We recently had occasion to visit the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. They have a small historical display in the lobby commemorating the institution’s venerable history. One particular exhibit caught our eye, with a caption reading: “In 1914, doctors were paged by telegraph tickers throughout the building. They took the call by picking up conveniently located telephones.”

The telephone was safely tucked behind plexiglass, but the telegraph sounder (the plaque’s “ticker”) sat right out in the open—practically begging to be manually clicked. Which, of course, we did.  Nobody answered our CQ, but perhaps that’s because we were using International Morse and not American Morse.

Mayo was an early adopter of communication technology, integrating pneumatic tubes, central switchboards, and telegraph paging when they opened their state-of-the-art 1914 building. Eight years later, the June 1922 issue of The Modern Hospital described the system as an established method of hospital paging:

One method is to install sounders, similar to telegraph sounders, at various points throughout the hospital. These are actuated from a telegraph key or code calling device located at the telephone operator’s desk. When a telephone call is received for a doctor the operator sounds the call on the system and the doctor calls the telephone operator from the nearest telephone. This system embodies one feature sometimes considered objectionable. The signal is given by ticks or dots, as in the Morse code, and its success depends entirely upon the doctor’s being able to distinguish his particular call.

Of course, we don’t see this as a shortcoming. If a physician cannot distinguish their own Morse code call sign, we’re not entirely sure we’d want them treating us in the first place.

May 22, 2026, was a sad day in radio broadcasting history, as the CBS Radio Network went dark  after 99 years.  The final top-of-the hour newscast was at 11:00 PM Eastern.  For most of the day, it was business as usual at the network, as it carried national and world news.  The last broadcast was a farewell message.  You can listen to the 11:00 newscast at this link,  The one-minute bulletin at the bottom of the hour was the very final broadcast, and is at this link.

The network produced this retrospective, which aired during the network’s final week:

One of the network’s oldest affiliates was WCCO in Minneapolis-St. Paul. For a time, it was owned by the network. The owned and operated stations were spun off as Audacy Inc., and those stations switched to the ABC network.  (ABC is a relative newcomer, dating back to 1945 when it was spun off from the NBC Blue Network.)

Coincidentally, one of the long-term WCCO staff members, Denny Long, who had served as announcer (and originally, music director) of WCCO, is retiring at the end of the month after 55 years at the station. As far as I know, he is the last employee of the station from the years when I grew up, when the station was a constant soundtrack for most homes in Minnesota. He did a remote broadcast today, and it was only fitting that this website, devoted as it is to radio history, paid him a visit and wished him the best. He is the handsome gentleman at the left, and you can hear some of his soundchecks covering over half a century at this link.

If you want to make the CBS sounder your phone’s ring tone, here it is:

This cyclist appeared seventy years ago on the cover of the February 1956 issue of Radio Electronics. She is described by the magazine as a “typical Southern university coed,” and she is listening to a favorite program on her Darb Holiday radio, a four-tube portable that could be powered three ways. With separate power packs, it could operate from AC power, 6 volts DC, or dry cells. It featured pushbutton tuning of three preset stations, with no variable tuning.

Another installation by another cyclist is shown at right. The set was manufactured by S.C. Ryan. Co., 1316 Yale Place, Minneapolis.

Armistice Day Blizzard, Excelsior Blvd., West of Minneapolis. Minn. Historical Society photo, NOAA.

Today marks the 85th anniversary of the Armistice Day Blizzard of November 11, 1940. Here are some of our previous posts:

• Broadcasters and the Armistice Day Blizzard
• Amateur Radio and the Armistice Day Blizzard

This young woman is now close to 90 years old, but she is shown here, according to the calendar on the wall, in September 1937, in her living room in a farm house near Northome, in Koochiching County in far northern Minnesota. The house looks humble, and I’m not sure exactly what’s going on there in the corner. They don’t have electricity, as evidence by the kerosene lamps, but they do have a radio, and it’s a rather impressive radio.

The radio is a Zenith model 4-B-132. You can see a beautifully preserved example at the Radio Attic Archives.  (In fact, if you want to buy that radio, it’s for sale at the Radio Attic.)  Most farm sets used two batteries–a low-voltage battery to run the filaments, and a B battery of something like 90 volts.  But with this set, Zenith used a different tactic, which probably saved the owner a lot of money over the years.  It used a single 6-volt battery, and, like a car radio, it included a vibrator power supply to generate the B+.  When the battery got low, it could be recharged with the car or tractor.

Now that we know what the radio is, we want to know what they were listening to.  And if we do a close-up of the dial, we can see that it’s tuned between 1400 and 1500 kHz.  That makes it easy.  The only logical suspect is KSTP, which was then (prior to the NARBA switch, when they moved to 1500) on 1460 kHz, with 25,000 watts day and 10,000 watts night.  At 206 miles away, the station would come in loud and clear at night, and probably during most of the day as well.  It was a good receiver, there was little in the way of electrical interference, and there were few other stations close to it on the dial.  In fact, a 1937 promotional brochure from the station claims the county’s 2400 radio homes (out of a total of 3345 families) as being part of the station’s secondary service area, along with counties in Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas.

The photo was taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Russell Lee, and is available at the Library of Congress website.  Another picture featuring the family and the radio can be found at this link.

Some people look at a picture like this one and feel sorry.  There was a depression going on, and there’s a reason why there aren’t a lot of farms these days in Koochiching County.  Life was undoubtedly tough.  But despite their otherwise austere living conditions, they owned a $40 radio ($854 in 2023 dollars) which undoubtedly brought much pleasure during the long winter nights.  And by zooming in on the left side of the picture, we see that this girl, along with her brother and sister, also owned this pinball machine.  We suspect this girl had a happy childhood, and a happy life.

Unfortunately, while many of these old Farm Security Administration photos include a caption with the names of the people, this one does not.  All we know is that this family lived on a farm near Northome, probably in the house shown below, which was the next negative on the roll.

It’s a longshot, but if you know the people in the picture, or you are a member of this family, we would love to hear from you at clem.law@usa.net.

A hundred years ago, radio was rapidly becoming a familiar part of the home, whether it was in the city or on the farm. The cover of the January 1923 issue of Wireless Age, above, shows an idyllic scene of radio by the hearth.

But radio was more than just a pastime for the urban upper class.  It was rapidly making it’s way to the farm, and it was bringing rural people closer to the city.  The magazine contained a feature describing how radio was rapidly becoming a necessity on the farm.  Farmers could receive up-to-the-minute market reports, and the main complaint from farmers was that they were being read too fast to write down.  And weather warnings could make a huge difference in the safety and profitability of farm life.  But in addition to the purely practical, radio was changing rural life by allowing residents to hear news, concerts, and lectures.  Shown here are Mrs. Albertina Schockweiler, her daughter and grandson, as the pull in a program on their farm in Osseo, Minnesota.

Seventy-five years ago today, the June 23, 1947, issue of Broadcasting magazine carried this ad from WCCO radio in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The gentleman shown speaking at the microphone is Rep. George I. Clem (no relation to the author of this website), who served one term in the Minnesota Legislature representing the 56th District, which at that time was the Pine City area, about 100 miles north of the Twin Cities.

Inexplicably, the ad copy states that Clem drove to Minneapolis to assume his duties in the Legislature, which seems unlikely, seeing that the state capital is St. Paul. But in any event, while carrying out his legislative duties by day, by night he attended WCCO’s “Radio School for Legislators,” in which station personnel taught legislators the nuts and bolts of communicating effectively by radio. The faculty included the station’s educational director E.W. Ziebarth, program director Gene Wilkey, news director Sig Mickelson, and farm services director Larry Haeg.

Rep. Clem reported that his attendance at when addressing the Pine City Commercial Club, he knew that his attendance at the school made the difference, and also made it possible for him to keep the people of his district better informed.  He served a single term in the Legislature, and died in 1988 at the age of 78.