Radio Broadcast (May-Oct 1925)

472 Radio Broadcast ■"•'v '"'fit ■ THE SANDMAN OF STATION KHJ At Los Angeles. Those who have that unusual ability to talk to children instead of down to them are heard from many broadcasting stations, and the "Sandman" of khj is one of the most able and most popular of the broadcasters of this sort After that, it seemed as if newspaper and magazine radio critics increased even as the beasts of the field. ,j There are now probably anywhere from three to five million radio receivers in this country, if one accept the most credible estimates of those arithmetical persons who interminably compile statistics on the number of radio listeners. That chip falling where it may, however, it is our hope that some of the owners of the five million receivers may find something interesting in these pages each month. That object being attained, as J. Caesar would say, we hope to read your letters of opinion and comment on broadcasting— our mutual concern. What Makes a Broadcasting Station Popular are not much of an addition to most outdoor pick-ups. A Statement of Policy IT I S no easy task to take up "The Listener's Point of View" where Miss Mix left it. In the fourteen months that she wrote this department, she succeeded in building up a following of readers in all parts of the country which any writer might envy. This was natural indeed, for her comments and criticism combined in delightful fashion, great breadth of knowledge of matters musical and a charming style of presentation. The present writer, readers willing, will attempt to carry on. His design involves news and comment of broadcasting stations, artists, and broadcast programs, and all else which is of the ether etherial. It was in February, 1924, that the editors of Radio Broadcast planned this department, and in the April, 1924, magazine that Miss Mix's first department appeared. A few days before the April number appeared on the news stands, the New York Herald Tribune began their daily broadcasting critique " Last Night on the Radio" written by the caustic Mr. Raymond Francis Yates, who used the name "Pioneer." JN THE first exciting days of broadcasting, the very act of receiving the sounds of tinny phonograph records and the noisome regularities of a mechanical piano was regarded by the wondering public as a stunt, a kind of theatrical laboratory experiment. And many of our broadcast directors have never allowed that feeling to weaken in the minds of what they are pleased to call their clientele. While listeners are able to depend on this station and that for regular features of one sort or another, they look to others to supply them with something new, curious, outre. Witness the Philadelphia broadcaster who sent a studio favorite in a diving suit to the bottom of the ocean near Atlantic City, where for some fifteen minutes he regaled his listeners with sub-aqueous, non-scientific platitudes. A year ago, much journalistic to-do was excited over the broadcasting of the sounds of the circus. And so we have had various attempts at broadcasting from an airplane, none of them especially successful. The learned Secretary Wilbur arranged with his Naval radio and publicity experts to install a low powered broadcasting set on the Los Angeles when she made a recent all-day voyage over Philadelphia, laden with a cargo of merchants. Gar Wood's "race" between one of his speed boats and the Twentieth