NBC Transmitter (Jan-Nov 1942)

4 NBC TRANSMITTER EDUCATIONAL TRAIL-BLAZER Central Division's Judith Waller Amazed Industry With "Firsts" Judith Waller (right) and Secretary Grace Neuuerth. • When the School Broadcast Conference selected Judith W aller for its first annual award of merit on December 6, 1940, it turned the limelight on a woman who, in the words of a famed newspaper columnist, “is a quiet, unassuming person who has labored hard for many years in the educational phase of radio.'’ ^ et. to the hundreds of persons who know her and her work. Miss Waller’s selection seemed only a just recognition of her influence and effect upon education in radio. As a radio pioneer, who from the very beginning felt that radio should offer something more than entertainment. M iss W aller made arrangements for literally hundreds of informative lectures over Station W'MAQ, of which she was director from April, 1922. until 1932. It was she who suggested that actual pick-ups of classroom lectures at Northwestern University and at the University of Chicago were feasible and desirable; it was she who arranged for what was very likely the first musical appreciation hour, a program which made its debut on October 12, 1922, with Mr. and Mrs. Marx E. Oberndorfer as commentators on the work of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; it was she who pioneered the children’s field with a “Hearing America First” musical series, Miss Georgene Faulkner’s “Story Fady” series, Russell Pratt’s “Topsy Turvy Time” program and a thrice-weekly program presented in collaboration with the Chicago Public Schools, and it was she who not only conceived the idea of the celebrated “University of Chicago Round Table.” but who also saved it from possible oblivion by persuading NBC to retain it when WMAQ joined the network in 1931. It was Miss W^aller, too, who worked out the plans for the NBC-Northwestern University Summer Radio Institute which got off to a splendid start this season with 100 students. But Miss \^'aller’s experience in radio has not been confined to education by anv means. .As director of one of Chicago’s most enterprising stations for ten years, she has so many “firsts” to her credit that she has forgotten many of them. Yet it was her personal interview with William Wrigley, Jr., that led to the first play-by-play broadcast of a big league baseball game from Wrigley Field. True the World’s Series had been aired in the fall of 1924. but no one, so far as is known, had ever thought of broadcasting a play-by-play description of a regular game until Miss Waller booked the first game in the late spring of 1925. Miss Waller also booked the first play-by-play account of a football game — that between the L niversity of Chicago and Brown t niversity in 1924. Her station was the only one in Chicago to broadcast the inauguration of President Coolidge on March 4. 1925, and prior to that it had been one of a few to broadcast the Democratic and Republican National Conventions by land wire in 1924. Miss Waller also is responsible for booking such diverse radio programs as the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra broadcast and the debut of Amos ’n’ Andy. She recalls considerable misgivings regarding the addition of Amos ’n’ .Andy to her WMAQ staff. “They wanted S25.000 a year,” she said, “and my budget from The Chicago Daily News for all other program talent was exactly that figure. Frankly I didn’t know how much of a gamble it would be to try to make stars out of a team that had acquired a certain amount of fame as Sam n’ Henry, hut which would have to change that name on my station. Luckily, they proved their worth in short order.” Another “first” which Aliss aller recalls with a chuckle because of tbe furore it created at the offices of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company is the first international broadcast ever made — the broadcasting of a telephone conversation between John Gunther, Chicago Dailv News correspondent in London, and Hal O’Flaherty, then foreign news editor, regarding the condition of King George AL then gravely ill. This broadcast, made on December 4, 1928. cost a mere S75 in toll charges, but it brought the wrath of the A. T. & T. down on her head because of a rule forbidding the broadcast of telephone conversations. It was not until WMAQ joined NBC in 1931 and made Miss Waller its education director in the NBC central division that she began to devote most of her time to the field of education in radio. Since then she has been responsible, in addition to the “University of Chicago Round Table.” for developing such programs as “Music and American A outh,” the National Music Camp broadcasts from Interlochen, Mich., the “High School Studio Party” — presented in cooperation with the Radio Council of the Board of Education of Chicago — “Student Opinion,” an ad lib discussion program for high sch«ol youngsters. Parent-Teacher Association programs and the American Medical Association’s “Doctors at Work.” [Continued on page 13)