time, whether there were technical problems that couldn’t be overcome, a lack of equipment or finances, or perhaps the Chronicle simply decided radio wasn’t worth the hassle, perhaps was only a passing fancy.


By contrast, another example of the enthusiasm the Post had for radio included a front page story in the July 5th edition concerning what the Post believed to be the first ‘radio vacationists’ ever in the country. J.W. James of the James Furniture Co. and his 13 year old son Roy were taking off for California on a trip expected to last 6 weeks. James had outfitted a 2 seater with a ‘spider like aerial, consisting of copper wire wound around an inch and a quarter pole, four feet high, which was fastened on the tire rack.’ Wires ran to both the front and rear bumpers to complete the antenna. The tuner was placed ‘conveniently’ on the running board, so the two could listen to concerts as they drove. James was a member of the Houston Radio Club and members planned to broadcast messages specially for him on a daily basis and he would listen to Houston broadcast stations wherever he was. Camping gear was stowed on the running boards alongside the receiver; the pair planned to sleep out under the stars.

The Press had dropped almost all coverage of local radio developments when the Post’s series of concerts on WEV and WCAK started, but on the 21st of August the paper felt compelled to editorialize on the new medium. It seems some were already saying the fad was over, people were losing interest and the medium was going to wither away. The lengthy editorial titled ‘The Radio Slump’ took issue, acknowledging the novelty had worn off but arguing that the medium was going to be around for a long time to come, although broadcasters would be wise to pay more attention to the quality of the program content if they wished to continue to gain listeners.

To round out the licenses isued in June, 1922, on June 29 a license was issued for the first Galveston radio station, WHAB, licensed to Clark W. Thompson of Fellman’s Dry Goods. Co. On July 10, the Post noted, on p. 13, that a Galveston radio club was being formed.

"Galveston, July 8. Organization of a Galveston radio club will be accomplished Monday, according to O.W. Chancellor, radio operator of station WHAB, located at Fellmans store.

There are a number of live radio enthusiasts in the city according to Mr. Chancellor, and they are anxious to get together to form an organization so that they may exchange ideas and be of mutual help to one another in the various problems that may come up.

The radio fans will meet at the radio department of Fellman’s at 7:30pm Monday."

WHAB was apparently already on the air by that time.

UPDATE: A separate article has been published about Galveston's first station, WHAB, here, taken from stories in the Galveston Daily News.

A second station in Galveston received authorization from the Commerce Department in July, 1922. 

WIAC was owned by the Galveston Tribune and the Daily News does not seem to have given it any ink. The holdings of the Rosenberg Library at Galveston of past issues of the Tribune is very spotty and there are none from this time period so we may never know anything else about the second Galveston station.


None of the Houston papers carried much Galveston news.



Images above are taken from the Archives of the Houston Post at the Houston Public Library.

1922 Part 3 - June - WEAY, the Iris Theater Station

Will Horwitz was an entertainment entrepreneur who owned three theatres, the Iris at 612 Travis being one of them, and he had an ulterior motive in promoting radio: his own application for a license was in the pipeline and he became the third Houston broadcast licensee on June 6 when he was assigned the call letters WEAY. He began his own broadcasts on June 9.


The Post building was right down the street on the southwest corner of Travis and Texas and the antenna was stretched between the two buildings. The operator was Gerald Chinski who told the Post the station’s transmitter put out 120 watts and could be ‘forced’ to 150. The studios were in the Iris but the Post was having a studio of its own built on the 4th floor of the Post building. Like Alfred P. Daniel, Chinski was to have a long career in Houston radio, too. In the 30s he served as Chief Engineer of KXYZ and held that post for 26 years, leaving in 1961 just after putting KXYZ-FM on the air for the second time. In a story at that time it was also reported he had built and operated the first commercial station in Houston to handle wireless messages with ships at sea in 1925.

The front page story in the Post the next morning called WEAY the ‘Iris-Post Signal’ and said it had been received in El Paso, Cleveland, Atlanta and Dallas. The Post soon began printing front page schedules for the three stations on the air, listing WEAY as the ‘Iris-Post’ station for a while but eventually just as ‘the Iris Theatre Station.’

Various claims have been made about the relationship between the Post and WEAY. It has been claimed, for instance, that KPRC, which launched in May, 1925, ‘took over’ WEAY and was really just a continuation of the earlier station. It has also been claimed that Ross Sterling, owner of the Post and then the Post-Dispatch, had acquired WEAY when he bought the Houston Dispatch newspaper in 1924 and merged it with the Post. The Commerce Department records I have examined, however, never show the Post or the Post-Dispatch as owners of WEAY; the ownership is always credited either to Will Horwitz or the Iris Theatre. In 1925, the Commerce Department lists KPRC as a new station, not a change in ownership and call letters of WEAY, and WEAY continues to broadcast for 5 months after the launch of KPRC. It was deleted from the Commerce Department list on October 24, 1925, outlasting its two earliest competitors by ten months.

One possible explanation for the Post calling WEAY the ‘Iris-Post’ signal was that it was a promotional tie-in. The Post had obviously caught radio fever, the Marconi virus, v. guglielmitis, as have so many of us since, and treated radio developments as exciting and very important. In its stories on radio the Post repeatedly referred to its readers as the ‘Post radio family.’ By contrast, the Chronicle seems to have considered radio unnewsworthy and seldom mentioned it at all, much less on the front page like the Post. The Post was already sponsoring concerts on the two earliest stations; the tie-in with WEAY was a little closer with some of the programming originating from the studio on the fourth floor of the Post building down the street from the Iris, and with the flattop antenna stretched between the two buildings. It’s also clear that the Post had a close relationship with Horwitz over the years, serving as co-sponsor of his annual Children’s Christmas Party at the City Auditorium.

Another possible explanation is that the Post knew the Chronicle had an application pending for a station and the Post did not.

On the eleventh of June WEAY carried what was apparently the first church services aired in Houston.

"An extensive program arranged to feature the installation of the giant broadcast radio station of the Houston Post-Iris Theatre was transmitted over the ether Sunday...when the Ladies Amona Bible Class of the First Baptist Church conducted a special class.

The program was broadcast from station WEAY and was received by early ‘listening in’ parties in fine shape, according to the calls of appreciation floating in after the class meeting."

Afterward Reverend James B. Leavell delivered his sermon:“powerful microphones caught the divine’s message and the sermon was broadcast out into space.” Actually, there was a problem with the microphones being placed too far from the minister but the choir and congregation’s singing were heard clearly. The service was broadcast from the City Auditorium and this probably qualifies as Houston’s first remote broadcast. That afternoon, a youth service was broadcast by A.P. Daniel over WCAK from the First Presbyterian Church.

Seven months later, on January 23, 1923, the Post inaugurated a series of Friday night concerts on WEAY with the first night’s broadcast featuring the first ever one act play broadcast in Texas.

"Texas radiophone fans never before have heard a complete play by radio. The General Electric Co., Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co. and the Radio Corporation of America are the only broadcasting station operators in the United States to successfully broadcast a complete play.

The success of the big Eastern stations is dimmed, however, when it is found that few persons have heard the plays in Texas. Usually, radiophone stations nearer the state interfere with Eastern stations."

The play was ‘Troubles of 1923,’ which dealt with San Francisco’s Chinatown before the earthquake of 1906.

Will Horwitz made a fortune as an entertainment entrepreneur in Houston and gave much of it away helping needy people during the Depression. He was one of the most beloved Houstonians of his era. He held special promotions at his movie houses called Peanut days on his birthday every year when children got free transportation, free admission and a free bag of peanuts. He held a big Christmas party at the City Auditorium each year, dressing as Santa Claus to give away thousands of gifts to needy children. In the 1930s, after WEAY had left the air, Horwitz bought a controlling interest in Mexican radio station XED, the first border station, operating from Reynosa with 10,000 watts.

Almost everything Will Horwitz touched turned to gold, with one very notable exception. There will be more on Will Horwitz on the Houston Radio History blog, a bio in the People section, and more on XED and Will Horwitz' radio activities in the section on the 1930s.


The first image above is from the George Fuermann Collection of Houston Post Cards at the University of Houston Libraries and is Copyright 2000 by the University of Houston Libraries. The Houston Post occupied that building on the south west corner of Texas and Travis from 1904 to 1925 and built a radio studio on the fourth floor in 1922 to originate some programming for WEAY in the Iris Theater just down the street at 612 Travis. A mast was erected on top of the building and the antenna stretched between that mast and one atop the Iris.

The second image is from the archives of the Houston Post at the Houston Public Library.

1922 Part 2 - May - WCAK, the Houston Post Concerts

On May 6, 1922, the second Houston broadcast license was issued to Alfred P. Daniel of 2504 Bagby for station WCAK. Daniel has been credited by several with the first actual Houston radio broadcast, using a set rigged up in a Quaker Oats box, a story largely if not entirely based on an account published 33 years later. Three weeks after Daniel’s death in 1955, Anna Clyde Plunkett wrote to Post Radio TV Editor David Westheimer about the broadcast. Plunkett was a friend of the Daniel family and according to her, she sang Brahm’s ‘Sapphic Ode’ accompanied on the piano by Louise Daniel in a closed room upstairs at the Daniel house. Downstairs, family members and friends, also in a closed room to make sure what they heard was over the radio and not just from the next room, listened. After the first number, Daniel bounded upstairs to exclaim “It works!” Then Elizabeth Blaffer sang ‘One Fine Day’ and the two followed with the duet from Mme. Butterfly. Daniel asked if anyone had heard the broadcast to please phone in and a call came in from Rockport on the Texas coast above Corpus Christi. It is not recorded whether the caller asked if he had won anything.

Plunkett wrote Westheimer that it was Houston’s first radio broadcast but she did not give a date nor the call letters of the station and the broadcast was not reported on by the papers that I can find, so whether Daniel got WCAK on the air between May 6 and May 11 and beat Hurlburt-Still or whether the broadcast actually was over Daniel’s amateur station or special amateur station earlier is unknown. There will be more on the question of ‘who was first?’ in Houston in a forthcoming post.

Alfred P. Daniel’s station always operated from his home. Like WEV, WCAK was to last until early 1925 although by early 1923 Daniel was an announcer and operator at WEV and broadcast very little on WCAK. Of the early operators and owners, however, he was to have one of the longest and most notable careers in Houston radio, playing a roll in the launch of Houston’s oldest surviving AM station and its second FM station. For more on WCAK and Alfred P. Daniel, called the Dean of Houston Radio in his front page obituary in the Post in 1955, go here.

The Houston Post’s enthusiasm for the new medium was to grow by leaps and bounds in just a few days. The newspaper undertook the sponsorship of concerts on both of the first two stations and started reporting on them and promoting them with front page, above the fold, stories. On Thursday, May 18, the Post headlined on page 1 that it had arranged to send daily radio programs with the Hurlburt-Still company allowing the use of its big ‘sending plant.’

"Old familiar songs, melodies of haunting sweetness and fondest memory, hits from the latest Broadway musical shows, the jazziest of jazz music, bedtime stories for those sleepy-headed, tousled-haired boys and girls, short sermons by Houston ministers, interesting talks by prominent educators and scientists and merry nonsense by the cleverest monologists you ever heard...."

Those were just some of the features planned for the ‘Post family’ all through South Texas. Houston artists and performers lined up for the chance to donate their performances. That evening’s first program included ‘silver-voiced’ Houston tenor Henri Therrien, who would later sing with the Chicago Grand Opera, and Italian singer Amando Ianuzzi. Friday’s program was to include Peck’s Bad Boys Jazz Dance Orchestra and the Graham Four, Mrs. John Wesley Graham’s female quartet.

Friday morning’s edition of the Post carried the front page headlines “Post’s Initial Radio Broadcast from ‘WEV’ Entertains Thousands” and “Many ‘Encores’ by telephone received.”


Two monologists had dropped by and were pressed into service.

"A technical talk on radio was the fashion by which Mr. (John S.) Bonner announced his subject but it proved to be a delightful misnomer. The speaker declared he was far better acquainted with the machinery of a rodeo than that which clutters up a radio broadcasting plant. Withal it was the merriest 15 minutes of nonsense imaginable and the Post family “applauded” so insistently - by telephone calls to WEV asking for more - that the droll monologist was obliged to respond to an encore."

In the lingo of broadcasters, the phone rang off the wall at Hurlburt-Still; Bonner delivered his monolog a second time, Houston’s first re-run.

The Saturday morning front page review after the second broadcast continued the enthusiasm and mentioned that Alfred P. Daniel’s station had been called into service, too. The Saturday evening concert was to be over WCAK which would regularly carry the programs on Sunday afternoon as well as Wednesday and Saturday evening. Mention was also made of other programming on WCAK which included radio gossip and announcements of the concerts for the evening and news of the Houston Radio Club at 7pm each evening which had been going on for a year and a half on Daniel’s amateur stations.

“Jazz and Classical Music Put on Ether by Post Broadcast” and “Local Artists and Syncopated Orchestra Bring Many Encores from Stations in Houston and at Other Points in the State” were the headlines on Saturday, again referring to a receiver as a ‘station.’ The Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Engineers was having a convention in Houston at the time and several officials were present for the broadcast, which none of them had ever experienced before. The Post persuaded President W. S. Carter of the Brotherhood to speak on the Monday evening broadcast. Carter got busy trying to notify his family and friends in Cleveland, Ohio, to get radio sets and try to tune in WEV.

Other businessmen were getting radio fever too. On the 23rd of April, Abe Zindler of Zindler’s Mens and Boys Wear had announced he was having a radio station installed in his store. H.S. Powell of Dallas had been retained by Mr. Zindler to install and operate the equipment and would be on hand to answer questions about the care and use of it. Zindler’s was located at Congress and Fannin and billed itself as the South’s largest men’s and boy’s wear store. Their advertising slogans included ‘On Courtesy Corner’ and ‘Where Your Car Stops.’ Mr. Zindler said that information obtained from all over the US and Canada through the radio station would be megaphoned to passersby on the street. What Mr. Zindler was installing we would call a tuner or receiver, not a ‘radio station.’ Incidentally, there was no mention whether Mr. Zindler had thought about megaphoning restaurant reports every Friday night for passersby.

The first ‘radio concert’ was scheduled at Zindler’s on June 15th by which time the Press reported Mr. Zindler had added a line of receivers to his merchandise.

Later in the year the National Bank of Commerce was to announce it had installed radio receivers in its savings department at the teller windows, so that Houstonians who had not yet experienced this new phenomenon could listen while they made their deposits.

The Arabia Temple installed a big receiving set and had ‘radio concerts’ where people came and sat in the auditorium to listen to radio broadcasts from elsewhere. Such a gathering took place for the first Post concert on WEV. Will Horwitz did the same thing at his Iris Theatre at 612 Travis where the JP Morgan Chase Tower now stands. He entertained some of his customers Saturday night, May 13, with a surprise radio concert featuring the ‘largest and most perfect radio set obtainable,’ connected to a Western Electric loud speaker ‘recently invented’ and loaned to Mr. Horwitz for demonstration purposes. He presented Hurlburt-Still and Alfred P. Daniel broadcasts, he carried sermons from a Dallas station and concerts from the University of Texas Station at Austin, WCM, which had been issued a license just one day before Hurlburt-Still.

The Iris offered radio enthusiasts the opportunity of ‘taking it apart and seeing what makes it go’ at a free demonstration at the theatre on Saturday morning, May 20th. Kids of school age, especially, were invited to the demonstration that would cover all phases of ‘radio work,’ from construction of an amateur outfit to handling one of the big commercial sets. Printed instructions were handed out for those who wanted to build their own sets.

All the papers were running series on how to build your own set, from a simple crystal set to a one-tube superheterodyne receiver. The Press also offered a 15 page pamphlet for free just for writing in and arranged a special showing at the Queen theater of a film produced by the Commerce Department on building your own set. The film was then made available, free of charge, to any club, organization, school, church, etc., that wanted to show it and later in the summer the Press arranged to have the film shown at all city parks that had movie programs.

Images above are from the archives of the Houston Post at the Houston Public Library.