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I Had to Tell It
How Poetry and Vocal Salesmanship Combined to Make a Radio Newspaper Pay on the Great Lakes
By WILLIS KINGSLEY WING
I DOUBT it," said the Superintendent. " You can't make a wireless newspaper go on the Lakes, even if you have got the longest run out here. Your passengers won't be interested in a daily Daper when they are out for a pleasure cruise. This isn't salt water."
"But," I interrupted, "we have them for nine days and the trip is nearly 2,400 miles long. Buffalo to Duluth and back, you know."
It was a warm day in early June and the Superintendent was in a hurry. He relented. "All right, go to it," he said. "Get your assignment slips for your vessel and hop down and convince the steamship owners. You haven't much time. Your ship sails in two days."
I got out of the wireless company's office, and past the long line of operators waiting assignment in the " static room" as quickly as I could. The battle was nearly won.
The steamship people weren't nearly as hard to convince, and in an hour we had all arrangements made. The arrangements for that paper — grandiloquently named the Great Lakes Radio News — cost me one luncheon and two specialdelivery stamps. I submit that to the promoting people as about the last word in low "first costs."
Wireless papers had been tried on the Lakes before and had failed. One of the first was printed on the SS. South American during the exciting days of 1 914. My junior operator and I had the job of making a radio newspaper
bloom where radio newspaper had never bloomed before.
We issued no metropolitan daily of 48 pages. Ours was a simple four-page affair, but it was all news. First we had the latest weather forecasts which came in by radio from the Canadian and American stations and then we featured the baseball scores. Five hundred words of condensed press matter followed, which we copied from broadcasting stations and high-power code stations. And, honorably bringing up the journalistic rear, was the passenger list — a highly important item. Few papers can exist without a social column and the passenger list was our social department.
THE YOUTH AND BEAUTY OF THE SHIP GATHERED IN THE
MUSIC ROOM
The insurance people especially were positively agog waiting for the address
But in the radio cabin, there, were smiles of another wavelength
of their president, back in C.