APRIL IN THE GOLDEN AGE
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APR 1 1920 Early radio developer Lee DeForest opens his experimental station 6XC/San Francisco.  (See Alchemists of The Air.)
APR 1 1931 Variety estimates that the 1930 AT&T line charges paid by NBC and CBS totaled $3.5 Million.  ​​
APR 1 1933   NBC orders a second 10% pay cut for all employees earning more than $1,000 annually.  The cut matches the 10% drop applied in September, 1932, when CBS reduced its workers’ pay by 15%.
APR 1 1934   Chevrolet cancels NBC’s Jack Benny Show because General Motors President William Knudson doesn’t think he’s funny.  Benny begins a new series of shows on NBC for General Tire five nights later. (See The 1933-34 Season.)
APR 1 1935   Pepsodent Toothpaste reports its slogan contest advertised on Amos & Andy resulted in 2.6 Million entries, each accompanied by a proof of purchase.  (See Amos & Andy: Twice Is Nicer and Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
APR 1 1935   A new Los Angeles based organization identified as The American Society of Recording Artists sends a letter to all stations demanding a fee for every record paid - from five to 15 cents each with 45% going to the artists and 55% withheld for the group’s expenses.
APR 1 1935   NBC/New York City installs a new studio organ and begins to charge sponsors for its use - formerly a free service - beginning at $25 per quarter-hour.
APR 1 1935   Sportscaster Ronald (Dutch) Reagan of WHO/Des Moines begins a campaign for Chicago Cub fans to protest the Des Moines minor league baseball club’s blocking of Cub play-by-play broadcasts on WHO.  
APR 1 1936   NBC secures exclusive rights to broadcast the May maiden flight of German dirigible Hindenburg  with NBC European correspondent Max Jordan reporting from aboard the ship. 
APR 1 1937  CBS re-routes its network line to the West Coast out of Salt Lake City from San Francisco to KNX/Los Angeles. 
APR 1 1937   NBC rules that none of its sustaining 15 minute band remotes may contain more than two vocals and no half-hour pickups can feature more than four vocals.  (See Big Band Remotes.)
APR 1 1937   CBS converts an audition studio in its New York City headquarters for the exclusive use of its news department.
APR 1 1937 Complimentary phone calls result when NBC’s WRC and WMAL/Washington, D.C., give all male announcers April Fools Day off and replace them with female staff members.
APR 1 1938  Al Pierce’s opening day at the Fox Theater in St. Louis is picketed by the UAW handing out leaflets that read, “Al Pearce’s Gang is sponsored on radio by the Ford Motor Co., the only unfair car manufacturer.”
APR 1 1939   The Cincinnati AFM local admits 36 “hillbilly,” (country guitar, fiddle, banjo and harmonica), musicians employed at five local stations at 75% of the union dues.
APR 1 1939   WOW/Omaha broadcasts a 30-minute salute to competitor KOWH, the new call sign of WAAW, purchased by The Omaha World Herald.  (See Top 40 Radio’s Roots .)
APR 1 1939  Officials of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York meet with Muzak to discuss piping music and lessons into the area’s 240 parochial schools to 104,000 students.
APR 1 1940   Broadcast Music, Inc., (BMI), begins operation and issues its first composition, We Could Make Such Beautiful Music Together.
APR 1 1940   NBC moves its West Coast distribution point for network programs from San Francisco to Hollywood.
APR 1 1940  Procter & Gamble doubles the daily schedule of NBC’s  Vic & Sade with the addition of a weekday afternoon broadcast on Blue.  (See Vic & Sade.)  
APR 1 1940   FCC cites WFIL and WIP/Philadelphia, WGN/Chicago, KRLD/Dallas and WISE/Asheville, North Carolina for possible violation of Federal lottery laws with their radio giveaway games. 
APR 1 1940  American Tobacco begins an on-the-hour spot radio campaign on eight New York City stations featuring song clips from Lucky Strike’s Your Hit Parade.  The campaign will spread to over 50 stations in the East.  (See Smoke Gets in Your Ears.)
APR 1 1940   With commercial restrictions on FM stations relaxed, the FCC reports receiving 80 applications for new FM stations during the past week.
APR 1 1941   BMI celebrates its first anniversary, announcing it has sold 1.65 Million copies of its compositions’ sheet music, led by 190,000 copies of the music for I Hear A Rhapsody.
APR 1 1941   Eddie Cantor wins his arbitration with Dinah Shore forcing the singer to remain with his show but both parties insist that they remain good friends despite the dispute.
APR 1 1941   FCC votes 3 to 2 to allow full time operation to WHDH/Boston on 850 kc., formerly the nighttime clear channel of KOA/Denver.  Commission Chairman James Fly and new Commissioner Ray Wakefield abstain.
APR 1 1941  Barrel Of Fun, a half-hour transcribed comedy series produced in Hollywood for regional brewery sponsorship, is released into syndication starring Charlie Ruggles and panned by critics as a Duffy’s Tavern carbon copy.  (See Duffy Ain't Here.)
APR 1 1941  FCC reveals that it has created 24-hour shortwave listening posts manned by 250 specialists who monitor, record, translate, transcribe and analyze all programs from foreign and domestic sources intended for U.S. listeners.
APR 1 1942   A German born WEMP/Milwaukee announcer is fired for refusing to read the U.S. Treasury Department announcement, “Buy U.S. Defense Bonds to help rain bombs on Berlin and Tokyo.” 
APR 1 1942  The U.S War Production Board prohibits the manufacture of radio and television sets for consumers for the duration of World War II.
APR 1 1943   Chicago radio veterans Eddie & Fannie Cavanaugh celebrate their 21st anniversary on the air, with a record of over 7,500 broadcasts on six stations beginning with KYW on March 31, 1922. 
APR 1 1944   Standard Radio transcription service celebrates its ten year anniversary, citing growth from one office in Hollywood to seven, including branches in Canada, Mexico and South Africa. (See “By Transcription...")
APR 1 1944   NBC’s Truth Or Consequences joins a two-way Transatlantic hookup with Great Britain, becoming part of the BBC’s Atlantic Spotlight program.  (See Truth Or Consequences.)
APR 1 1945  Blue correspondent Larry Tighe covers the Allied invasion of Okinawa from the nose of a B-29 flying overhead - his five minute report is relayed to the U.S. via Guam and broadcast live on Blue and Mutual.  
APR 1 1945   The Peabody Network Radio Awards for 1944 are given to Fred Allen, Raymond Gram Swing, The Cavalcade of America and The Telephone Hour.
APR 1 1946   ABC develops a recording/rebroadcast technique to overcome Daylight Saving Time confusion. 
APR 1 1946   Lanny Ross returns from the Army to host a 7:00 p.m. weeknight show for Procter &  Gamble on CBS, replacing P&G’s split network programs, The Jack Kirkwood Show and Mommy & The Men.
APR 1 1946   Coca Cola’s Spotlight Bands switches format to three nights a week on Mutual at 9:30 with permanent rotating orchestras - Guy Lombardo on Monday, Xavier Cugat on Wednesday and Harry James on Friday.  (See Spotlight Bands.)
APR 1 1946   Veteran actor Noah Beery, Sr., 62, dies of a heart attack while rehearsing for his role on that night’s broadcast of Lux Radio Theater with his brother, Wallace Beery.  
APR 1 1946   Emily Holt, AFRA’s National Executive Secretary for eight years, resigns after representatives from nine of the union’s largest locals demand a change in its management.  
APR 1 1947   WCKY/Cincinnati files suit against the IBEW for $25,000 in damages from a sudden walkout without notice by union technicians that shut the station down for twelve hours. 
APR 1 1947   Dr. Walter Damrosch, 85, NBC Director of Music since 1929, retires.
APR 1 1948   A.C. Nielsen begins its radio audience surveys on the West Coast. (See Radio's Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.) 
APR 1 1948   AT&T files its revised rates for television network use of coaxial cable. 
APR 1 1949   Eddie Cantor closes his CBS program with an attack against the ratings system and claims that network executives, “…should have their heads examined for allowing an outsider, (Hooper or Nielsen), dominate their business.”  (See Radio's Rulers:
Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.)
APR 1 1949   NBC-TV begins its four month coverage of afternoon horse racing from five New York tracks with veteran race announcer Clem McCarthy. 
APR 1 1949   Television networks and the AFM sign a one year extension of their labor agreement.
APR 1 1950   BMI celebrates its tenth anniversary with 1,362 music publishers, composers and authors, 2,082 AM radio stations, 394 FM radio stations and 94 television stations.
APR 1 1950   Borden Dairies cancels its game show County Fair after a five year multi-network run.
APR 1 1950   Hot Springs, New Mexico, officially changes it name to Truth Or Consequences. (See Truth Or Consequences and Saturday’s All Time Top Ten.)
APR 1 1951   KTSL(TV)/Los Angeles, purchased by CBS from the Don Lee estate in December becomes a CBS-TV affiliate replacing KTTV. 
APR 1 1951   Citing a $50,000 loss over the past year, NBC-owned KNBH(TV)/Los Angeles eliminates 14 hours of daytime programming per week.
APR 1 1952   Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons begins the final two years of her sporadic 23 year multi-network career with a weekly five minute show on CBS.
APR 1 1952   Jack Benny and sponsor American Tobacco decide to continue Benny’s Sunday night show on CBS Radio for, “…at least one more season.”  (See Lucky Gets Benny.)
APR 1 1952   The California desert city of Palm Springs signs a 50 year exclusive contract with Telemeter, Inc., to provide a cable television system for the community to carry the seven Los Angeles stations and a movie channel. 
APR 1 1953   The William Esty agency solicits major stations for a 10% discount in return for a guaranteed April through September spot contract for its clients - R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and Colgate-Palmolive-Peet.
APR 1 1953   KXOK-FM/St. Louis discontinues its Transit Radio service of music and commercials to 1,000 city buses and streetcars for lack of advertising support.

APR 2 1940   City-owned WRR/Dallas rejects the demand of The United Drys of Texas to ban beer advertising.
APR 2 1940  FCC revokes the license of KGFI/Brownsville, Texas, for changing ownership without authorization.
APR 2 1941   BMI reports its first year of operation resulted in acquiring rights to 250,000 songs making it the country’s largest music publisher.  
APR 2 1942   Mutual blocks its music programs from affiliate WSIX/Nashville during an AFM strike at the station, preventing the union‘s strike against the network.  (See Petrillo!)
APR 2 1942   Controversial Evangelist Robert P. Shuler, (aka Fighting Bob), claims the FCC forced KTMR/Los Angeles to cancel his broadcast after complaints reached the agency that he is anti-American and pro-Nazi. 
APR 2 1942  The National Labor Relations Board orders WOV/New York to rehire 26 fired employees and pay them a total of $50,000 in back wages.
APR 2 1942   Dancing school impresario Arthur Murray accepts $10 for the blanket release of his name in the hit song, Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing In A Hurry.
APR 2 1943   First Nighter sponsor Campana issues a call to freelance writers to submit scripts for the show - 20 minutes in length with “...general family audience appeal.”  Writers are paid $100 to $200 for winning scripts.  (See Friday’s All Time Top Ten.)
APR 2 1944   CBS star Kate Smith headlines NBC’s Fitch Bandwagon for one night.
APR 2 1945   Don Lee Broadcasting picks a 90,000 square foot site for its new radio and television headquarters in Hollywood, on Vine Street two blocks south of NBC’s West Coast Radio City.
APR 2 1945   With no date yet specified, Waltham Watch Company buys time signals in the Blue Network’s five-hour V-E Day celebration on DuMont’s WABD(TV)/New York City.
APR 2 1946   Mutual’s Queen For A Day, on a tour of Midwest cities, originates from the Chicago intersection of Madison & State Streets before a crowd estimated by police to number 200,000, blocking traffic for four hours.
APR 2 1947   Newspaper drama The Big Story begins its successful eight season run on NBC. (See Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.) 
APR 2 1947   CBS produces an audition record for Goodman Ace’s novel historical program, CBS Was There.  (See You Are There and Easy Aces.)
APR 2 1948   Cincinnati operator of streetcars and buses agrees to become the first mass transit operator to install receivers for Transit Radio music and commercials provided in that city by WCTS-FM.
APR 2 1948   NBC-TV adds WLWT(TV)/Cincinnati and WTVR(TV)/Richmond, Virginia as affiliates.
APR 2 1950   After ten years of operation, the first FM station west of the Alleghenies, WTMJ-FM/Milwaukee, leaves the air - the 235th FM station to go off so since 1949.
APR 2 1951   Paul Harvey, 32, begins his string of mid-day newscasts on ABC that will extend until February 16, 2009.
APR 2 1951   With increased interest in news due to the Korean war, Procter & Gamble signs a $300,000 contract for three, five-minute nighttime newscasts a week on CBS over 13 weeks. 
APR 2 1951   Longtime Network Radio star Phil Baker, 55, signs  a $50,000 contract for a daily afternoon disc jockey show on WITH/Baltimore while continuing to host the weekly $64 Question, (fka Take It Or Leave It), on NBC.  (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 2 1951   WBKB(TV)/Chicago agrees to comply with the FCC order and moves its frequency from Channel 4 to Channel 2 at an expense of $200,000.
APR 2 1952   The NARTB dissolves its Broadcast Measurement Bureau division due to lack of industry support.

APR 3 1930   The second annual Academy Awards are broadcast for one hour on KNX/Los Angeles.
APR 3 1932  KUT/Austin, Texas, is advertised for sale in the local newspaper for $12,500.  (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 3 1933   With several school buildings destroyed in the March 3rd earthquake, the Long Beach school system opens outdoor classrooms and depends on support from educational programs supplied by Los Angeles radio stations. 
APR 3 1933   Churches, religious denominations and societies are reported buying 60 hours a week from Los Angeles stations at full commercial rate - another twelve hours a week are used by Aimee Semple McPherson’s Church of The Four Square Gospel on her KRKD/Los Angeles. 
APR 3 1934   Colgate-Palmolive’s Beauty Box Theater opens on NBC starring soprano Gladys Swarthout and registers two Top Ten seasons. (See See The 1933 -34 Season and Frank Munn’s Golden Voice.) 
APR 3 1934  WOR/Newark broadcasts Footlight Follies from the Roxy Theater in New York City - the first performance of a vaudeville show broadcast from its stage.  
APR 3 1935   The ten day strike at the Crosley Radio factory in Cincinnati is settled with pay raises granted to its employees.  Crosley stations WLW and WSAI continued operating at the facility throughout the walkout.
APR 3 1936   WOR/Newark newscaster Gabriel Heatter, 45, gains fame for his 52 minute ad-lib Mutual broadcast on the night of Bruno Hauptmann’s execution in Trenton, New Jersey.  (See Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
APR 3 1938  Agents for Detroit priest Charles Coughlin add 30 stations to his ad-hoc network of 70 outlets for his Sunday broadcasts attacking President Roosevelt’s reorganization plans.  (See Father Coughlin.)
APR 3 1939  After eleven years on NBC, Freeman Gosden & Charles Correll take their Amos & Andy weeknight strip to CBS for four seasons. (See Amos & Andy: Twice Is Nicer and Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
APR 3 1939   Mr. District Attorney debuts as a 15 minute strip show replacing Amos & Andy on NBC. The program becomes a weekly half hour three months later as Bob Hope’s summer replacement.  (See Mr. District Attorney and Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 3 1939  The District of Columbia Court of Appeals reprimands the FCC and orders it to issue a construction permit for a new station to the Pottsville (Pennsylvania) Broad-casting Corporation.   
APR 3 1939   WLW/Cincinnati owner Crosley files its final brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals to restore the station’s power to 500,000 watts. 
APR 3 1941  The American Network, Inc., opens offices in New York with the objective of establishing a nationwide chain of FM stations.
APR 3 1942   WMCA/New York releases specially ordered Crossley data estimating that its hourly New York Times news capsules are heard by 1.3 Million persons at least once a day. 
APR 3 1944  Ed Gardner signs to renew his Duffy’s Tavern on Blue for the 1944-45 Season with the option to switch to NBC whenever a suitable time period becomes available.  (See Duffy Ain’t Here.) 
APR 3 1944   Armed Forces Radio’s “Mosquito Network” begins its broadcasts to the South Pacific from Munda in the Solomon Islands.
APR 3 1945   Ed Gardner’s physicians refuse to allow him to tour Allied service camps in the Pacific, so the creator-star of Duffy’s Tavern books a tour of Army camps in Europe.  (See Duffy Ain’t Here.)
APR 3 1945   NBC’s Words At War creates controversy with its adaptation of Sir William Beveridge’s book, Full Employment In A Free Society.   (See Words At War.)
APR 3 1948 CBS revives the teenage sitcom Junior Miss for a sporadic four season run spanning six years.
APR 3 1949   International Silver moves The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet back to CBS after six months on NBC.  (See Ozzie & Harriet and Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 3 1949   Comedians Dean Martin, 31, & Jerry Lewis, 23, make their highly promoted radio debut on NBC.  
APR 3 1949   CBS changes the historic call sign of its newly acquired KQW/San Jose-San Francisco to KCBS.  (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 3 1949   Crosley Broadcasting opens the microwave links connecting its three owned television stations in Ohio, WLWT(TV)/Cincinnati, WLWD(TV)/Dayton and WLWC/(TV)/Columbus.
APR 3 1950   Colgate spends $1.0 Million to bring “The quiz show with a heart” - Strike It Rich - to 40 CBS stations on weekday afternoons.
APR 3, 1950  Mutual opens the baseball season with 350 affiliates carrying its Game of The Day co-op broadcasts and Camel cigarettes buying the network for its postgame scoreboard show. 
APR 3 1950   A former People  Are Funny contestant sues Art Linkletter and the show for $126,000 because the show didn’t make him rich as was promised.  (See People Are Funny. Tuesday's All Time Top Ten and Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 3 1952   Big Town on CBS-TV switches from live production to film and made available for sale in markets not bought by its network sponsor, Lever Brothers.  (See Big Big Town.and Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.) 
APR 3 1953  FCC reports 550 bids for new television stations are held up in its hearings of competing applicants.

APR 4 1928   NBC receives its first television station construction permit.  
APR 4 1933   Networks provide lengthy spot coverage of the New Jersey coastal water crash of Navy dirigible USS Akron that killed 73.
APR 4 1938   Kate Smith begins a 15-minute talk show, Kate Smith’s Column, three afternoons a week on CBS.  It will evolve into the long running weekday feature, Kate Smith Speaks, in 1939.
APR 4 1938   New York City theater owners complain of the unfair competition from radio networks and stations that distribute between 2.5 and 4.0 Million free tickets to their studio audiences annually and call for a tax on the practice..
APR 4 1940   An antique wagon train hauled by a team of 20 mules leaves Los Angeles for New York to publicize NBC’s Death Valley Days sponsored by Pacific Borax and MGM’s new movie, Twenty Mule Team.
APR 4 1942    A garage fire destroys Kay Kyser’s band bus containing the orchestra’s book of 15 years’ worth of arrangements.  Arrangers George Duning and Bill Fontaine go to work immediately on a new, updated book.  (See Kay Kyser and Wednesday’s All Time Top Ten.)
APR 4 1943  Madam Chiag Kai-shek speaks to America on Mutual from the Hollywood Bowl.
APR 4 1944  FCC temporarily suspends the effective date of its “duopoly” ruling prohibiting the same ownership of stations with overlapping signals - affecting some 50 stations in 25 markets. 
APR 4 1944   The U.S. War Food Administration launches its 1944 Victory Garden Drive on NBC’s Fibber McGee & Molly.  (See Tuesday’s All Time Top Ten.)
APR 4 1944   WBZ/Boston refuses the NBC Words At War repeat broadcast at 11:30 p.m. of its Assignment USA broadcast dealing with racial intolerance.  (See Words At War.)
APR 4 1947   False rumors circulate that Lever Bros. will move its Lux Radio Theater from CBS to NBC’s Sunday night schedule at 10:00.  (See Lux…Presents Hollywood! and Monday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 4 1948   The Chicago Tribune begins programming WGN-TV on Channel 9.
APR 4 1949   The St. Louis Globe Democrat buys KWK/St. Louis and simultaneously changes the call sign of its KWGD(FM) to KWK-FM.
APR 4 1949   General Mills signs a $750,000 contract with Jack Chertok Productions and Lone Ranger, Inc., for 52 filmed episodes of The Lone Ranger to be shown on ABC-TV beginning in September. (See The Lone Ranger.)
APR 4 1950   CBS-TV moves its Ed Wynn Show from Saturday to Tuesday nights in those cities where it opposes NBC-TV’s ratings giant Saturday Night Revue.
APR 4 1951   A Federal grand jury fails to indict ABC newsman Paul Harvey for trespass-ing into Chicago’s Argonne National Lab atomic facility in February.
APR 4 1952   Ed Murrow on CBS, ABC’s Elmer Davis and Bill Henry on Mutual salute NBC’s H.V. Kaltenborn, 74, on his 30th anniversary in radio.
APR 4 1952 Charging “incompetence,” “ineptitude” and “waste,” the U.S. House votes 160-109 to cut $45 Million of the State Department’s budget request for the Voice of America - leaving $86.5 Million.
APR 4 1952  CBS grants a 7½% pay raise to all employees pending approval by the Wage Stabilization Board.

APR 5  1930   NBC tests its Pacific (Orange) Network of seven stations linked by 1,700 miles of telephone lines with six hours of nighttime programming per week originating from KPO/San Francisco.
APR 5 1930   Rin Tin Tin - The Wonder Dog begins as a Blue Network juvenile adventure series for three seasons. 
APR 5 1930 Del Monte Foods begins a series of 13 Saturday night half-hour adaptations of MGM and First National movie musicals on NBC beginning with Rio Rita starring Bebe Daniels. 
APR 5 1937  CBS attempts a new approach to morning radio on its WABC/New York City, a variety show with live music hosted by comedian Phil Cook from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. titled New York Almanac.
APR 5 1937  American Tobacco expands Lucky Strike’s radio budget by $1.5 Million with a year’s sponsorship of Edwin C. Hill’s weeknight newscast on CBS.
APR 5 1937   Hollywood Hotel on CBS says it will skip its planned salute and partial adaptation of RKO’s film Shall We Dance because its star Fred Astaire, is under exclusive radio contract to Packard Motors and unable to appear.  (See Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 5 1937   The Don Lee regional network in California grows to 12 stations with the addition of KEBC/Redding and KHSL/Chico.
APR 5 1938   Bill Paley uses the broadcast of The CBS Annual Report to defend network control of radio, the right to unrestricted profits from radio and the right of unrestricted barter between buyers and sellers of stations.
APR 5 1939   North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye introduces a bill  that would require broadcasters to identify all winners of contests and completely identify (or read) their winning entries.
APR 5 1940   Decca Records informs the radio industry that its records may be broadcast, “without fear of reprisal” - Columbia Records issues a similar notice three days later, RCA-Victor follows in a week .
APR 5 1941   NBC monitors Radio Berlin and is first to report the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece.
APR 5 1942   The U.S. War Department begins The Army Hour on NBC Sunday afternoons to, “…link the men in our Armed Forces fighting abroad with American firesides back home.”
APR 5 1942   Complaints erupt when Kenny Baker sings Ave Maria in German on the CBS broadcast of Fred Allen's Texaco Star Theater.
APR 5 1943   CBS changes the call sign of its WJSV/Washington to WTOP representing its 1500 kc frequency as “Top of the dial.”
APR 5 1943   CBS introduces its drama Romance from 11:30 p.m. to midnight, the first in a series of late night showcases replacing band remotes to test the popularity of in-house productions.
APR 5 1946   FCC denies the sale of Hearst’s WINS/New York to WLW/Cincinnati owner Aviation Corp., (aka AVCO), partially due to the sale’s agreement giving Hearst control of one hour of station time a day for ten years.  
APR 5 1946   Newsman Morgan Beatty broadcasts a portion of NBC’s News of The World by shortwave from President Truman’s train, rolling between York and Harrisburg, Penn-sylvania.  (See Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
APR 5 1946   The entire cast of NBC’s Chesterfield Supper Club - including stars Perry Como, Jo Stafford and a 25 piece band - perform the program from a TWA Constellation flying 20,000 feet over New York City.  (See Crooners & Chirps.) 
APR 5 1946   Vincent Youmans, composer of many hit songs that became standards, (Tea For Two, It’s A Great Day, Hallelujah, More Than You Know, etc.) dies in Denver at 47 after a long battle with tuberculosis. 
APR 5 1947   The five-week nationwide telephone workers’ strike begins but does little harm to broadcasting.
APR 5 1948   The U.S. Coast Guard notifies ABC that it is cancelling its weekly radio series, This Is Adventure, because the program’s recruitment commercials were too effective, resulting in 1,558 enlistments in 13 weeks.
APR 5 1950  Federal Trade Commission issues cease and desist orders to cigarette makers Reynolds and Lorillard whose commercials claimed that their Camel and Old Gold brands contained “less nicotine” than competitors.  (See Unfiltered Cigarette Claims and Smoke Gets In Your Ears.)
APR 5 1950  Union musicians at KSTP/Minneapolis-St. Paul refuse to cross a picket line of striking engineers and won’t return to work until August, 1953.
APR 5 1950  Toni Twin Time sponsored by Toni Home Permanents with host Jack Lemmon opens on an alternate Wednesday night schedule on CBS-TV. 
​APR 5 1953   Drew Pearson, cancelled by ABC a week earlier, begins 15 years of syndicating his program via tape to an initial client list of 151 stations.

APR 6 1930   Will Rogers begins a 13 week series of Sunday night political commentaries sponsored by Squibb wholesale drugs for $75,,000.
APR 6 1931   Kids’ serial Little Orphan Annie graduates from a one season tryout on WGN/Chicago to the Blue Network, beginning an eleven year multi-network run. (See Serials, Cereals & Premiums.)
APR 6 1934   FRC approves WJJD to identify its city of license as Chicago, replacing Mooseheart, Illinois. 
APR 6 1935   Al Jolson, 49, begins his two year run on NBC’s Shell Chateau.  (See Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 6 1935   NBC is flooded with complaints after Miriam Hopkins reading of a Dorothy Parker piece on Shell Chateau which listeners considered offensive to religion and decency.   
APR 6 1937 Jeanette McDonald refuses Standard Brands’ offer to host Sunday night’s Chase & Sanborn Hour on NBC beginning May 9th when Do You Want To Be An Actor? leaves the air.  The company reverts to its alternative variety show with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and dummy Charlie McCarthy.  (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 6 1940  Former CBS news commentator H.V. Kaltenborn, 61, begins his 15 year career on NBC.  (See H.V. Kaltenborn and Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)  
APR 6 1941  Comedy team Bud Abbott & Lou Costello join Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy’s Chase & Sanborn Hour for 13 weeks.  (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 6 1942   The U.S. Supreme Court rules 6 to 2 in favor of Scripps-Howard over the FCC, deciding that broadcasters are entitled to obtain stay orders delaying effectiveness of Commission rulings.
APR 6 1942   Joe Kelly, host of The National Barn Dance and The Quiz Kids, begins a daily 7:45 a.m. show reading The Chicago Sun comics on WLS/Chicago.  (See The Quiz Kids.)
APR 6 1942  Blue offers sponsor General Mills its daytime rate to lure the early evening Lone Ranger away from Mutual.  (See The Lone Ranger.)
APR 6 1942   WPEN/Philadelphia cancels its daily program of horse race results after complaints made by the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission that it promotes illegal gambling reach the FCC.
APR 6 1942   NBC’s WNBT(TV)/New York City begins its weekly training course for air raid wardens.
APR 6 1943   Bob Hope and his NBC Pepsodent Show cast embark on cross-country tour of service camps for series of broadcast and non-broadcast performances.  (See Hope From Home and "Professor" Jerry Colonna.)
APR 6 1943   Lever Brothers offers free Vimms brand B-Vitamins to all CBS/New York City employees at the start of every workday.
APR 6 1943   CBS tests a late night programming concept with Invitation To Music broadcast nightly at 11:30 p.m. followed by a second half hour of programs provided by key affiliates.
APR 6 1945  Weekday serial The Story of Mary Marlin, often heard concurrently on both CBS and NBC, leaves the air after ten years.  (See Soft Soap & Hard Sell.)
APR 6 1945   Sanctioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, This Is Your FBI begins its successful eight season Friday night run on ABC.  (See FBI Vs. FBI and Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 6 1945   Rexall Drug Stores picks up multi-year sponsorship of the Jimmy Durante & Garry Moore Show on CBS at a reported cost between $12,500 to $15,000 per week.  (See Goodnight, Mr. Durante…)
APR 6 1945    Comedienne Joan Davis signs four year contract with Lever Brothers beginning at $17,000 per week.
APR 6 1946   The U.S. Senate passes The Lea-Vandenberg Bill (aka The Anti-Petrillo Act),  47-3.  (See Petrillo!)
APR 6 1947   Easter Sunrise services from the Hollywood Bowl switch from NBC to ABC at 5:30 a.m. PT. 
APR 6 1947  Screen legend Gloria Swanson appears as host of CBS-TV’s coverage of New York City’s Easter Parade.
APR 6 1951  CBS obtains $15 Million in 20 year loans from Prudential and Metropolitan Life Insurance companies payable at 3½% interest. 
APR 6 1951   The nation’s first licensed commercial FM station, WSM-FM/Nashville, leaves the air after twelve years citing insufficient audience appeal.  KFI-FM/Los Angeles turns in its license after four years of operation.
APR 6 1951  The U.S. House Appropriations Committee slashes the Voice of America’s funding from a requested  $97.5 Million to $9.5 Million. 
APR 6 1951   The NCAA meets to explore means of avoiding a Department of Justice investigation resulting from its policy banning television of college football games. 
APR 6 1952   Teen sitcom Meet Corliss Archer, a CBS fixture for the better part of eleven years, moves to ABC for 18 months following Walter Winchell’s Sunday night commentary.

APR 7 1927  Bell Telephone demonstrates the first intercity video hookup, transmitting images of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and entertainment acts from Washington to New York by wire and radio. 
APR 7 1934  American Tobacco concludes its yearlong sponsorship of Metropolitan Opera broadcasts for Lucky Strike cigarettes on the combined NBC and Blue networks.  (See Smoke Gets In Your Ears.)
APR 7 1934   Six Minneapolis city detectives armed with machine guns act on a tip where John Dillinger is hiding and raid an apartment only to find Norris Goff of Lum & Abner, in town for appearances on WCCO/Minneapolis-St. Paul.
APR 7 1937   The NAB Board is presented with samples of ten hours of public domain music recorded for stations’ use and approves proceeding to complete its planned library of 500 selections representing 25 hours of license free music.  
APR 7 1940   Pepsodent cancels Mr. District Attorney after a 26-week run on Blue.  Bristol Myers moves the show four days later to NBC where it begins an eleven year run.  (See Mr. District Attorney and Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)  
APR 7 1941 Jimmy McClain replaces Lew Valentine in the role of quizmaster Dr. I.Q. on NBC.  (See Dr. I.Q.)
APR 7 1941   Keenan Wynn debuts as The Amazing Mr. Smith, a 13-week comedy mystery series co-starring Charlie Cantor.  (See The Two Stooges.)
APR 7 1941   Former NAB staff member Ed Kirby becomes head of the War Department’s new Radio Publicity Bureau to, “…organize, coordinate and supply program ideas and continuity to the publicity officers of our 189 military camps.” 
APR 7 1941   Frederic William Wile, regarded as America‘s first Transatlantic radio correspondent, covering the London Naval Conference for CBS in 1930, dies after a short illness at 68., 
APR 7 1941  FCC nullifies its 1940 revocation of the licenses of Tyler, Palestine, Lufkin, Huntsville and Brownsville, Texas stations controlled by Reverend James Ulmer, under the cloud of suspected, “…political wire pulling.” 
APR 7 1941   FCC issues the revocation of the license for WBAX/Wilkes-Barre, Penn-sylvania, for ownership manipulation. 
APR 7 1943   Attorneys for Walter Winchell, Blue and sponsor Andrew Jergens move for a dismissal of a $25,000 libel suit filed by two men labeled by Winchell as Nazi sympathizers in a broadcast four months earlier.  (See Walter Winchell.)
APR 7 1943   The U.S. Office of Censorship warns stations not to accept any civilian statements about war production or new weapons without first checking with reliable government sources.
APR 7 1944   Response begins immediately to Don McNeill’s offer of “charter member-ship” certificates to Blue’s Breakfast Club with 800,000 requests received in the first week.  APR 7 1945   A District Court judge denies a petition by four local churches seeking an injunction against WPEN/Philadelphia for its cancelling all paid religious programs.
APR 7 1945   NBC’s WNBT(TV)/New York City begins a series of 90 minute programs for children on Saturday nights which include Hopalong Cassidy movies.  
APR 7 1947   The nationwide telephone strike fails to interrupt service of the four major networks which have “no strike” agreements with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
APR 7 1947  United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers becomes first union to sponsor a network series, signing a 52 week contract for Leland Stowe’s weekly news commentary on Mutual.
APR 7 1951   ABC premieres its 90 minute Saturday Night Dancing Party at 8:30 p.m. featuring Paul Whiteman and his 40 piece house band.
APR 7 1952   Jack Benny and CBS agree to trimming his weekly radio budget from $26,000 to $18,000.  (See Sunday At Seven and Your Money Or Your Life.)
APR 7 1952   C.E. Hooper begins its Duplex system of audience polling, asking respondents what they were listening to when the phone rang and 15 minutes before they called.  (See Radio's Rulers: Crossley,  Hooper & Nielsen.)
APR 7 1952   WLS/Chicago and the U.S. Department of Commerce revive the successful World War II series of touring National Barn Dance shows with a ticket awarded for each 100 pound donation of scrap metal.  (See Saturday's All Time Top Ten.)

APR 8 1930   NBC broadcasts a special episode of its RKO Hour variety show starring comedians Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey from Radio Pictures studios in Hollywood to promote their new Technicolor film, The Cookoos.  (See Radio Goes To The Movies.)
APR 8 1932   KQV/Pittsburgh is sold at auction to the Union National Bank for $26,000.  (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 8 1934   WBBM/Chicago upsets classical music fans by pre-empting its Sunday afternoon concerts to carry Cubs baseball broadcasts.
APR 8 1935   FCC Commissioner Thad Brown opens hearings in Los Angeles concerning complaints of unethical medical advertising on stations KFWB, KGFJ, KIEV, KMPC and KRKD. 
APR 8 1935   WNEW/Newark covers the Culbertson-Sims Bridge Tournament in New York City with Martin Block providing the play-by-play for its four daytime and three nighttime broadcasts during the week. 
APR 8 1936   An engineer with five years experience at NBC is electrocuted at the company’s Empire State Building television lab when he touched a hot condenser containing thousands of volts.
APR 8 1938   A severe spring blizzard tears down lines and drives KOMA/Oklahoma City, KCRC/Enid, KVSO/Ardmore and the Oklahoma Network off the air for the day. 
APR 8 1940   Co-owned Ohio stations WCLE/Cleveland at 610 kc. and WHKC/Columbus at 640 kc. ask the FCC to swap frequencies which would enable both to boost power to 1000 watts.
APR 8 1940  NBC’s West Coast network breaks precedence and broadcasts its first transcribed programs, weekday serials Against The Storm and The Guiding Light, record-ed  to account for Daylight Saving Time.  (See Soft Soap & Hard Sell.)
APR 8 1940   INS scores a 45-minute major scoop with news of Germany’s invasion of Denmark at 11:40 p.m. 
APR 8 1940  NBC and CBS remain on the air all night to report the German invasion of Denmark and Norway.  
APR 8 1941   Radio’s Lone Ranger for eight years, Earle Graser, 32, Is killed in an auto accident. (See The Lone Ranger and Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
APR 8 1942  The U.S. Office of Emergency Management reports that 720 of the country’s 850 stations are broadcasting its weekly program, You Can’t Do Business With Hitler.
APR 8 1943  Gillette signs its third annual contract to carry boxing bouts promoted by the 20th Century Sporting Club and broadcast on Mutual with Don Dunphy and Bill Corum.  Dunphy also records a recap of every bout for OWI distribution.
APR 8 1943  Freelance announcer Art Millet, who is heard regularly on CBS, NBC and Mutual programs, dies after a long illness in New York City at 34.
APR 8 1944   Game show Guess Who? begins its four year sporadic run on Mutual.
APR 8 1947   FCC returns to full strength as Edward Webster is sworn in to replace former Chairman Paul Porter.
APR 8 1947   Eastman Kodak, ABC and Philco demonstrate a new, high-speed, low-cost 16 mm film process predicted to revolutionize television news coverage.
APR 8 1948   Westinghouse station KEX/Portland, Oregon increases its transmitting power to 50,000 watts.  (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 8 1949   Columbia Records President Frank White, 49, is appointed President of Mutual succeeding Ed Kobak.
APR 8 1949   KING/Seattle boosts its power to 50,000 watts.
APR 8 1950   Science fiction series Dimension X begins its one year run on NBC.
APR 8 1951   CBS-TV game show What’s My Line? flies four guests in from London to stump its panel with British occupations. 
APR 8 1951   KTLA(TV)/Los Angeles loses its top rated show to rival KNBH(TV) - reruns of Hopalong Cassidy movies.
APR 8 1952   The ACLU, represented by former FCC Chairman James Fly, asks the Commission to investigate blacklisting in broadcasting and charges the ABC, CBS, DuMont and NBC networks, “…lack proper qualifications to hold licenses.” 
APR 8 1952   Broadcasting pioneer Dr. Lee DeForest is honored for his 50 years in the industry with dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria featuring speakers including former President Herbert Hoover and RCA Chairman David Sarnoff.
APR 8 1953  Veteran network announcer and emcee Dan Seymour, 39, is appointed Vice President of New Programs at Young & Rubicam Advertising.  He later becomes President of J. Walter Thompson Advertising.

APR 9 1933   Manhattan Merry Go Round moves from Blue to NBC Sunday night at 9:00 ET where it stays for 16 years. (See Top 40 Radio’s Roots and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 9 1934   KLZ/Denver begins a 13-week series of weekday half-hour remote broadcasts from the city’s police court.  (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 9 1937   Standard Brands premieres The Harlem Revue starring Louis Armstrong and Eddie Green on Blue for a 13 week run.
APR 9 1937  KMOX/St. Louis feeds a 15 minute program to CBS from the opening of the Hobo Jungle Camp at the 29th annual convention of the Hoboes of America, attended by an estimated 3,000 hoboes.
APR 9 1939   Groucho & Chico Marx’s ad-libbing push a comedy script five minutes overtime on NBC’s The Circle and create a last minute timing panic on the program advertised as extemporaneous.   (See The 1938-39 Season.)
APR 9 1940  Bell Laboratories makes the first public demonstration of its Stereophonic Sound system at Carnegie Hall with music recorded on three tracks of film.
APR 9 1942  Gene Autry begins his eight week tour of the Flying A Ranch Stampede Rodeo of Eastern cities in Cleveland and announces all profits will go to Army and Navy Relief Funds.  (See Saturday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 9 1943  American Tobacco announces on NBC’s All Time Hit Parade that it is sending 250,000 free Lucky Strike cigarettes to Armed Forces personnel stationed overseas.  (See Smoke Gets In Your Ears.)
APR 9 1947  ABC kills a proposal by Andrew Jergens Co. to repeat Walter Winchell’s Sunday night Jergens Journal on independent WNEW/New York an hour after his network broadcast on ABC’s WJZ. (See Walter Winchell and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 9 1947   FCC rejects the appeal of WOKO/Albany for its license renewal and threatens to take the station off the air until a new licensee is chosen.
APR 9 1947   Fred Allen pinch hits for the traveling Lowell Thomas for one night on the NBC newscast sponsored by Sun Oil.  CBS, which carries Thomas in the West for Procter & Gamble, refuses to go along with the stunt promoting an NBC comedian.
APR 9 1947   Ford’s Dinah Shore Show on CBS is converted to a 30-minute memorial to industrialist Henry Ford who died two days earlier at age 83.
APR 9 1948   William Boyd, (aka Hopalong Cassidy), signs 52 episode contract with transcribed program syndicator Commodore Productions.
APR 9 1948   KFAC/Los Angeles charges that the U.S. Weather Bureau gives exclusive forecast information for farmers to 50.000 watt KFI in that city.
APR 9 1948   FCC approves Gene Autry’s purchase of KOOL/Phoenix for $250,000 provided he disposes of his minority share in KPHO/Phoenix.  
APR 9 1948   CBS-TV signs affiliation contracts with CBS affiliated radio stations holding television construction permits in Dallas, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Louisville, Binghamton, New York and Stockton, California.  
APR 9 1949  ABC begins delayed broadcasts of Gillette’s Friday Night Fights on the West Coast at 9:00 p,m. because live broadcasts at 6:00 p.m. tended to upset the timing of the Pacific Coast Network’s entire night’s schedule. 
APR 9 1949   Los Angeles television stations KTLA and KTTV remain on the air for over 24 hours with the city’s radio outlets in covering the futile efforts to save three year old Kathy Fiscus who had fallen into an abandoned well. 
APR 9 1949   Milton Berle hosts a 16 hour telethon on twelve NBC-TV stations to generate almost $1.0 Million for the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund. 
APR 9 1950   Fire destroys 250 watt KICD/Spencer, Iowa, causing $75,000 in damages.
APR 9 1950   Ben Grauer and Maggi McNellis host NBC-TV’s two hour coverage of New York City’s Easter Parade over a network of 29 interconnected stations.
APR 9 1950   Frigidaire pays Bob Hope  $40,000 to host its 90 minute Easter Sunday variety show on NBC-TV, carried live on 27 stations for a 49.4 Hooperating and seen via kinescope film a week later in 18 additional cities.
APR 9 1951   ABC offers its new Mary Margaret McBride Show from 2:00 to 2:30 p.m. weekdays to its affiliates on a co-op basis.

APR 10 1933  An Albuquerque court clears Alburtus The Seer from charges of using the mails to defraud by offering character analyses on KOB in return for donations, but it recommends more stringent control of radio advertising.
APR 10 1935   WJR/Detroit, an NBC affiliate, signs a five year affiliation contract with CBS effective in September on the promise of $200,000 more in annual network income.  (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 10 1936   Eddie Cantor announces he’ll leave his current contract with Lehn & Fink’s Pebeco Toothpaste on CBS in May to join Texaco in the fall for a show package contract of $10,000 weekly on a network to be named later.  (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten, Wednesday's All Time Top Ten and Network Jumpers.)
APR 10 1937   Lord & Thomas Advertising lays off 30 employees when it loses $1.2 Million in annual billings with the cancellation of RCA’s Matinee program on NBC.  
APR 10 1937   KLS/Oakland, California begins operations in its Radio Village center, surrounded by a restaurant, hair salon and six other stores with new automobiles displayed in the center of the small complex.  (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 10 1937   WFSA/Montgomery, Alabama surprises its staff at the conclusion of its seventh anniversary week by giving them a percentage of the station’s income for the week.
APR 10 1938   WTAM/Cleveland sportscaster George Hartrick suffers a broken nose and facial lacerations when attacked by two unknown assailants on a dark street.
APR 10 1939   Dr. I.Q. begins its ten season multi-network run on 16 Blue Network  stations and  moves to NBC three months later.  (See Dr. I.Q.)
APR 10 1939   AP begins forwarding transcripts of NBC’s 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. five minute newscasts on its radio wire as the model which its clients can repeat.
APR 10 1939   Loaded down with both New York Giants and Yankee broadcasts, CBS-owned WABC farms out network sports broadcasts it can’t clear to independent WMCA/ New York City.
APR 10 1940   FCC hearings on television result in suspending its limited commerciali-zation rule and the probability of Congress entering into the patent debate between manufacturers RCA and DuMont.
APR 10 1941  An estimated 1,000 persons a day - over half of them children - pass by the bier of Earl Graser, radio’s Lone Ranger, who was killed in a Detroit auto accident earlier in the week. (See The Lone Ranger and Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
APR 10 1942   People Are Funny begins its 18 season multi-network run on NBC with first year host Art Baker. (See People Are Funny, Tuesday's All Time Top Ten and Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 10 1942   Procter & Gamble’s weekday serial Against The Storm on NBC wins a 1942 Peabody Award, cited as, “…a case of merit in a field of mediocrity.”   (See Soft Soap & Hard Sell.)
APR 10 1943   Five weeks into its 13 week nationwide tour, Ralph Edwards’ Truth Or Consequences, reaches the tour’s total goal of $20 Million in War Bond sales. (See Truth Or Consequences and Saturday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 10 1943   American Tobacco begins the giveaway of 250,000 Lucky Strike cigarettes to servicemen overseas every time Joan Edwards or Jerry Wayne sings a song on Your Hit Parade - or two million cigarettes a week.  (See Saturday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 10 1943   Detective mystery The Falcon begins its sporadic multi-network run covering eleven years on Mutual.
APR 10 1943   Rudy Vallee hosts a 90 minute, star-studded salute to Paul Whiteman on Blue beginning at 11:15 p.m.
APR 10 1943   CBS mails a rebuttal to a March newspaper ad by the Metropolitan Newspaper Group claiming superior exposure to homes than any radio network on Sunday, to advertisers, affiliates and the press. 
APR 10 1944   Walter Winchell files a $250,00 suit against Michigan Congressman Claire Hoffman for the congressman's quote in the Marcellus (Michigan) News that the Navy should oust Winchell as a reserve officer. (See Walter Winchell and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.) 
APR 10 1944   MGM premieres its two-reel film, Patrolling The Ether, on a network of three television stations: WNBT/New York, WRGB/Schenectady and WPTZ/Philadelphia, encouraging amateur radio operators to help the FCC locate enemy agents. 
APR 10 1944   George Furness, developer of The Eveready Hour in 1926, the first sponsored program on Network Radio, dies in New York City at 60.
APR 10 1945   Over 900 stations pledge to broadcast Jim & Marian Jordan’s 15 minute transcribed episode of Fibber McGee & Molly on behalf of the American Cancer Institute’s fund raising campaign. 
APR 10 1946  WBBM/Chicago reports upgrading its broadcasting facilities from area hotels and ballrooms and increasing its charge 35% to $100 a week for originating remotes from the venues.  (See Big Band Remotes.) 
APR 10 1947   FCC issues a nationwide reallocation of FM channels employing a four channel separation of stations in the same area. The plan calls for reassigning 90% of the country’s 150 FM stations‘ frequencies. 
APR 10 1947   FCC reverses an earlier decision and awards an AM station construction permit in Biloxi, Mississippi, to the owner of a hotel that sells liquor and maintains slot machines, both against Mississippi law.
APR 10 1948   ABC-TV broadcasts its first network program, On The Corner starring comedian Henry Morgan, on WABD(TV)/New York, WFIL-TV/Philadelphia, WMAR-TV/Baltimore and WMAL-TV/Washington. 
APR 10 1949   Standard Brands cancels its 14 year sponsorship of One Man’s Family on NBC.  (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 10 1950   Chicago television stations WGN-TV and WNBQ(TV) extend their daily programming into the daytime hours - WGN beginning at 10:00 a.m. and WNBQ at 1:00 p.m.
APR 10 1951   Former CBS newsmen Joseph C. Harsch and William L. Shirer join the Liberty Broadcasting System network as commentators.
APR 10 1951   Former Network Radio star Ginny Simms begins a weekly show from service camps on newly independent KTTV(TV)/Los Angeles.  (See Crooners & Chirps.) 
APR 10 1953   Gillette pays $250,000 for radio and television rights for Rocky Marciano vs. Jersey Joe Wolcott Heavyweight Championship fight.

APR 11 1927   NBC opens its Pacific Coast network(s) by recreating its original Red and Blue Networks’ scripts and musical scores shipped by Railway Express to its San Francisco owned stations, KPO, (Red) and KGO (Blue).   (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 11 1930     Freeman Gosden & Charles Correll sign a $250,000 contract to appear as Amos & Andy in their RKO Radio Pictures movie debut.  (See Radio Goes To The Movies.)
APR 11 1936   A bomb causing $500 in damage explodes on the front porch at the house of the owner of WJAY/Cleveland which has broadcast a series of exposes of illegal gambling in the city.
APR 11 1936   WGH/Newport News, Virginia, begins broadcasting a weekly hour of professional wrestling matches from its Norfolk studios.  (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 11 1938   The four Los Angeles daily newspapers, The Times, Herald-Express, Examiner and News, all fire their Radio Editors and columnists in protest against broadcasting’s cut into their publications’ advertising revenue.
APR 11 1938   Singer Tony Martin loses his $7,600 suit against the producers of Hollywood Hotel for firing him without cause.  (See Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 11 1939   Johnson Wax salutes 200th broadcast of its Fibber McGee & Molly by announcing a 50% sales increase since its sponsorship of the program began in 1935.  (See Fibber McGee Minus Molly and Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 11 1940   Mr. District Attorney leaves Blue after a six month run and begins a successful eleven years on NBC under Bristol-Myers sponsorship.  (See Mr. District Attorney and Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 11 1940 NBC-TV simulcasts Blue's Town Hall Meeting of The Air broadcast for New York City television viewers.
APR 11 1941   NBC sues Mutual, Mike Jacobs’ 20th Century Boxing Club and sponsor Gillette for trying to break Jacobs’ verbal agreement with NBC’s Blue Network for exclusive broadcast rights to the promoter’s bouts. 
APR 11 1941   Season opening exhibition baseball game between the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers is televised by NBC’s W2XBS/New York.
APR 11 1942   Bob Hope, Burns & Allen, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and other top stars headline a 10:00 to 11:00 p.m. appeal for funds for The United China Relief Fund.
APR 11 1943   Lon Clark debuts as Nick Carter, Master Detective, beginning a 12 year run on Mutual.  (See Nick Carter.)
APR 11 1943   Richard Kollmar, co-host with wife Dorothy Kilgallen on WOR/New York City’s Breakfast With Dorothy & Dick six mornings a week debuts as Boston Blackie on the same station Wednesday nights via Ziv’s transcribed series.  (See Fred Ziv - King of Syndication.) 
APR 11 1946   Dinah Shore loses her voice near the end of her NBC program forcing the network to use a recording of the show for its West Coast rebroadcast.  (See Crooners & Chirps and The Late Shift.)
APR 11 1946   Walt Disney Productions and MGM both withdraw their FCC applications for Los Angeles television stations.
APR 11 1947  My Friend Irma starring Marie Wilson begins its seven year run on CBS, five in Annual Top Ten.  (See CBS Packages Unwrapped and Monday’s All Time Top Ten.)
APR 11 1948   Line transmission failure wipes out NBC’s entire broadcast of the Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy half hour show.
APR 11 1949   ABC introduces its weekday half-hour Modern Romances for a year's run at 11:00 a.m. featuring a complete story every day.
APR 11 1949   ABC-TV is the first television network to offer co-op programs, (mostly boxing and wrestling), to its affiliates.
APR 11 1951   CBS buys the Hytron Radio & Electronic Corporation for the purpose of manufacturing television sets.
APR 11 1951  Networks broadcast the 1:05 a.m. bulletin that President Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur. 
APR 11 1952  ABC cancels the encore season of early soap opera The Story of Mary Marlin.  (See Soft Soap & Hard Sell.)
APR 11 1952   Disc jockey Bill Anson sues CBS for $1.35 Million, charging that the network’s Songs For Sale format was stolen from his concepts for Song Jury and Music Is My Business.   
APR 11 1953   Smilin’ Ed McConnell’s Saturday morning Buster Brown Gang is cancelled after nine years on NBC.

APR 12 1924  Sears-Robuck opens WLS/Chicago with its call-sign to represent “World’s Largest Store.”
​APR 12 1934   WLS/Chicago celebrates its tenth anniversary with a 45 minute late night program on the Blue Network.
APR 12 1935  NBC controlled WENR/Chicago, WTAM/Cleveland and WBZ/Boston turn down a transcribed Chevrolet program from World recording studios because it contains the tag line, “…this is the World Broadcasting System.”
APR 12 1937  Chicago agency Blackett, Sample and Hummert launches an independent survey of 400 stations to learn their basic coverage and rates, then establishing a cost for each station to reach 1,000 homes.  (See Soft Soap & Hard Sell.)
APR12 1937   Burns & Allen jump from CBS to NBC for an 18 month Monday night show sponsored by General Foods - before moving back to CBS. (See Network Jumpers and Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 12 1937   NBC gives announcer Wendell Niles the name Ronald Drake on the new Burns & Allen Show because his sound-alike brother Ken Niles was announcer on the couple’s recent CBS show.  
APR 12 1938   After two years on WXYZ/Detroit, The Green Hornet moves to Mutual for 18 months then on to Blue for a sporadic 13 year run.
APR 12 1938   Car dealer Earle C. Anthony sells KECA/Los Angeles for $100,000 - provided the station be moved to San Diego and Anthony keeping the KECA call sign for his newly acquired KEHE.  (The FCC denies  the sale resulting in Anthony temporarily owning KFI, KECA and KEHE in Los Angeles.)
APR 12 1940  The U.S. Justice Department refuses to prosecute NBC’s Pot O Gold as a lottery because it  does not define answering the telephone as “consideration” on the contestant’s part.
APR 12 1941   Lionel Stander stars in the first version of The Life of Riley, a sustaining sitcom on the CBS Saturday morning schedule for five months which had little resemblance to the later hit starring William Bendix. 
APR 12 1942   CBS begins signing off its sustaining programs with wartime slogans beginning with, “If it’s a secret, keep it - if it’s a rumor, kill it!”
APR 12 1942   Eddie Cantor’s emergency hemorrhoid operation forces the closing of his Broadway musical-comedy Banjo Eyes.  He continues with his NBC Time To Smile broadcasts from his hospital room.  (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten and Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 12 1942   Dinah Shore introduces a song written by two NBC pages, I’ve Got Those Mad About Him, Sad Without Him, How Can I Be Glad Without Him Blues.  (See Crooners & Chirps.)
APR 12 1943   The four major networks and 800 stations devote the day to begin the Treasury Department’s Second War Loan Drive with a goal of selling $13 Billion in War Bonds.  The campaign exceeded the goal by $5.0 Billion. 
APR 12 1943   A Hartford, Connecticut appearance of Information Please accounts for $203.48 Million in War Bonds sold - $200 Million from 150 local businesses and the remainder from 3,500 persons attending the broadcast.  (See Information Please.)
APR 12 1943   Walter Winchell charges sponsor Andrew Jergens’ ad agency, Lennen & Mitchell, with “censorship” for making minor changes in his April 4th and 11th scripts.  (See Walter Winchell and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 12 1945   INS is first with the bulletin of President Roosevelt’s death at 5:47 p.m.  plunging Network Radio into a three day period of mourning, cancelling all commercials. 
APR 12 1945   An afternoon tornado strikes Antlers, Oklahoma, killing 60 and injuring 300.  KTUL/Tulsa and KOMA/Oklahoma City join forces to coordinate emergency messages for areas struck by the twister. 
APR 12 1945   C.E. Hooper estimates that radio reports of the events surrounding President Roosevelt’s death and its aftermath generate a combined audience of 38.7 Million adults between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m., three times its typical size.  (See Radio's Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.)
APR 12 1946   The four major networks and AFRS broadcast the ceremonies turning the Roosevelt family estate at Hyde Park, N.Y. over to the U.S. Interior Department.
APR 12 1946   NBC devotes two late night hours to broadcast of Rendezvous With Destiny, a compilation of FDR speeches also available to the public as an RCA Victor record album priced at $15. 
APR 12 1946   Adam Hats begins a series of Friday night boxing broadcasts from the  Hollywood Legion Stadium on Mutual that start in the East at 1:00 a.m. 
APR 12 1948   FCC grants Mutual newscaster Lyle Van the license for a new AM station in Deland, Florida. 
APR 12 1949   WLS/Chicago celebrates its 25th anniversary.  (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 12 1949   Although 14 advertisers are reported interested in the new Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis television show, NBC holds out for one of them to sponsor the comedy team on both radio and television.
APR 12 1949   Former NBC President Merlin Aylesworth is quoted in Look magazine: “Within three years the broadcast of sound, or ear radio, over giant networks will be wiped out.  Powerful network television will take its place.”

APR 13 1932   NBC celebrates the tenth anniversary of its WMAQ/Chicago - originally WGU - with a special broadcast starring Amos & Andy.
APR 13 1936   Major Bowes cancels his agreement to book his barnstorming amateur units with the NBC Artists Bureau, a move which he says will save his office $200,000 annually by doing it independently.  (See Major Bowes' Original Money Machine and Thursday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 13 1936   NBC establishes a Guest Relations Department to deal with its volume of tourists and studio audiences. 
APR 13 1936   WJZ/New York City petitions the FCC for a boost from 50,000 to 500,000 watts and permission to erect a 640 foot, all-steel tower to transmit the increased power.
APRR 13 1938   FCC refuses by a 5-2 vote to endorse a Congressional investigation into radio.
APR 13 1938   FCC denies the four-year pending application by the owners of Los Angeles stations KTMR and KIEV to build a new station in San Diego. 
APR 13 1939   A severe sleet storm takes down the month-old, 490 foot tower of WBBM/Chicago, forcing it off the air for five hours.  Two wooden poles are erected for temporary duty and then the station leases the old WENR tower until a new one can be constructed.  
APR 13 1941   Mystery adventure series Bulldog Drummond begins its nine season run on Mutual. 
APR 13 1942   Blue Network affiliates are given permission to follow WJZ/New York City’s example and rebroadcast Walter Winchell’s Jergens Journal after midnight to reach more defense plant workers.  (See Walter Winchell and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 13 1942  The Ku Klux Klan demands equal time on CBS to respond to “slurs” leveled against it by Massachusetts Congressman Thomas Elliot.
APR 13 1943   Bob Hope and his radio troupe leave the Kingman, Arizona, Air Force Base for a three month tour of European army camps with his NBC shows delivered by shortwave by the BBC.  (See Hope From Home and Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 13 1943   The New York Daily News reports that it employs 14 rewrite men and spends $65,000 annually to provide news every hour on the half hour 24 hours a day for WNEW. 
APR 13 1945   President Truman’s first address to Congress generates a Hooperating of 32.0.  (See Radio's Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.)
APR 13 1946   British character actor Donald Crisp, 63, debuts in the sitcom set in 1905, Jonathan Thimble, Esquire, on Mutual for a 13 week run as summer replacement for Break The Bank.  
APR 13 1947  Amos & Andy and Fibber McGee & Molly headline the 25th anniversary show of the station that started them in Network Radio,  WMAQ/Chicago.
APR 13 1949   KJR/Seattle stays on the air despite an earthquake that bent the top 40 feet of its transmitter tower.  (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 13 1949   ABC-TV runs a full page ad in the trade press for its new hour on Thursday and Saturday nights for, “…the event taking the country by storm...", the Roller Derby. 
APR 13 1950   New York Post owner Dorothy Schiff, (fka Dorothy Thackrey), sells KYA/San Francisco to investors for $155,000. 
APR 13 1950   MGM cancels the Lux Radio Theater’s adaptation The Bride Goes Wild with stars Van Johnson and June Allison because the show refused to guarantee plugs for MGM films early in the broadcast.  (See Lux...Presents Hollywood! and Monday's All Time Top Ten.
APR 13 1951   CBS ignites an industry furor by announcing plans to cut its nighttime radio network rates by 10 to 15% on July 1st. 
APR 13 1952  Drew Pearson temporarily takes Walter Winchell’s Sunday night timeslot on ABC when health issues force Winchell to reduce his work schedule.  (See Walter Winchell and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 13 1952   In an economy move, CBS-TV turns Sunday afternoon programming back to its affiliates 
APR 13 1953  The Mariners male quartet featured on Arthur Godfrey Time do not appear on the CBS show’s two weeks of originations from Miami because of a city ordinance forbidding racially mixed entertainment units.  (See Arthur Godfrey.)
APR 13 1953   Falstaff Beer signs as sponsor of baseball’s Game of The Day broadcasts on 187 Mutual stations 
APR 13 1953   WCAE/Pittsburgh, WGAR/Cleveland, WGN/Chicago and WQXR/New York report experiments of binaural, (stereo), broadcasts involving simultaneous use of their AM and FM facilities. 

APR 14 1912 Marconi wireless stations receive and relay reports of the Titanic sinking and survivor lists from rescue ship Carpetia.  The tragedy leads to ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship wireless becoming standard equipment on all ships.  (See Alchemists of The Air.)
APR 14 1930   Robert Ripley begins his 18 year sporadic Network Radio run with Believe It Or Not on NBC for a reported $65,000 per year.  (See Believe It Or Not.)
APR 14 1931   Seven Chicago radio stations - WBBM, WCFL, WENR, WGN, WIBO, WJJD and WMAQ all carry play-by-play broadcasts of the Cubs and White Sox every day.  An eighth, KYW, interrupts programs with updates.
​APR 14 1936   General Mills begins the baseball season with full or partial sponsorship of play-by-play broadcasts in 21 cities advertising its Wheaties, “Breakfast of Champions.” 
APR 14 1936   The Chicago Cubs buy the 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. hour on WIND/Chicago-Gary, Indiana to recap its games for fans who miss the day’s play-by-play broadcast.
APR 14 1938   A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals orders Groucho and Chico Marx to each pay $1,000 to the authors of the radio skit Mr. Dibble & Mr. Dabble for unauthorized use of their material or go to jail for a year.
APR 14 1941   NBC stuns its competitors by bidding $150,000 for broadcast rights to the 1941 World Series - $50,000 more than any previous year.
APR 14 1941   The NLRB gives AFRA a victory in its dispute with WIOD/Miami, making the station a closed shop for all air personalities and giving settlements to two announcers who had been fired for alleged union activities.
APR 14 1941 WHN/New York City Sales Manager Bert Lebhar, (aka Bert Lee), who does the station’s daily 7:45 a.m. newscast and 7:15 p.m. sports report, adds the nightly Sports Final at 10:45 p.m., broadcast from his home. 
APR 14 1942   The War Department forbids broadcasts originating from war plants to identify the company, its location or its products. .   
APR 14 1944   Walter Winchell sues Michigan congressman Clare Hoffman for $250,000 resulting from Hoffman’s letter in his district’s newspaper calling Winchell, “…un-American, unreliable and a party to conspiracy…”  (See Walter Winchell and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 14 1944   American Tobacco cancels its weeknight quarter-hour Believe It Or Not with Robert Ripley on Mutual after 13 weeks claiming it needs the money for its budget after signing Jack Benny.  (See Believe It Or Not and Lucky Gets Benny.)
APR 14 1945   NBC broadcasts an hour-long tribute to the late President Roosevelt by stars of the Broadway stage accompanied by Dr. Frank Black and the NBC Orchestra.
APR 14 1945   All U.S. radio stations devote a minute of silence at 4:00 p.m. ET in tribute to the late President Roosevelt.
APR 14 1947   NBC proposes network policy changes to affiliates including no mystery or crime programs before 8:30 p.m. local time and a limit of three daytime serials back-to-back in any given hour.
APR 14 1947   Melodrama Treasury Agent begins its first network run of one year on ABC.  A second, three year run begins on Mutual in 1954. 
APR 14 1947   Television sets go on sale to the general public for the first time in Washington, D.C. and dealers’ inventory of  2,500 sets is quickly sold out.
APR 14 1948   NBC denies Radio Moscow accusations that the network’s Moscow correspondent, Robert Magidoff , is engaged in espionage. 
APR 14 1949  The NAB loans $75,000 to its research branch, Broadcast Measurement Bureau, for completion of its second nationwide radio survey.
APR 14 1949   The CBS talent raid on NBC continues with the signing of George Burns & Gracie Allen to a long term radio and television contract.  (See Network Jumpers.and Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 14 1950   General Foods signs a $150,000 contract to sponsor the broadcasts of twelve Saturday afternoon Brooklyn Dodger baseball games on 70 CBS stations.
APR 14 1952   The FCC officially lifts its 43 month freeze on new television stations effective July 1st and adds 70 UHF channels to the existing 13 VHF channels.  Assignments require 30 of the existing 108 VHF stations to change channels. 
APR 14 1952   Trade magazine Broadcasting-Telecasting estimates that 100,620,000 commercials were delivered on the country’s 2,236 AM stations in 1951 and 4,008,000 commercials on its 108 television stations.
APR 14 1952 The AP joins its competitors, UP and INS, in offering a weekly newsreel to television stations. 
 
APR 15 1919 The United States ends its World War I prohibition of private and amateur radio.
APR 15 1923 Lee DeForest introduces the Phonofilm sound process for movies at New York City’s Rivoli Theater in a feature film length vaudeville review starring Eddie Cantor.   (See Alchemists of The Air.)
APR 15 1932   ASCAP proposes a 300% boost in fees to radio stations, to 5% of gross income amounting to a total of $3,500,000.  The  NAB obtains a six month moratorium.
APR 15 1934   WJJD/Chicago begins to carry Sunday afternoon CBS programs which frees WBBM to broadcast Chicago Cub and White Sox baseball games.
APR 15 1935   FCC shuts down Brooklyn stations WARD, WBBC, WLTH and WVFW and gives the 1400 kc. frequency to The Brooklyn Eagle which will operate a new 500 watt fulltime station.
APR 15 1936   RKO releases Major Bowes’ Amateur Parade No. 1, the first in a series of six, shorts based on Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour.  (See Radio Goes To The Movies and Major Bowes’ Original Money Machine.)
APR 15 1937   Broadcasters protest FCC Commissioner Henry Payne’s idea of a tax on station licenses based on wattage.  The tax that would total $7.0 Million a year was proposed to Congress by New York Representative John Boylan.
APR 15 1937  The Los Angeles AFM local orders stations KFI and KECA to hire twelve staff musicians and smaller stations KFVD, KGFJ, KIEV, KMPC, KMTR and KRKD to hire three staff musicians or risk losing their band remotes.  (See Big Band Remotes.)
APR 15 1937   Mutual gets a last minute approval to broadcast the final game of the Stanley Cup playoffs with CKLW/ Windsor, Ontario affiliate sportscaster Steve Douglas describing the Detroit Red Wings’ 3-0 shutout over the New York Rangers. 
APR 15 1938   Fire, apparently started by a cigarette, destroys the Audience Mail Department of NBC’s San Francisco headquarters.  No injuries were reported from the noon hour blaze.
APR 15 1940  Sterling Drug cancels its eleven month experiment of rebroadcasting six of its network weekday serials at night on WMCA/New York City.  Instead, it schedules afternoon replays its two CBS morning serials, Our Gal Sunday and The Romance of Helen Trent, on WMCA.  (See Soft Soap & Hard Sell and Karl Swenson.)
APR 15 1941   Bill Stern, 34, is appointed NBC Sports Director.  (See Bill Stern.)
APR 15 1942  The NAB responds to the printing unions’ call for a tax on “monopolistic” broadcast advertising by pointing out that radio only receives one of every eight dollars spent in advertising.
APR 15 1943  In response to American Tobacco’s weekly gift of 250,000 Lucky Strikes to Allied troops, R.J. Reynolds announces on NBC’s Jimmy Durante & Garry Moore Show that it is sending 300,000 Camel cigarettes to American soldiers in the Burma area.
APR 15 1943  The U.S. Office of War Information reports a weekly output of 3,000 15-minutes programs in over two dozen languages from 22 shortwave transmitters located in New York, Boston, Schenectady, Cincinnati and San Francisco.
APR 15 1943   RCA announces  the $6.500,000 sale of its stock in Radio-Keith-Orpheum, parent company of RKO Studios.
APR 15 1944 The AFRS “Mosquito Network” opens a station on Bougainville with shortwaved and transcribed programs from the United States.
APR 15 1944   NBC’s WNBT(TV)/New York City televises Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus from Madison Square Garden.
APR 15 1945   All of NBC’s top stars accompanied by Major Meredith Willson’s U.S. Army Band participate in a two hour prime time tribute to the late President Roosevelt.  (See Meredith Willson.)
APR 15 1946  DuMont’s WABD(TV) becomes New York City’s first television station to return to the air after channel reallocaton and dedicates its “World’s Largest TV Studio” in Wannamaker’s Department Store with a program from DuMont’s W3XWT(TV)/ Washington relayed to New York via AT&T’s newly installed coaxial cable.  (See Dr. DuMont’s Predictions.) 
APR 15 1947   FCC Commissioner Clifford Durr charges his colleagues on the FCC with “laxity in the enforcement” of tighter program standards set forth in 1946’s FCC Blue Book.
APR 15 1947   The New York Daily News, the American Broadcasting Company, Bamberger Department Stores and Bremer Broadcasting of Newark are awarded the final four television licenses for New York City.
APR 15 1947   DuMont’s WABD(TV) pays the New York Yankees $35,000 to televise 77 of its home games with the amount to be raised an additional $1,000 per game if a sponsor can be found. 
APR 15 1948  ABC wins three Peabody Awards for its broadcasts of The Theater Guild On The Air, Elmer Davis news commentaries and Boston Symphony concerts.
APR 15 1948   The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee adds an additional million dollars to broadcasting section of The Voice of America, raising total expenditure to $24.6 Million..
APR 15 1949   The Committee On Radio of the National Council of Teachers of English complains that the CBS sitcom hit Our Miss Brooks starring Eve Arden, “…puts many English teachers to ridicule.”  (See Our Miss Arden.)
APR 15 1949    Citing “slow summer television trends” Don Lee Broadcasting temporarily cancels Tuesday and Wednesday programming on its KTSL(TV)/Los Angeles.
APR 15 1950   General Mills sponsors its second annual Saturday night half-hour Welcome Back Baseball variety show starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on CBS.
APR 15 1951  Horace Heidt takes his Youth Opportunity Program on a two-month, around-the-world junket for the Armed Forces.  His crew of 80 will film material for his television shows and tape his radio shows which will be flown back to the U.S. for editing and broadcast.
APR 15 1952   Gene Autry’s Flying A Productions begins filming Annie Oakley starring 22 year old Gail Davis - the first Western series with a female lead.
APR 15 1953  CBS reports Edward R. Murrow to be the network’s highest paid officer at $211,000 annually -  $45,000 more than CBS President Frank Stanton and $92,600 more than Chairman Bill Paley.
APR 15 1950  Mutual announces it will make its key “affiliated” television stations available to advertisers: WOR-TV/New York, WGN-TV/Chicago, WNAC-TV/Boston, WOIC(TV)/ Washington and KTSL(TV)/Los Angeles. 
 APR 15 1951   CBS cancels The Desi Arnaz Show after a 13-week, Sunday afternoon run to test the Latin bandleader’s air personality before he and his wife, Lucille Ball, begin their television series, I Love Lucy, in October.
APR 15 1953   FCC rules against Zenith Radio Corporation’s appeal contesting the granting of Chicago’s television channel 2 to Balaban & Katz Theaters’ WBKB(TV).


APR 16 1926  A Federal court rules in favor of the Zenith Corporation’s WJAZ/Chicago, deciding that stations could choose their own frequency, stimulating a number of “wave jumping” incidents across the country.
APR 16 1932   Walter Winchell collapses from nervous exhaustion and American Tobacco signs Hearst columnist Louis Sobol to substitute for him on its Tuesday night NBC broad-cast for Lucky Strike.  (See Walter Winchell and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 16 1934  Babe Ruth begins a widely publicized 13-week series on Blue for Quaker Oats to be broadcast three nights a week from wherever his New York Yankees are playing. 
APR 16 1934  The Kansas City Police Chief sues CBS and Remington Rand for $250,000 over his allegedly libelous characterization on the April 6th broadcast of The March of Time.  (See The March of Time.)
APR 16 1934  The management of Glen Gray’s Casa Loma orchestra lodges a complaint against Dr. Lyons Toothpaste and NBC for presenting a Sunday night program with another band billed as “The Casa Nova orchestra.”
APR 16 1934  Soprano Rosa Ponselle’s half-hour for Chesterfield cigarettes on CBS is the first program allowed on WSJS/Winston-Salem, North Carolina, sponsored by a com-petitor of R. J. Reynolds’ Camel cigarettes, a Winston-Salem product.   
APR 16 1935   Jim Jordan, 38, and Marian Jordan, 37, debut as Fibber McGee & Molly on 26 Blue network stations,  beginning their 24 year Network Radio run. (See Fibber McGee Minus Molly and Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 16 1939   General Mills elevates its Grouch Club, (for people who want to complain), on the CBS West Coast Network to the full NBC network on Sundays at 6:30 p.m. for a 39 week run. 
APR 16 1940   FCC Commissioner George Henry Payne recommends the license revo-cation of Texas stations KGKB/Tyler, KRBA/Lufkin, KTBC/Austin and KNET/Palestine for hidden ownership issues.
APR 16 1941   The London offices of CBS and NBC are destroyed in a German air raid.
APR 16 1941   FCC settles its long standing “Brooklyn Case” by merging New York City stations WARD, WBBC, WLTH and WVFW into WBYN to operate with 250 watts on 1430 kc.
APR 16 1941   FCC grants full time power of 10,000 watts to WNOX/Knoxville, owned by Scripps-Howard, upsetting thought that the Commission discriminated against newspaper ownership and/or anti-New Deal isolationists.    
APR 16 1942   Due to wartime shortage of materials the U.S. War Production Board and FCC recommend an immediate halt to all radio and television station construction or modification.
APR 16 1943   General Foods and NBC temporarily bans studio audiences from broadcasts of The Aldrich Family to determine if the program’s quality improves without audience laughter and applause.  (See The Aldrich Family and Thursday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 16 1943   Negotiations between the AFM and phonograph record companies to end the eight month musicians’ strike break down after two days of meetings in New York.  (See Petrillo!)
APR 16 1943  Bob Hope finishes his filming of Let’s Face It at Paramount and flies to Fort Worth to begin a 40 day tour and 173 camp shows with his NBC radio troupe.  (See Hope From Home and Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 16 1944   Blue adds Yanks In The Orient to its Sunday schedule at 11:15 p.m. - a recorded program featuring service personnel in the China-Burma-India war theater interviewed by Army Lieutenant Bert Parks.
APR 16 1945   Andrew Jergens Co. increases its renewal offer for Walter Winchell’s Sunday night Jergens Journal to $7,500 per week.  (See Walter Winchell and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 16 1945   Burns & Allen refuse to perform their regular comedy show so soon after President Roosevelt’s death, forcing Lever Brothers to substitute a program of music with its Swan Soap commercials read intact.  (See Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 16 1946  President Truman signs Public Law 344, (aka The Lea Act), directly aimed at limiting the coercive tactics of James C. Petrillo’s AFM against broadcasters. (See Petrillo!)
APR 16 1946   AFRA begins a letter writing campaign to U.S. Senators protesting the The Lea Act. 
APR 16 1946   Mutual’s kid serial Superman begins a new series of stories intended to fight juvenile delinquency.  (See Serials, Cereals & Premiums.)
APR 16 1946   ABC resumes television production in New York City with two prime time half-hours per week purchased at $625 each from DuMont’s WABD(TV). 
APR 16 1947  Stations and networks marshal forces for emergency services and continuous coverage of the disastrous explosions and fires at the port city of Texas City, Texas, that killed an estimated 580 persons and injured at least 5,000 others. 
APR 16 1947  KTHT/Houston cancels all programming and commercials for 48 hours of continuous service to local agencies in forwarding news and messages from the Texas City disaster.
APR 16 1948 Plaintiff Jack Stanley’s award of $35,000 from CBS for the network’s stealing his format idea for its Hollywood Preview show is upheld by a Los Angeles appeals court.
APR 16 1949   Miami stations WBAY, WBMB, WGBS, WIOD, WKAT, WLRD, WQAM, WVCG, WWPB and WFTL/Fort Lauderdale simultaneously broadcast a civic sponsored expose of criminal elements in South Florida.
APR 16 1951  The National Association of Broadcasters, (NAB), officially changes its name to The National Association of Radio & Television Broadcasters, (NARTB).  The name change will last seven years before reverting again to the NAB.
APR 16 1951  Mutual expands it baseball Game of The Day broadcasts to seven days a week with day-night doubleheaders on Sundays. 
APR 16 1951  The Liberty Broadcasting System begins nightly commentaries from former CBS newsmen Joseph C. Harsch and William L. Shirer.
APR 16 1952 Edward R. Murrow and Douglas Edwards from CBS and NBC’s Morgan Beatty are dispatched to Omaha to cover the Missouri River flooding in Nebraska, South Dakota and Iowa. 
APR 16 1952   Pabst Brewing pays $80,000 for rights to the highly anticipated Sugar Ray Robinson vs. Rocky Graziano Middleweight Championship fight on CBS and CBS-TV, won by Robinson with a third round knockout.

APR 17 1927 FRC orders the 129 existing radio stations to change frequencies in a effort to alleviate dial clutter and interference.
APR 17 1937   CBS opens its new Hollywood broadcast center at Sunset and Gower at a cost of $1.75 Million.
APR 17 1938   AFM lifts its demand for $11 to be paid to each musician, allowing Mutual to broadcast the Easter Morning Sunrise services from the Hollywood Bowl featuring a 100 piece orchestra and chorus, narrated by Herbert Marshall.
APR 17 1939   The NAB and RMA begin Radio Open House Week combining network and station programs and presentations designed to further the industry’s campaign to avoid government dictation.  
APR 17 1939   Actress Irene Rich, a youthful looking 47, threatens to leave her six year association with Welch’s Grape Juice as its spokesperson and star of its low cost weekly Blue Network program, because of the client’s "cheapness".
APR 17 1939 Crosley’s high frequency experimental station W8XUJ/Cincinnati transmit’s a facsimile report of the Cincinnati Reds vs. Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game accom-panied by pictures of the players.
APR 17 1942  The U.S. Office of Facts and Figures issues its Network Allocation Plan calling for a portion of network commercial time be given to wartime messages.
APR 17 1943   American Tobacco replaces Martin Block’s ad-lib commercials on Lucky Strike’s Your Hit Parade and Kay  Kyser shows with Milton Cross dissertations on historic Americans and their links to tobacco. 
APR 17 1944   General Mills agrees to a five year contract worth $13.5 Million to revive the Irna Phillips-Carl Wester soap opera Women In White and pair it with The Guiding Light and Today’s Children on NBC beginning in June.  (See Soft Soap & Hard Sell.)
APR 17 1944  Trade magazine Broadcasting reports 55 advertising agencies, most located in New York, have created television departments - 16 having already experi-mented with TV for clients.
APR 17 1945  Philco Corp. opens the first multiple relay microwave video link -  between Washington and Philadelphia.
APR 17 1945  President Truman’s first nighttime address to the nation registers a 53.6 Hooperating.  (See Radio’s Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.)
APR 17 1946   Would-be fifth network Associated Broadcasting System begins liquidation proceedings with liabilities of $279,000 and assets of $15,000.
APR 17 1947  CBS mystery anthology Suspense wins a Peabody Award and Roma Wines promptly changes its cancellation of the program to a renewal.  (See Sus…pense!
and Thursday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 17 1947  Transcribed program producer Frederic Ziv signs actor Ronald Colman to host and star in its syndicated Favorite Story radio series.  (See Fred Ziv - King of Syndication.)
APR 17 1949   Bing Crosby, minority owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, rejoins CBS, appearing with his four sons in the General Mills hour long special, Welcome Back Baseball.
APR 17 1949  Sterling Drug cancels Frank & Anne Hummert’s Manhattan Merry Go Round, ending the show’s 17 year multi-network run.  (See Top 40 Radio’s Roots and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 17 1950  Horace Heidt flies to Europe with his cast and crew of 60 for NBC’s Youth Opportunity Program to tour Armed Forces installations for two weeks and record three shows featuring service personnel.
APR 17 1950   A packed Hollywood Legion Stadium refunds the admission of ticket holders when its roster of wrestlers refuses to appear before KTSL(TV) cameras, claiming television harms their gate.
APR 17 1951   Radio and television networks give saturation coverage to General Douglas MacArthur’s return to America.
APR 17 1951   The NCAA proposes a three-point television plan for collegiate football: permitting teams to appear in one home and one away game per season, only one game televised in any market per week and a television blackout, “once or twice” per season whenever local game attendance is threatened by a televised game.   

APR 18 1932   ASCAP notifies broadcasters that it plans to raise its license fees by 300% on June 1st with a 5% surcharge on their advertising income, estimated to bring the society $4.0 Million in 1933. 
APR 18 1932   KNX/Los Angeles sues The Chico Record for slander after the California newspaper claimed that the station falsely reported the safe return of the kidnapped Lindbergh baby. 
APR 18 1934  Eddie Cantor stuns the industry by signing a contract with Lehn & Fink’s Pebeco Toothpaste to leave Standard Brands and NBC in February for a new half hour Sunday night show on CBS.  (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten and Network Jumpers.)
APR 18 1934   Kraft Cheese buys broadcast rights to the Primo Carnera vs. Max Baer Heavyweight Championship fight for $15,000 on NBC, June 14th, a Thursday night coinciding with the normal start time of its Kraft Music Hall.   (See Thursday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 18 1935  NBC introduces its post-midnight horror program, Lights Out! at 12:30 a.m.
(See Lights Out!)
APR 18 1936  Chicago based Affiliated Broadcasting Company network begins operations with 20 affiliates in four Midwest states including WIND/Gary-Chicago, WIL/St. Louis and WDGY/Minneapolis-St. Paul.
APR 18 1937   The new broadcast line linking WLW/Cincinnati with WHN/New York City, KQV/Pittsburgh and WFIL/Philadelphia is opened with the Ave Maria Hour from WHN to the other stations.
APR 18 1939   After an 18 month absence, Marian Jordan rejoins the cast of Fibber McGee & Molly. (See Fibber McGee Minus Molly and Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 18 1939   Blue affiliate WXYZ/Detroit agrees to carry NBC afternoon programs that affiliate WWJ cannot accept because of its broadcasts of Detroit Tiger baseball games. 
APR 18 1940   Newspaper editors complain when H.V. Kaltenborn relays quotes on his NBC program from a news conference with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles a few hours earlier, until they learn that AP and UP transmitted the quotes before his broadcast.
(See H.V. Kaltenborn and Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.) 
APR 18 1941   Brace Beemer, 38, assumes the role of The Lone Ranger and will hold it until the series ends production of original episodes in 1954. (See The Lone Ranger and Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
APR 18 1942   The publisher of The Washington Times-Herald  files $200,000 libel suit against Walter Winchell, his sponsor Andrew Jergens Co. and the Blue Network for allegedly slanderous remarks made by Winchell in a 1940 broadcast.  (See Walter Winchell and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 18 1942   NBC’s National Barn Dance from WLS/Chicago celebrates its tenth anniversary of Saturday night performances before admission-paying audiences, boasting a ten year attendance of 1,037,742.  (See Saturday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 18 1945   Blue dedicates a 30-minute tribute to war correspondent Ernie Pyle who was killed in the battle of Okinawa at age 55.  
APR 18 1946   Chet Lauck & Norris Goff, (aka Lum & Abner), celebrate the 1000th broadcast of their program on the Keystone Broadcasting System transcription network.
APR 18 1947   Forty disgruntled NBC affiliates organize a group to protest the network’s request to reduce chain-break commercials, claiming that a large percentage of their revenue is derived from spots between network programs. 
APR 18 1947  Carl Haverlin, Mutual Station Relations Manager, leaves the network to become CEO of BMI.
APR 18 1948   ABC cancels the sustaining Sunday evening Detroit Symphony broadcasts as it looks for an hour of more popular programming leading into its new Stop The Music! giveaway show.  (See Stop The Music!)
APR 18 1949   CBS President Frank Stanton signs a ten year contract with the network at $100,000 per year.
APR 18 1949   Joan Blaine, original star of the daytime serial Story of Mary Marlin in 1934 and subsequently Valiant Lady for nine years beginning in 1938, dies in New York City two days short of her 49th birthday.  (See Soft Soap & Hard Sell.)
APR 18 1949   Philadelphia stations WCAU-TV, WFIL-TV and WPTZ(TV) begin their three way split of televising all the home games of the Phillies and Athletics.
APR 18 1950The NAB forms Broadcast Audience Measurement, Inc., to replace its Broadcast Measurement Bureau in measuring radio coverage.  (See Radio’s Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.).  
APR 18 1950   The major league baseball season begins with all teams except the Pittsburgh Pirates televising some or all of their home games. 
APR 18 1951  The Liberty Broadcasting System signs Falstaff Beer to sponsor its Game of The Day baseball broadcasts on 150 affiliates - the remaining 210 Liberty stations will carry games on a co-op sponsorship basis. 
APR 18 1951  Show business legend Sophie Tucker, 64, makes her television debut on Jimmy Durante’s NBC-TV variety show.  (See Goodnight, Mr. Durante...)
APR 18 1953 Mutual cancels Himan Brown’s detective drama The Affairs of Peter Salem after a four year run.

APR 19 1924  Pioneering rural country music and comedy show National Barn Dance debuts on WLS/Chicago.
APR 19 1937  Future movie star Paul Douglas, 30, begins a nightly, ten-minute sportscast on CBS which Variety reviews as, “…entire show is one of the best of its kind on the air.” 
APR 19 1938   CAB announces it will increase its sampling size by 25%, making 509,000 completed telephone calls annually.  (See Radio’s Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.)
APR 19 1938  Dancing teacher Arthur Murray begins a series of half-hour dancing lessons Tuesday nights on WNEW/New York City.
APR 19 1938   A member of the Texas Prisoners Rhythmic Swingsters preparing to broadcast on WBAP/Fort Worth, walks out of rehearsals at the Huntsville correctional facility.  He’s recaptured hours later.
APR 19 1938   NBC expands its television schedule to two hours of evening programs per week for viewing in its studios by broadcast industry professionals.
APR 19 1939   FCC concludes its six-month Network Monopoly Inquiry hearings with 8,500 pages of testimony and a cost to taxpayers of approximately $500,000.
APR 19 1939   Gordon Thompson, pioneer J. Walter Thompson radio producer, dies of a sudden heart attack at his desk at age 35 while reviewing the script of the next night’s Rudy Vallee show.  
APR 19 1942   Kate Smith becomes temporary emcee of the CBS Sunday afternoon morale building show, The Spirit of ’42.  (See Kate's Great Song and Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 19 1942   Blue becomes the first network to allow espionage themed plots in its mystery programs with the introduction of its 13-week series, Alias John Freedom.
APR 19 1942   Texaco begins sponsorship of transcribed Fred Allen Shows on CBS shortwave facilities late Sunday nights directed to American Armed Forces in various parts of the world.  (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten and Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 19 1943   OWI chief Elmer Davis reports the need for 300 skilled radio men to establish and operate powerful new AM stations in North Africa delivering Allied news and propaganda to all parts of Europe. 
APR 19 1944   NBC begins a series of prestigious hour-long dramas, Arthur Hopkins Presents, on Wednesday nights at 11:30 p.m.  The program remains on the network until January 3, 1945.  
APR 19 1948   The New York Yankees at. Washington Senators game is the first season opener televised, the first time a President is seen on television throwing out the first pitch and the first away televised back to New York City. 
APR 19 1948   CBS boss Bill Paley attempts to recruit Joan Blondell for the new Our Miss Brooks sitcom series when Shirley Booth withdraws from consideration for the show.  (See Our Miss Arden.)
APR 19 1950  NBC Board Chairman Niles Trammell pays tribute to Mr. District Attorney on the melodrama’s tenth anniversary on the network.  (See Mr. District Attorney and  Wednesday’s All Time Top Ten.)
APR 19 1950  Ted Cott, 33, Programming Vice President of WNEW/New York City, becomes Manager of NBC’s flagships WNBC and WNBT(TV).
APR 19 1951  All radio and television networks and many independent stations carry General Douglas MacArthur’s farewell address to Congress.
APR 19 1951  NBC establishes a three-man executive board representing administration, sales and programming, to “streamline” its AM network and station operations. 
APR 19 1953 The Aldrich Family leaves Network Radio after 14 seasons - 13 sponsored by General Foods.  (See The Aldrich Family and Thursday's All Time Top Ten.)

APR 20 1931   CBS enters the spot sales field with a division representing local stations.
APR 20 1934   NBC refuses to broadcast General Mills sponsored recordings of Jack Armstrong, on any of its owned and/or operated stations because the program is transcribed from live performances on CBS.  (See Serials, Cereals & Premiums.)
APR 20 1934   FRC approves the petition of KNX/Los Angeles to increase its transmitting power from 25,000 to 50,000 watts.
APR 20 1934   Zomar The Mystic on WSOC/Charlotte creates news by driving through downtown traffic “blindfolded“. 
APR 20 1935   Your Hit Parade begins 18 season multi-network run on NBC for American Tobacco’s Lucky Strike Cigarettes. (See Top 40 Radio’s Roots and Saturday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 20 1938   After ten years as CBS Music Director, Freddie Rich resigns with a cordial letter to Bill Paley in Variety.
APR 20 1939   Mutual commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr., is successful in his campaign to obtain Press Gallery credentials for Network Radio correspondents in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
APR 20 1939   FCC charges the District of Columbia Court of Appeals with going beyond its legal precincts by attempting to usurp the Commission’s functions and administering The Communications Act of 1934.
APR 20 1940  NBC turns down Bill Stern’s eye witness account of the New York Central’s Lake Shore Limited train wreck at Little Falls, New York, that killed 30 and injured 100.  Stern was a passenger and escaped injury but the network didn’t want to alarm relatives of others aboard the ill fated train.  (See Bill Stern.)
APR 20 1942  The U.S. Office of Censorship issues a “suggestion” that all references to weather conditions be eliminated from baseball broadcasts.
APR 20 1943   Ben Bernie, 52, leaves his hotel suite oxygen tent in Los Angeles and moves to a desert resort to recover from his heart attack suffered eleven weeks earlier. (See Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 20 1945   Mutual broadcasts three of 25 messages recorded by U.S. troops in German prison camps brought back to this country by representatives of the YMCA.
APR 20 1945  Great Britain’s BBC offers American networks and independent stations all of its planned V-E Day broadcasts. 
APR 20 1946   Video transmission of the Chicago Cubs season opener on WBKB(TV) is ruined by electrical interference to cables caused by elevators in the station’s building.  The broadcast becomes audio play by play accompanied by a test pattern..  
APR 20 1947   NBC cuts The Fred Allen Show for 35 seconds during his joke about network vice presidents.  (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten and Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 20 1947  CBS celebrates the seventh anniversary of Phil Baker’s comedy quiz Take It Or Leave It by limiting the show’s studio audience only to persons named Baker.   (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 20 1948  Bing Crosby, part owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, joins the play by play broadcast of Pirates-Chicago Cubs game on WWSW/Pittsburgh.
APR 20 1949   Ziv’s transcribed Guy Lombardo Show debuts Wednesday nights on WNBC/New York, breaking the station’s long held ban against recorded programs.   (See Fred Ziv - King of Syndication and Guy Lombardo.)
APR 20 1949   CBS commentator Edward R. Murrow is elected to the network’s Board of Directors.
APR 20 1949  Omaha brewer Robert Storz and his son Todd buy Omaha stations KOWH and KOAD-FM from The Omaha World Herald for a reported $75,000. (See Top 40 Radio’s Roots.)
APR 20 1949  NBC reports that 84 of its 170 affiliates have committed to television - 31 already have television stations on the air, 19 hold construction permits and 34 have applications on file with the FCC waiting for the freeze to end.
APR 20 1951   Using television’s impact on nighttime radio as its excuse, WAAF/Chicago turns down its FCC grant to expand from a daytime only operation to a fulltime station.
APR 20 1952   NBC cancels The Big Show, its elaborate variety program aimed at bringing down Jack Benny, after two seasons and a total $1.5 Million loss.  (See Tallulah’s Big Show and Meredith Willson.)
APR 20 1952  CBS-TV moves the Edward R. Murrow & Fred Friendly series, See It Now, from Sunday afternoons to evenings.
APR 20 1953  Eight new television stations begin operations since April 14th - a record for a one week period.
APR 20 1953   ABC cancels its two nighttime serials, Hollywood Starway and Mike Malloy, Detective, after 26 weeks.

APR 21 1930   Using affiliate WAIU’s existing broadcast line into the Columbus, Ohio, penitentiary, CBS scores a scoop on all media in covering the historic prison fire that kills 322 inmates.
APR 21 1934  A wedding is broadcast by KOVR/Colorado Springs so the distant parents of the couple might hear the ceremony. A telegram is later received from the groom’s parents in Seattle acknowledging its reception.  
APR 21 1936  The ANPA declares a “truce” with broadcasters - neglecting to publicly disclose that newspapers control approximately 200 radio stations with applications pending for 50 more.  
APR 21 1937  A toppled beehive in the studio of WEEI/Boston releases 30,000 bees in the station that has to be evacuated before beekeepers can capture and remove them.
APR 21 1937   Rudy Vallee appears on Boston stations WNAC and WMEX to plead his case after being found guilty of assaulting a newspaper photographer who took a his picture with his arm around a showgirl in a local theater lobby.  (See Thursday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 21 1938   Memphis stations WMC and WREC receive awards from the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce for their emergency work during the 1937 floods.
APR 21 1939   Detroit statons WJBK and WMBC refuse to carry The League For Peace & Democracy’s weekly rebuttals to controversial priest Charles Coughin’s Sunday afternoon messages.  (See Father Coughlin.)
APR 21 1940  Comedy quiz Take it Or Leave It begins its seven year run on CBS followed by five seasons on NBC.  (See Sunday’s All Time Top Ten.)
APR 21 1941   Lux Radio Theater begins using movie studio contract players instead of regular radio actors for its minor roles to accustom them to radio work and overcoming “mike fright.”  (See Lux…Presents Hollywood! and Monday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 21 1941   The IAPTA printers’ union continues its attack on radio by proposing a Federal “Amusement.” tax on broadcasters’ income.
APR 21 1946   NBC covers both the beginning and end of an Army P-80 jet plane’s record breaking flight between New York and Washington in 28 minutes, 15 seconds.
APR 21 1946   Agnes Moorhead’s Calamity Jane is replaced after three weeks on the CBS schedule by The Amazing Mrs. Danbury, a sitcom also starring Moorhead.  Sponsor Tums cancels after eight weeks.
APR 21 1947   Quiz Kids host Joe Kelly shoots and kills a robber in his Chicago home.  (See The Quiz Kids.)
APR 21 1947  KTHT/Houston reports $50,000 has been raised through its appeals to aid Texas City disaster victims. 
APR 21 1947  Audience Records, Inc., releases of specially performed comedy records by network stars Jack Benny, Burns & Allen, Amos & Andy and Edgar Bergen.
APR 21 1948   ABC’s Vox Pop originates from Paris with subsequent week’s originations from London and aboard the S.S. America on its Transatlantic cruise to the United States.
(See Monday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 21 1948   Welsh baritone Thomas L. Thomas stars in Frank & Anne Hummert’s new Borden Dairies series Your Song & Mine for 13 weeks on CBS. 
APR 21 1949   The Peabody Awards recognize their first television series, ABC-TV’s Actors Studio for drama and NBC-TV’s Howdy Doody for children’s programs.
APR 21 1950   Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club celebrates its 5,000th consecutive broadcast on Blue/ABC.
APR 21 1950   Baseball great Dizzy Dean begins his season of pre and post game commentaries to New York Yankee games on DuMont’s WABD(TV).
APR 21 1953   CBS announces its plan to syndicate 65 episodes of the Amos & Andy television sitcom.

APR 22 1932   AT&T reveals its yearly income from radio network line charges is $6.0 Million with an additional $4.0 Million coming from local stations by supplying lines between their studios and transmitters.  
APR 22 1935   Edison Electric, owner of WEEI/Boston, and Travelers Insurance, owner of WTIC/Hartford, agree to act together as they contemplate dropping their NBC affiliation for CBS.
APR 22 1936   Soprano Vivian della Chiesa, discovered in a CBS talent contest, is signed to a network contract by NBC. 
APR 22 1938   A second fire breaks out in the Audience Mail Department of NBC’s headquarters in San Francisco, this time from materials used in redecorating the area from the earlier fire a week earlier.
APR 22 1940  Walter O’Keefe sues Young & Rubicam Advertising for $48,750 for breach of contract stemming from the suspension of O’Keefe’s Packard Mardi Gras show in March, 1938.  
APR 22 1941   Former NAB President Mark Ethridge, 44, accepts President Roosevelt’s request to make an independent study of the broadcasting industry, its ownership and its regulation. 
APR 22 1942   The U.S. government orders all civilian radio and phonograph production to be diverted to military communications.
APR 22 1943   Jim & Marian Jordan as Fibber McGee & Molly fill in for vacationing Bing Crosby on NBC’s Kraft Music Hall for two weeks.  (See Thursday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 22 1944  The Washington Post acquires WINX/Washington, D.C., for $500,000.
APR 22 1945   WNBT(TV)/New York City broadcasts the Warner Brothers two-reel film,  It Happened In Springfield, dealing with racial intolerance in the Springfield, Massachusetts schools, concurrent with the film’s release in theaters.
APR 22 1946   AFM union chief Petrillo tests The Lea Act  by ordering members not to play on any AM-FM simulcast programs without double payment.  (See Petrillo!)
APR 22 1946   WABD(TV)/New York starts broadcasting 30 minutes of pop music as background to its video test-pattern before programming begins, announcing that all records are available at the Wanamaker Department Store.
APR 22 1947  NBC kills the microphones of Bob Hope and Red Skelton during jokes on their shows about the network’s censorship of Fred Allen two nights earlier..
APR 22 1948   NBC opens “The worlds most modern video studio - 8-G” at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
APR 22 1948   Barney Blake, Police Reporter debuts on NBC-TV at the late hour of 9:30 p.m. due to the network’s ban of crime shows any earlier.
APR 22 1950   KWK/St. Louis joins four other stations in the city - KSD, KXLW, WEW and WIL - and shuts down its FM operation, returning its license to the FCC.  (See Three Letter Calls.)
APR 22 1952   An estimated 5.0 Million American television viewers witness the Yucca Flat, Nevada, atomic test from a camera atop 9,000 foot Mt. Charleston 40 miles away and remote facilities provided by KTLA(TV)/Los Angeles.

APR 23 1923   The six year old son of GE engineering pioneer Ernst Alexanderson is kidnapped from the family’s Schenectady home.  WGY immediately begins broadcasting bulletins and appeals for his return.
APR 23 1931   After a month at NBC, Kate Smith moves to CBS for a highly successful 19 year run. (See Kate’s Great Song and Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 23 1932   An unemployed 22 year old pianist wins a new piano in a contest sponsored by WTMJ/Milwaukee because he was, “…looking for something to do.”  
APR 23 1933   Ed Wynn spends over 20 minutes at the close of NBC’s Texaco Fire Chief show telling of his problems, the "lies" he claims are spread about him, the 115 lawsuits filed against him and how Will Rogers "stole his jokes".  (See Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 23 1936  RCA demonstrates its latest television system to the press at Camden, New Jersey, which Variety calls visibly improved, “…but still a great distance from practicable commercial development.” 
APR 23 1936  NBC refuses to allow its horse racing expert, Clem McCarthy, to call the May 16th Preakness on Mutual.
APR 23 1937  Bing Crosby signs a two year contract extension to host NBC’s Kraft Music Hall for $3,500 per week with 13 weeks off each season.  (See Thursday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 23 1937  The U.S. Post Office orders NBC to stop shipping live mice through the mails after the network’s promotion department mails an estimated 800 rodents to ad agencies and newspapers to promote its “Singing Mice” stunt.
APR 23 1937  The 20th Century Fox film, Wake Up & Live, capitalizing on the Walter Winchell-Ben Bernie “feud,” opens with boosts from Bernie’s NBC show, Hollywood Hotel on CBS featuring both co-stars and Winchell’s Sunday night program on Blue. (See Walter Winchell,  Sunday's All Time Top Ten  and Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 23 1938  Mark Warnow’s orchestra is increased to 55 pieces for its Your Hit Parade debut on CBS - reported to be the largest orchestra ever assembled for a popular music program.  (See Saturday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 23 1939   Lawrence Tibbett returns to NBC’s The Circle and agrees to remain with the roundtable sponsored by Kellogg cereals for the rest of the season.
APR 23 1941  CBS refuses to allow Gracie Field’s performance of five Shakespearian sonnets tying-in with the war, citing network policy forbidding any, “…dramatization or emotionalizing of the war.”
APR 23 1945   Philco Corp. successfully links Philadelphia and Washington in a television networking experiment.
APR 23 1947   WOR/New York City refuses to carry Mutual’s new series of news commentaries by Leland Stowe sponsored by the United Electrical, Radio & Machinery Workers union, claiming it does not accept advertising from lobbying groups.  The program is carried instead by WMCA/New York.
APR 23 1947   Lewis Lawes, former prison warden, author and creator of the pioneering crime program, 20,000 Years At Sing Sing, on Blue from 1932 to 1938, dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at 63. 
APR 23 1948 Cecil B. DeMille loses his four year fight against AFRA suspension when the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to review his appeal. (See Lux…Presents Hollywood!  and Monday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 23 1948   FM inventor Edwin Armstrong testifies to the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee that RCA and FCC impeded growth of FM.
APR 23 1948   Phil Baker’s comedy quiz Everybody Wins! debuts for Philip Morris on CBS for a 26 week run.
APR 23 1948   CBS-TV is temporarily cut out of the Washington, D.C., market when WMAL-TV signs with ABC-TV.
APR 23 1951   An FCC study of the 1950 revenues of 421 radio stations in television markets shows a 7% increase over 1949.
APR 23 1952   Television manufacturer, network operator and station owner DuMont Laboratories reports a fiscal year loss of $583,000 compared to a previous year’s profit of $6.9 Million.  (See Dr. DuMont’s Predictions.)
APR 23 1953   ABC President Robert Kintner announces plans to reduce the network’s radio expenses, “…to the bone,” to provide funds for television.

APR 24 1933   The AP rules that none of its news shall be given to any radio chain and no member newspaper shall give any local news or news furnished by the AP to any radio station except brief bulletins of major importance. (See The Press Radio Bureau.)
APR 24 1933   All networks and local stations oppose charging admission for any of their broadcasts originating from the grounds of the Chicago World’s Fair. 
APR 24 1936   Warner Brothers offers $1.0 Million for 40% of Mutual - an offer the network is expected to decline.
APR 24 1936   Pat Barrett, Uncle Ezra of two programs on the Blue Network, sues to stop John Van Arnam of Syracuse to cease using the name Uncle Ezra Jones of the Barn Dance Frolics with the name “Jones” in small type in the act’s print advertising. 
APR 24 1937  WHO/Des Moines announcer Ronald (Dutch) Reagan, 26, makes his final appearance on the Iowa Barn Dance Frolic, before leaving for Hollywood and his new Warner Brothers film contract.
APR 24 1938  Sterling Drugs expands John J. Anthony’s Sunday night Goodwill Hour to Mutual’s full network with the addition of Don Lee’s 25 West Coast Stations.
APR 24 1939   CBS breaks off negotiations to buy World Broadcasting’s transcription company.   (See “By Transcription…”)
APR 24 1939   Former Mayor Jimmy Walker begins a 15 minute commentary three times a week on WMCA/New York City. 
APR 24 1939  AP membership reverses its earlier stand and votes to make the wire service available to radio station subscribers.
APR 24 1939  St. Louis stations KSD and KWK join KXOK in its bid to the FCC to move to 630 kc.  
APR 24 1942   Kids’ serial Little Orphan Annie leaves the air after eleven multi-network seasons.  (See Serials, Cereals & Premiums.)
APR 24 1942 FCC grants permission to WGBR/Goldsboro, North Carolina to obtain the materials necessary to rebuild following a fire that destroyed the station located at its transmitter, leaving only its tower and ground system. 
APR 24 1943   The Lone Ranger makes his first personal appearance after ten years on the air - as masked star Brace Beemer and his white horse, Silver, headline Chicago’s Olympia Circus. (See The Lone Ranger and Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
APR 24 1944  Kentucky Senator Albert (Happy) Chandler denounces Blue commentator Drew Pearson as, “…part of a plot to destroy representative government…” 
APR 24 1944  AFM locals ignore orders from the AFL and War Labor Board and continue their strikes - despite Labor’s “no strike” pledge - against WJJD/Chicago and KSTP/ Minneapolis-St. Paul.  (See Petrillo!)
APR 24 1944   The American FM Network, the sales representative for 25 FM stations, announces plans to build and operate stations in New York, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles.
APR 24 1945 Theodore Granik’s American Forum of The Air on Mutual hosts four U.S. delegates to the United Nations World Security Conference in San Francisco: Representative Sol Bloom, former Governor Harold Stassen and Senators Tom Connally and Arthur Vandenberg.
APR 24 1945   CBS broadcasts Norman Corwin’s 60-minute Word From The People on the eve of the United Nations Conference with 40 remote pickups from six continents.
APR 24 1946   AP membership votes 173-14 to admit radio stations and networks as “associate” members.
APR 24 1949   Daylight Saving Time arrives and all four networks institute systems of feeding transcribed broadcasts of programs to areas remaining on Standard time. 
APR 24 1949  Dick Powell debuts as Richard Diamond, Private Detective, NBC‘s summer replacement for Jack Benny, beginning a four year multi-network run.  (See Dick Powell.)
APR 24 1949   Sponsor Philip Morris cigarettes returns Horace Heidt’s Youth Opportunity Program to its 10:30 p.m. Sunday timeslot on NBC after the program’s failure to dent Jack Benny’s ratings on CBS at 7:00.  (See Sunday At Seven.)
APR 24 1950  Campbell Soup slots a second half-hour of NBC’s Double Or Nothing on the network’s weekday morning schedule at 10:30, a taped repeat of the previous after-noon’s 2:00 p.m. show with Walter O’Keefe.
APR 24 1950  RCA Chairman David Sarnoff predicts that television will become a $3.0 to $5.0 Billion industry within five years.
APR 24 1950   Jack Benny and his radio troupe receive $25,000 to play the Desert Inn in Las Vegas for three days.  (See Sunday At Seven and Your Money Or Your Life.)  
APR 24 1951   ABC Radio broadcasts a two hour fund raiser, The Metropolitan Opera Jamboree, hosted by Milton Cross, featuring performances by operatic stars and Jimmy Durante.  (See Goodnight, Mr. Durante...)
APR 24 1952   Mutual President Frank White resigns after three years and is replaced by the network’s board chairman, Thomas F. O’Neil. 
APR 24 1953  Red Foley leaves WSM/Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and his seven year role as host of its Saturday night broadcasts on NBC.  (See Saturday's All Time Top Ten.)

APR 25 1923  The Browning-King (Clothing Company) Orchestra - one of the first musical groups to adopt the name of a sponsor - debuts on WEAF/New York City.
APR 25 1932   ASCAP agrees to the NAB’s request to extend its deadline for a rate increase until September 1st.
APR 25 1932   CBS estimates, “between 3,000 and 9,000”, television sets are in the New York City area and tune to its ambitious seven hours of programming weekly provided by 150 to 200 entertainers who perform for free.
APR 25 1934   CBS agrees to a New York City demand that radio studios admitting audiences be licensed as theaters and pay a $500 annual fee.  
APR 25 1936   NBC provides dual, simultaneous coverage of the Drake Relays in Des Moines and the Penn Relays in Philadelphia, considered a technical achievement by the industry.
APR 25 1938   FCC estimates that 200 unlicensed stations are operating in Texas.
APR 25 1938   Associated Press members veto a plan to join United Press, International News Service and Transradio Press in selling AP’s news service to radio stations.
APR 25 1940   Joe Penner, 36, leaves the air after a seven year multi-network run. (See The 1939-40 Season.)
APR 25 1941   CBS marks Kate Smith’s tenth anniversary on the network with a commemorative broadcast of The Kate Smith Hour.   (See Kate’s Great Song  and Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 25 1942  WWSW/Pittsburgh reports success in using its FM station, W47P, instead of land lines to feed This Is War, to WPIC/Sharon, Pennsylvania, 60 miles away .  It also uses the FM outlet to feed Pittsburgh Pirate broadcasts to WSTV/ Steubenville, Ohio, 35 miles away.
APR 1943   Arturo Toscanini conducts the NBC Symphony with guest pianist Vladimir Horowitz in a special War Bond concert at Carnegie Hall.
APR 25 1943   Southern California stations leave the air at 8:34 p.m. for 55 minutes until unidentified planes are designated as friendly aircraft.
APR 25 1943   Campana closes its season’s sponsorship of First Nighter earlier than usual due to the wartime shortage of glycerin, a key ingredient in its Campana Balm skin lotion.  (See Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 25 1943   Movie and radio comedian Joe E. Brown returns from a three month South Pacific tour entertaining Armed Forces personnel with 277 separate shows - sometimes as many as seven a day.
APR 25 1944   Coca Cola’s Spotlight Bands, (aka The Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands), celebrates its 500th broadcast. (See Spotlight Bands.)
APR 25 1944  Reversing the trend of newspapers buying radio properties, the owner of WIRE/Indianapolis buys the Indianapolis Star and Muncie Star newspapers for $250,000.
APR 25 1945   All networks and shortwave facilities devote full coverage to the United Nations Conference in San Francisco.
APR 25 1945   President Truman’s speech to open the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco achieves a 41.2 Hooperating.  (See Radio's Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.)
APR 25 1945   A truck collides with a telephone pole carrying Blue, Mutual and NBC network lines near Denver, cutting their programs east of Colorado from 9:20 to 9:31 p.m.  The CBS Frank Sinatra Show, on a separate circuit, is left intact.
APR 25 1946   C.E. Hooper meets privately with the Cooperative Analysis of Broad-casting’s Board of Directors to discuss a merger.  (See Radio’s Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.)
APR 25 1946   The music supervisor of the Toledo, Ohio, public schools charges that musicians’ union President James Petrillo threatened to have him fired for refusing to help the union organize high school musicians. (See Petrillo!)
APR 25 1947  Mutual and Gillette announce a new six year agreement for exclusive radio rights to baseball’s All-Star and World Series games paying $1,25 Million to the players‘ pension fund..
APR 25 1947  ABC’s Breakfast Club opens a two week East Coast tour with a broadcast for an audience of 200 from a ferry boat cruising New York Bay. 
APR 25 1947   Cleveland stations WGAR, WHK, WTAM and WWJ assume emergency status when storms driven by gale force winds close down the city and surrounding areas.
APR 25 1947  C.E. Hooper reports that the nationwide telephone strike doesn’t affect its telephone coincidental surveys because 75% of the nation’s telephone systems don’t require operators for local calls.  (See Radio’s Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.)
APR 25 1948   CBS, Mutual and NBC use ABC’s method of recording and re-broadcasting each day’s programming to accommodate affiliates in cities remaining on Standard time while remainder of country observes Daylight Saving. 
APR 25 1948  ABC becomes the first network to convert from disc transcriptions to tape recording.
APR 25 1948   Carlton E. Morse introduces his sequel to I Love A Mystery, I Love Adventure, with Michael Raffeto and Barton Yarbrough for a 13-week run on ABC.  (See I Love A Mystery and I Love A Sequel.)
APR 25 1949   A Florida sheriff captures a fugitive he heard described on Mutual’s True Detective Mysteries and claims the program’s $1,000 reward - the third time a reward has been claimed for an arrest stemming from a description on the program. 
APR 25 1949   After 14 consecutive years on the Mutual weeknight schedule at 9:00 p.m., Gabriel Heatter’s popular newscast is moved to 7:30 p.m.  (See Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
APR 25 1950   Dr. Allen DuMont tells the FCC that his company has built and is ready to market color television sets with twelve-inch picture tubes employing the CBS color system for a retail price between $500 and $600.  (See Dr. DuMont’s Predictions.)
APR 25 1952   The four major networks announce increased schedules of summertime dance band remotes with CBS beginning its nightly broadcasts at 10:30 p.m.  and the others starting an hour later. (See Big Band Remotes.)
APR 25 1952   The McLendon family, owners of the Liberty Broadcasting System, purchase KLEE/Houston, change its calls to KLBS and move network headquarters to station.

APR 26 1923 The National Association of Broadcasters, (NAB), is founded, primarily to fight increased ASCAP demands for music rights. ​
APR 26 1931  Daytime 500 watt WAAF/Chicago, the city’s second oldest station, goes commercial. 
APR 26 1932   Ed Wynn, 46, begins his three year run as the Texaco Fire Chief on NBC.  (See Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 26 1936   The networks’ observation of Daylight Saving Time causes confusion in program broadcast times in hundreds of areas remaining on Standard Time.
APR 26 1936   Waters, Arkansas, renames itself Pine Ridge after the fictional locale of Blue’s Lum & Abner.
APR 26 1936   Lady Esther Cosmetics moves its Serenade featuring Wayne King's orchestra from CBS to Mutual.  (See The Waltz King,)
APR 26 1937   Karl Swenson, 29, debuts as Frank & Anne Hummert’s Lorenzo Jones, beginning an 18 year run for the weekday comedy serial on NBC.  (See Karl Swenson    and Soft Soap & Hard Sell.)
APR 26 1937   FCC Examiner Ralph Hyde rejects the CBS proposal to lease KSFO/San Francisco for five years forcing the Commission to make a long-delayed decision on the practice of leasing.
APR 26 1937  WFBR/Baltimore is forced off the air for three hours when high winds from a severe storm topple its transmitter tower. 
APR 26 1938   Six radio editors of New York City daily newspapers leave by train as guests of CBS to attend the grand opening of the network’s new West Coast headquarters in Hollywood.  
APR 26 1941  FCC orders all applications for broadcast properties from newspapers to be temporarily delayed for action,
APR 26 1942   Edward R. Murrow begins his weekly quarter hour Sunday evening wartime commentary from London at 6:00 p.m. on CBS.
APR 26 1942  NBC opens its new San Francisco studios with an eight day celebration beginning with an origination of Jack Benny’s program before an invited audience.  (See Sunday At Seven.)
APR 26 1944   NBC cuts the Mr. District Attorney broadcast for 21 seconds for what network censors called a “gruesome” sound effect of a woman clubbed with a cane, but show producers argue was an indictment against a fascist front organization.   (See Mr. District Attorney and Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 26 1944   Bob Hope and Edward R. Murrow with the 1943 Peabody Awards along with CBS programs Lux Radio Theater and Let’s Pretend.  (See Lux...Presents Hollywood! and Let's Pretend.)
APR 26 1945   Major Edward Bowes, 71, retires from radio but is retained by Chrysler Corporation as its radio consultant.   (See The 1944-45 Season.)
APR 26 1945   The major networks cancel 21 commercial programs to carry speeches from the United Nations Conference in San Francisco.
APR 26 1945   NBC’s H.V. Kaltenborn, CBS’s William L. Shirer and Blue’s Raymond Gram Swing participate in a special broadcast America’s Town Meeting of The Air on Blue from the U.N. Conference in San Francisco.  (See H.V. Kaltenborn and Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
APR 26 1945   DuMont unveils its latest television set capable of projecting an image up to four by six feet coupled with an FM radio and phonograph for $1,500.  (See Dr. DuMont's Predictions.)
APR 26 1947  American Tobacco’s Lucky Strike cigarettes moves Your Hit Parade to NBC after eleven years on CBS and trims the show from 45 to 30 minutes .  (See Smoke Gets In Your Ears and Saturday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 26 1947  CBS fills its Saturday night vacancy left by Your Hit Parade’s departure for 39 weeks with The Bill Goodwin Show, a sitcom starring the popular announcer as an insurance salesman. 
APR 26 1948   NBC bans any further ‘lend lease” sponsorships of its programs as practiced by American Tobacco’s “lease” of Kay Kyser to Colgate and Standard Brands “lease” of Fred Allen to Ford.  (See Kay Kyser and Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 26 1951   President Truman’s daughter Margaret, 27, makes her dramatic debut opposite James Stewart on NBC’s  Screen Directors’ Playhouse production of Jackpot.
APR 26 1952  Classic western drama Gunsmoke begins its ten season run on CBS starring veteran radio actor William Conrad.
APR 26 1952   Approximately 1,200 AM stations participate in a test of the Conelrad emergency alert and communications system staged by the U.S. Air Force and FCC. 
APR 26 1953  Hallmark Cards sponsors a two hour NBC-TV production of Hamlet starring Maurice Evans.

APR 27 1931  The U.S. Supreme Court upholds a lower court decision sustaining DeForest Radio Corporation’s patent suit against RCA.  
APR 27 1931  Most Wisconsin broadcasters gather in Madison to form the country’s first state broacasters’ association.
APR 27 1932   CBS obtains 95% control of 50,000 watt KMOX/St. Louis.
APR 27 1938   Gangbusters broadcasts the description of a wanted Oklahoma fugitive on CBS without checking to learn that the criminal had been caught and was in a Tulsa jail.  (See Saturday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 27 1939   License renewals for two Hawaiian stations, KGMB/Honolulu and KHBC/Hilo, are held up when it’s discovered that one of the owning company’s directors is a Japanese national.  
APR 27 1940   KSD/St Louis becomes the first newspaper owned station, (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), to order 24-hour AP news service since the press association revised its stand on accepting radio clients. 
APR 27 1941  CBS sustaining anthology 26 By (Norman) Corwin replaces The CBS Workshop on Sunday nights for 26 weeks.
APR 27 1941  NBC refuses to broadcast The Kids of The Week on its eleven station Pacific Coast Blue network because it's too close in format and sound to The Quiz Kids. (See The Quiz Kids.)
APR 27 1942   The Kate Smith Hour becomes the seventh program series rebroadcast by CBS via shortwave facilities WCBX and WCRC for the entertainment of troops overseas.  (See Kate’s Great Song and Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 27 1942  The U.S. Office of Facts & Figures begins its systematic weekly allocation of subjects for wartime radio spots beginning with the sales of war bonds, the collection of scrap that can be used for war production and the pooling automobile trips to save gas
APR 27 1944  CBS Vice President Paul Kesten proposes scrapping the current black and white television system after World War II and adopting his network’s incompatible color television system employing UHF technology.  
APR 27 1946   Mutual signs its 300th affiliate, WKRZ/Oil City, Pennsylvania.  (See Mutual Led The Way.)
APR 27 1946  Bob Hope, Dinah Shore, Roy Rogers and Spike Jones’ City Slickers head-line a half-hour benefit on Blue for the Shriners’ Hospitals for Children.
APR 27 1946   CBS-owned WCBW(TV)/New York City, resumes programming exactly two months after it left the air to change to its new frequency on Channel 2.
APR 27 1947  Groucho Marx and Bob Hope engage in an off-color, ad-lib exchange on the transcribed Walgreen Drug show that leads to Marx’s radio comeback.  (See The One, The Only…Groucho! and Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 27 1948   WNEW/New York City disc jockey Robert Q. Lewis moves to CBS and substitutes for Arthur Godfrey during Godfrey’s four-week vacation.
APR 27 1948  Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante perform the skit, Brooklyn U.S.A., on Hope’s NBC broadcast, instigating a $50,000 infringement lawsuit by writer Will Morrissey. 
APR 27 1948   KSTP-TV/Minneapolis-St. Paul brings television to the Twin Cities from its new 570-foot tower midway between the two cities.
APR 27 1949   Detroit television viewers of WJBK-TV on Channel 2 suddenly see a baseball game from Houston’s Channel 2, KLEE-TV,  explained as a “bounce” of its signal from the stratosphere. 
APR 27 1951  The Adventures of Sam Spade ends its five season, multi-network run  (See The Curse of Dashiell Hammett.)
APR 27 1951 NBC cuts 20 jobs in its radio network division with more layoffs planned and asks its television division to absorb as many of the fired employees as possible.
APR 27 1951 Edgar Bergen makes his television debut on CBS-TV with Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd and guests.
APR 27 1951 The former publisher of The San Diego Journal buys KFMB AM&TV/San Diego for $925,000.
APR 27 1952   ABC, CBS, Mutual and NBC all use recording and re-broadcasting tech-niques to accommodate affiliates not switching to Daylight Saving time.  Television stations in those areas are forced to schedule network programs one hour earlier.
APR 27 1952   Barbara Luddy and Olan Soule open First Nighter’s final season of original broadcasts on NBC, closing the show's multi-network run that began in 1930.  (See 
Friday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 27 1952   Red Skelton’s joke referring to President Truman as, “…the number one idiot,” results in flood of complaints to CBS-TV and sponsor Procter & Gamble.
APR 27 1952   Newsman John Daly replaces George Denny, Jr., as moderator of America’s Town Meeting on ABC-TV.  Denny continues to host the ABC Radio version as he has since 1935.

APR 28 1932  NBC lifts its ban prohibiting its owned stations from broadcasting tran-scribed programs or recorded music.
APR 28 1934  Good Humor Ice Cream buys Cartoonist of The Air, a weekly half-hour on WGN/Chicago, to teach cartooning art by radio.
APR 28 1935  AT&T celebrates its 50th anniversary with hour long variety show starring Grace Moore, Dizzy Dean, Ted Husing and Edwin C. Hill on 92 CBS stations.
APR 28 1936  Major Edwin Armstrong applies to the FCC for an experimental station in New York City to, “…embrace the radical new technology of Frequency Modulation.”
APR 28 1937  One Man’s Family creator Carlton E. Morse leaves on a twelve-day round trip flight to the Orient aboard Pan American’s China Clipper with reports of the trip planned for NBC from stops along the route.
APR 28 1939   All networks carry a 150 minute speech by Adolph Hitler from the German Reichstag beginning at 6:00 a.m. with running translations - followed by commentaries of network news analysts and government officials. 
APR 28 1938  WMCA/New York City carries the CBS description of the Penn Relays with Ted Husing, its first of the network’s sportscasts that CBS-owned WABC is unable to clear because of its New York baseball commitments.  
APR 28 1939   Thirty staff members of The Salt Lake City Tribune and Telegram apply for FCC 3rd Class licenses permitting them to operate mobile shortwave backpack units when on news assignments.
APR 28 1941  Because NBC prohibits transcribed programs, Information Please moves to Blue on the West Coast to allow transcriptions of its East Coast feed to be broadcast in prime time.   (See Information Please.)
APR 28 1941  Bulova’s WPEN/Philadelphia begins to clear its schedule of all foreign language programming as it increases power from 1,000 to 5,000 watts.
APR 28 1941  WOR’s conversion from Newark to New York City becomes complete with the station’s incorporation in New York State.
APR 28 1942  FDR’s Fireside Chat about the war effort broadcast on all networks and many independent stations registers a 61.8 Hooperating and 69.5 CAB rating.  (See Radio's Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.)
APR 28 1945  The AP flashes a false bulletin of Germany’s surrender at 7:56 p.m. which the networks report with disclaimers while awaiting confirmation.  President Truman denies the report later in the evening
APR 28 1947  Jack Benny and Phil Harris headline a benefit in Galveston for victims of the Texas City disaster. .
APR 28 1948  Tom Breneman, 48, host of ABC’s popular weekday Breakfast In Hollywood dies of a heart attack.  NBC’s Take It Or Leave It quizmaster, Garry Moore, replaces Breneman temporarily.  
APR 28 1950  Rudy Vallee’s transcribed disc jockey show on WOR/New York is syndi-cated to WGN/Chicago, WIP/Philadelphia, WMAL/Washington and CKLW/Windsor-Detroit.
APR 28 1950   C.E. Hooper cites Baltimore as the first major city where prime time television viewing has surpassed radio listening.  (See Radio's Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen.
APR 28 1953  Hastings Products Company introduces its FM converter for AM car radios.

APR 29 1932   Carleton E. Morse’s serial One Man’s Family begins as a Friday night half hour on the NBC West Coast, (Orange), Network.  (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 29 1934   WTIC/Hartford goes from a daytime station to full time with its 50,000 watts at 1040 kc. 
APR 29 1935  Gillette introduces its 13 week detective series on NBC, Lucky Smith, star-ring Heavyweight Champion Max Baer.  The Gillette deal includes radio rights to Baer’s June 13th title fight with James J. Braddock - which Baer lost.
APR 29 1938  The dozen soap opera writers working for Blackett-Sample-Hummert’s New York City office headed by Frank & Anne Hummert are asked to sign contracts giving away all rights to their scripts for $25 per episode.  (See Soft Soap & Hard Sell.)
APR 29 1940  The (Bell) Telephone Hour begins its 19 season string of Monday night concerts on NBC.
APR 29 1940   Carnation Contented Hour music director-conductor Josef Pasternack, 59, dies during the program’s rehearsal.
APR 29 1940   Elliott Roosevelt resumes his quarter-hour commentary three nights a week on WMCA/New York City, recording his programs in Fort Worth and sending the discs by air-mail to the station. 
APR 29 1942   NBC’s One Man’s Family celebrates its tenth anniversary on the air.  (See Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 29 1944   Major Andre Baruch returns from overseas and appointed to host Saturday afternoon’s Visiting Hour on CBS in which he tours veterans’ hospitals and interviews wounded servicemen.
APR 29 1944  Blue censors an aria from Madame Butterfly sung by Grace Moore on its Music All America Loves program because, “..it’s too Japanese.”
APR 29 1946   CBS plans entry into the weekday late morning competition by slotting Arthur Godfrey Time from 11:00 to 11:30 a.m. against ABC’s Breakfast In Hollywood and Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians on NBC.  (See Arthur Godfrey.)
APR 29 1946   Arthur Godfrey, host of weekday morning shows on WCBS/New York City, WTOP/Washington, D.C. and the CBS network plus the Broadway revue, Three To Make Ready, collapses and is hospitalized two hours before his new CBS 11:00 a.m. show begins.  (See Arthur Godfrey.)
APR 29 1947   Hour-long dramatic anthology Studio One opens its year long run on CBS Radio in the “impossible” Tuesday night time period against Bob Hope and Fibber McGee & Molly on NBC. 
APR 29 1946   ABC begins its 22 week delayed broadcast system to accommodate stations in areas not observing Daylight Saving Time - transcribing and rebroadcasting over 1,848 hours of programs.
APR 29 1948   ABC’s Theater Guild On The Air wins The Peabody Award for 1947 radio dramas. 
APR 29 1949   Writer Edward Kovaks is awarded $25,000 in his plagiarism suit against Mutual, Philip Morris and the Raymond Morgan agency for appropriating his concept for the Heart’s Desire program. 
APR 29 1951  Longtime classical music station WBMS/Boston switches its format to popular music and changes its call sign to WHEE.
APR 29 1951  AT&T line failure between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City interrupts ABC programs Stop The Music!, Walter Winchell’s Jergens Journal and Louella Parson’s Hollywood News. 
​APR 29 1952  Eddie Cantor begins a week’s tour of Red Cross shows at the Naval Auditorium in Boston with a pint of blood the cost of admission.  His tour then moves to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Buffalo and Chicago.  
APR 29 1953  ABC-TV unveils its 3-D television system in Los Angeles requiring a special receiver and polarized glasses.

APR 30 1929   Fred Allen makes his film debut in Paramount’s ten-minute comedy, The Installment Collector. (See Radio Goes To The Movies and Mr. Allen Meets Mr. Benny.)
APR 30 1932 CBS/New York City transmits The London Crime Club, a 15-minute Saturday night television drama with a cast of five actors who perform at no charge.
APR 30 1933   Will Rogers, 54, debuts as host of Gulf Headliners on Blue - the show moves to CBS the next season.  (See Network Jumpers.)
APR 30 1935  FCC approves Hearst Radio’s purchase of Los Angeles stations KTM and KELW.
APR 30 1936  U.S. District of Columbia court rules the FCC has complete authority to order hearings on applications before it.
APR 30 1936   Kraft Music Hall presents a special broadcast with singing host Bing Crosby accompanied by the Philadelphia Symphony conducted by Leopold Stokowski.  (See Thursday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 30 1938   CBS opens its West Coast headquarters, Columbia Square in Hollywood, with 19 hours of special programs topped with a lavish, two-hour network program featuring the 108-piece Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. 
APR 30 1939  Comic strip based Dick Tracy, a multi-network 15 minute weekday kids’ show since 1935, is given a 26-week run as a half-hour prime time show by Quaker Oats on the Blue Network.  (See Serials, Cereals & Premiums.)
APR 30 1939  KOIL/Omaha leaves the Blue Network to join CBS.  Meanwhile, NBC affiliate WOW agrees to set aside 9;00 to 10:00 p.m. nightly to carry Blue programs until another affiliate can be found.
APR 30 1939  The New York World’s Fair opens with an address by President Roosevelt broadcast by all networks and televised by NBC for viewing in the New York City area. 
APR 30 1939   RCA television receivers go on sale in New York City ranging in price from $199.50 to $600.
APR 30 1940   First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt begins a 15 minute commentary Tuesday and Thursday afternoons on NBC for Sweetheart Soap.
APR 30 1941  Trade paper Variety publishes a 20 page tribute to Jack  Benny’s tenth anniversary in radio.  (See Sunday At Seven and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.)
APR 30 1942   The audience attending Blue’s Town Meeting of The Air in Ft. Wayne, shouts down a former UP reporter and Gestapo prisoner in Berlin for his criticism of William Randolph Hearst and Rev. Charles Coughlin.  (See Father Coughlin.)
APR 30 1944   The American Broadcasting Station In Europe - ABSIE - begins operations in Great Britain broadcasting to resistance groups in Europe in English, French, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and German.
APR 30 1945   The networks carry the first news of the death of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
APR 30 1945   Queen For A Day debuts from New York on Mutual with host Dud Williamson.  The program moves to Hollywood in June when Jack Bailey becomes its host for the next twelve years.
APR 30 1945   Arthur Godfrey, 41, begins his 27 year run on the CBS weekday morning schedule. (See Arthur Godfrey.)
APR 30 1946   Paramount’s W6XYZ(TV)/Los Angeles becomes the first station to transmit from 5,700 foot Mount Wilson in the Angeles National Forest.  Its signals are reported seen on receivers 50 miles away.
APR 30 1946   AFM President James Petrillo says union musicians will not be permitted to play on television, “…until we learn whether it will destroy our employment in radio - or put men to work.” (See Petrillo!)
APR 30 1947  RCA demonstrates its Tri-Color television system projected to a seven by ten foot screen at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute.
APR 30 1948   CBS cancels its award winning American School of The Air concluding its 18 year run.
APR 30 1948  California congressman and former union official Harry Sheppard intro-duces a bill to prohibit ABC, CBS and NBC from owning stations and forbidding their affiliates from broadcasting any two consecutive hours of network programs. 
APR 30 1949   WENR/Chicago newscaster Paul Harvey, 30, debuts on ABC with a Saturday morning 15-minute commentary, The Pulse of The News.
APR 30 1950  All networks begin an annual record-rebroadcast system to accommodate time differences of stations in Daylight Saving and Standard Time areas - the only exceptions being hourly newscasts, ABC’s Stop The Music!  and Mutual’s Game of The Day.
APR 30 1951   NBC reports drawing 80,000 listener requests for a Railroad Hour souvenir booklet from a single announcement on the program’s April 16th broadcast.  (See The Railroad Hour.)
APR 30 1953 The Committee For Free Asia discontinues. its Radio Free Asia shortwave service of news and music beamed from San Francisco since October, 1951.
​
                                                                               GLOSSARY

AAAA = American Association of Advertising Agencies - ABC = American Broadcasting Company - ACLU = American Civil Liberties Union - AFL = American Federation of Labor - AFM = American Federation of Musicians  - AFRA = American Federation of Radio Artists - AFRS = Armed Forces Radio Service - AFTRA = American Federation of Radio & Television Artists - AGVA = American Guild of Variety Artists - ANA = Association of National Advertisers - ANPA = American Newspaper Publishers Association - AP = Associated Press  - ARB = American Research Bureau - ASCAP = American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers - BBC = British Broadcasting Corporation - BMB = Broadcast Measurement Bureau - BMI = Broadcast Music, Inc. - CAB = Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting - CBC = Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - CBS = Columbia Broadcasting System - CIO = Congress of Industrial Organizations - CST = Central Standard Time - CWA = Communications Workers of America - EST = Eastern Standard Time - FCC = Federal Communications Commission  - FRC = Federal Radio Commission - FTC = Federal Trade Commission -  IAPTA = International Allied Printing Trades Association - IATSE = International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees - IBEW = International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers - ILGW = International Ladies Garment Workers - INS = International News Service - IRS = Internal Revenue Service - LBS = Liberty Broadcasting System - MBS = Mutual Broadcasting System -  MCA = Music Corporation of America - MST = Mountain Standard Time - NAB = National Association of Broadcasters - NABET = National Association of Broadcast Employees & Technicians - NARBA = North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement - NARTB = National Association of Radio & Television Broadcasters, (fka NAB) - NBC = National Broadcasting Company - NCAA = National Collegiate Athletic Association - NLRB = National Labor Relations Board - PST = Pacific Standard Time - PTA = Parent Teachers Association - RCA = Radio Corporation of America - RMA = Radio Manufacturers Association - SAG = Screen Actors Guild - SESAC = Society of European Stage Authors & Composers - SPCA = Society for The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals - TVA = The Television Authority (union) - UAW = United Auto Workers - UP = United Press