Radio doings (Dec 1930-Jun1932)

OH I4AY— AMERICA! The Inside Story of The Coast-to-Coast Eroadeast "0. K., SAN FRANCISCO!" cries Mrs. Winchell's boy. Walter, and countless radios from Maine to San Diego echo the words. "Carolina Moon ' is heard by a nation-wide audience at the exact instant the words leave Morton Downey's lips. Scattered friends, relatives and strangers in every hamlet in the country sit together in one great audience, united for a few moments by invisible ties. Blase as we are. inured to surprises and the thrill of the new, we can still get a few spinal quivers when we hear President Hoover in Washington. Bing Crosby, and Amos V Andy in Chicago. Will Rogers and George Arliss in Hollywood: and other familiar notables appearing on the same program, yet separated by thousands of miles. Simple though it all seems, the story behind the nation-wide network broadcast leaves one in breathless awe at the complexity of the gigantic, precise machine that makes these programs possible. The efforts of hundreds of men and women are required to bring "0. K. Denver" into a Hollywood livingroom. Oftentimes weeks and even months of planning and effort lie behind the production of a single fifteenminute program, and thousands upon thousands of dollars are expended. On New Year's Day, Bebe Daniels. Hollywood actress, sang from a Los Angeles studio, accompanied by Paul Whiteman's orchestra, which was in Chicago! The program was the first experiment in synchronization to be tried over a national hook-up. Without missing a single note or losing the rhythm, Miss Daniels sang to Whiteman's music as perfectly as if they had been in the same room. Here's how it was done. At a given signal, Whiteman's band commenced playing the introduction. Through the NBC-WJZ network, it was picked up in Los Angeles. At the same time, Los Angeles was hooked up on the same network, over a separate wire, prepared to broadcast back to WJZ. Page Twenty When Miss Daniels commenced singing, both programs were broadcast simultaneously at each end of the line and over all stations on the network. Both Miss Daniels and Paul Whiteman wore earphones, and governed their song and music accordingly, by following each other. Network broadcasting is anything but inexpensive. Every hour spent on the Columbia chair of eighty-three stations costs the sponsor of that hour $15,255 — and that doesn't include the cost of talent! The cigarette company that sponsored Bing Crosby paid $6,188 for that fifteen minutes, or $37,128 a week. Sometimes a New York sponsor, in order to get his program out to the Pacific Coast at a desired hour, finds it necessary to have a re-broadcast made at an hour that is most desirable in the West. Morton Downey and Tony Wons. for instance, who are heard by Eastern listeners at 7:45 p. m. Eastern Time, do the same program all over again at 11:30 that night, to reach the Pacific Coast at 8:30 Pacific Standard Time. As common as transcontinental broadcasts are, the number of listeners who understand what "makes them tick" is startlingly small. One prevalent misconception is that the local station, by means of a high-powered radio receiver, tunes in on the far-off station, places the loudspeaker against a microphone and re-broadcasts over the local transmitter. If such were the case, what would prevent every little 50-watt station in the country from tuning in on Last New Year's Day; in the first national network experiment in synchronization. Paul Whiteman and his famous orchestra, sat alone in the Chicago .XBC studios, two thousand miles away from California, and accompanied —