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| KFSG LA Regulator Trouble
Pioneer L. A. Christian Station Stops Broadcasting After 79 Years
by Jim Hilliker
AIMEE'S TROUBLE WITH THE RADIO REGULATORS
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KFSG Towers 1920s
© Jim Hilliker Collection
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Besides
the thousands of radio fans who tuned into the KFSG broadcasts each
week, the new station was also drawing the attention of the regional
Radio Inspector from the Department of Commerce 6th Radio
District in San Francisco, Col. J.F. Dillon. One legend that has
been passed down over the years is that KFSG was taken off the air or
at least received a stern warning, because the station either used too
much power, drifted off its assigned frequency or changed frequencies
without permission. These violations of the radio regulations
caused interference around Los Angeles to those trying to hear other
local stations. In reality, the station was never taken off the
air. But, some warning letters were sent to KFSG in 1924, shortly
after the station's debut. In a letter dated February 21, 1924,
J.F. Dillon told Aimee in his opening sentence, "This office is daily
receiving complaints regarding interference caused by the operation of
K.F.S.G. with the reception from K.F.I. and K.H.J. and distant
stations." (Source: Letters, telegrams and other items in the old
Department of Commerce KFSG files, copied for me by the National
Archives). Dillon's solution was to have KFSG go on the air only three
times a week. He felt part of the problem may have been the early
radios of the day, which had trouble filtering out or separating other
strong local stations, from the one you may have been trying to
hear!
KFSG
was then assigned to 1080 on the AM dial and on 1090 from April 1925 to
February 1928. KFI was at 640, KHJ was at 740 and KNX was on
approximately 833 kilocycles, and 890 by the end of 1924. If
Aimee was allowing KFSG to use other frequencies other than the one she
was assigned to broadcast on, she was not alone. There were
plenty of newspaper stories in the mid-1920s, especially in larger
eastern cities, about radio stations moving up or down the dial to
escape interference from other stations. Whatever took place
possibly kept happening between 1924 and sometime in 1925. There
must have been some warning from the Department of Commerce that KFSG
could lose its license if the station continued breaking the rules, but
we have no date of such an incident.
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Aimee Semple McPherson ca 1924
© Jim Hilliker Collection
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In
response to these warnings from the radio regulators, at some point, a
frustrated Mrs. McPherson fired off an angry telegram to Secretary of
Commerce Herbert Hoover. He was in charge of regulating radio
broadcasting at the time, before he was elected President of the United
States in November of 1928. The telegram to Hoover from Sister
Aimee reportedly said:
PLEASE ORDER YOUR MINIONS OF SATAN TO LEAVE MY STATION ALONE. YOU CANNOT
EXPECT THE ALMIGHTY TO ABIDE BY YOUR WAVELENGTH NONSENSE. WHEN I OFFER
MY PRAYERS TO HIM, I MUST FIT IN WITH HIS WAVE RECEPTION. OPEN THIS
STATION AT ONCE!
I wrote to Aimee's son, Dr. Rolf K. McPherson about this in 1994.
He tried to tell me the incident between his mother and Herbert Hoover
regarding the telegram never took place! In his letter responding
to me, Rolf said, "This is one of the many rumors which have persisted
through the years. Mother never attempted to defy the law, but
always endeavored to comply with the rules. The statements you
mention certainly were not typical of her way of doing things. I
might explain that the equipment in those days was not always adequate,
but the situations were cleared as quickly as they could be."
However,
history seems to prove that such an incident more than likely took
place. Matthew T. Schaefer, Archivist at the Hoover Presidential
Library, responded to my inquiry about this much-reported incident of
early radio history. He wrote the following to me: "Trying to
separate the history from the legend of the McPherson telegram to
Hoover is difficult. All who have written on Hoover, the
Department of Commerce and radio mention the McPherson telegram."
These sources include two biographies on Herbert Hoover and a
dissertation, and they all cite volume II of Hoover's memoirs,
published in 1952 as their source. Schaefer continues, "In the
memoirs, Hoover writes as if he has the McPherson telegram in
hand. Unfortunately (for today's historians), the original
McPherson telegram is not extant. This leaves as the earliest
source, a radio address Hoover gave on November 11, 1945 on the 25th
anniversary of radio. In this speech, Hoover tells the story
about KFSG violating the radio regulations, then says 'I can give you
approximately the telegram I received from her,' then proceeds with the
words of Aimee Semple McPherson."
In the radio speech from 1945, the words Hoover spoke are nearly the same
as in his memoirs, except for the last three sentences of the telegram,
which he read this way:
WHEN I OFFER UP MY PRAYERS, I MUST FIT INTO THE RECEIVING SETS IN
HEAVEN. YOU DON'T KNOW THEIR WAVELENGTHS AND NEITHER DO I.
STOP THIS INTERFERENCE WITH ME AT ONCE.
The last sentence seems to be Sister Aimee's way of telling Hoover and the
radio inspectors from the Department of Commerce to stop sending her
letters about KFSG straying off-frequency and interfering with other
stations. Hoover reportedly told her that if she stuck to the
rules, she could keep her license for KFSG and stay on the air.
Another version of the story told in some radio history books says
Hoover convinced McPherson to hire a competent broadcasting engineer to
keep the KFSG transmitter within its assigned power and
frequency. The reason this story is inaccurate is she already had
a capable engineer for KFSG from the start, Kenneth Ormiston.
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KFSG Letterhead
© Jim Hilliker Collection
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Mr.
Schaefer wrapped up his email letter to me, talking about how the above
statements by A.S.M. vary from Hoover's memoirs: "Either the 1945 radio
address or the 1952 memoir permitted some slippage between the original
telegram and the story as told by Herbert Hoover. Given Hoover's
careful attention to documenting history, I am inclined to believe the
story is true (even without the original telegram as the irrefutable
evidence)."
As
for the exact date or year this incident took place, the radio history
books and internet articles on McPherson say it was anywhere from 1925
to 1927. But the letters I have from the Department of Commerce
to KFSG also indicate that this may have taken place as early as
1924. Again, I'll quote Matthew Schaefer on this topic: "I
revisited the sources I consulted last time and some additional
sources, and could find nothing to narrow down the date of the
McPherson telegram to Hoover. Hoover's memoirs discuss it amidst
the several radio conferences held between 1922 and the eventual
passage of radio regulation by Congress in February 1927. Since
ASM broadcast throughout those years (at least from 1924 onward), and
the telegram is lost to history, there is no way to further narrow the
date." This means that those who previously wrote about the
telegram incident were also guessing as to what year it occurred.
One more possibility is this incident could have taken place in 1926 or
1927, after Kenneth Ormiston left KFSG. His last day there was
December 31, 1925, after only two years on the job, for reasons I'll
give you later in this article. In that case, if it happened in
1926 or 1927, two to three years after KFSG received its first warning
letters about causing interference, the blame would be placed not on
Ormiston, but on the new KFSG chief engineer who replaced him.
But it could have been Aimee McPherson, as owner of KFSG. giving the
orders on how to run the station.
Not
long after McPherson's skirmish with the Department of Commerce over
radio broadcasting regulations, a Federal Court in Chicago ruled in
1926 against Herbert Hoover, regarding what radio stations could and
couldn't do under the Radio Act of 1912. The judge's ruling
determined that Hoover and the Department of Commerce had to issue
radio station licenses to all who asked for them, he had no right to
restrict what frequencies radio stations used, their hours of operation
or their transmitter power. Because of this court ruling, between
July of 1926 and January of 1927, broadcasting became a
"free-for-all." The number of radio stations increased to over
700 and many jumped around the dial to any frequency they chose and
used higher output power than they were assigned. The chaotic
situation finally ended in February 1927, when Congress passed the
Radio Act of 1927, which formed the Federal Radio Commission. The
FRC became today's FCC in 1934.
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KFSG QSL card ca 1940
© Jim Hilliker Collection
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An
article in the November 3, 1926 issue of the New Republic
quoted from columns Aimee wrote for newspapers. There's nothing
about radio, but her writing style was very similar to her 'minions of
Satan' message to Hoover. Other magazine articles about her in
the '20s mentioned her amazing ability to use radio for fundraising and
to inspire listeners to donate or even join her church. Since
KFSG was a non-profit station for many years, this was no doubt helpful
in getting the money needed to keep KFSG equipment running, pay
electric bills and other costs related to the station and Angelus
Temple.
It's
also interesting to note that the story about the telegram McPherson
sent to Hoover is never mentioned once in any of the biographies or
other books about Aimee Semple McPherson written in the past 40 or so
years. The story only seems to be come up in Hoover's memoirs and
then was picked up and repeated in numerous books on early radio
history or history of religious broadcasting, and in some college
textbooks on the early development of radio and TV broadcasting.
Even a pamphlet KFI radio printed in 1972 on the occasion of that
station's 50th anniversary told the story of the KFSG
interference to KFI and the telegram, so it's more than likely
true. I haven't searched through microfilm files from 1924 and
1925 of the L.A. newspapers to see if any of this was reported by the
press at the time, or whether the letters between Aimee, J.F. Dillon
and Herbert Hoover were private matters that the public didn't know
about until much later. Whatever the truth is about this story, it is a
fascinating chapter in the KFSG story.
AIMEE'S FRIENDSHIP WITH THE KFSG ENGINEER CAUSES SCANDAL
Since
KFSG averted further trouble with the government and was able to stay
on the air by following the radio regulations of the day, I am trying
to determine the following: How could such a reliable and serious
radio engineer as Kenneth G. Ormiston allow KFSG to possibly transmit
on various frequencies it was not assigned to use or transmit with too
much power? Without a time machine, it's nearly impossible to get
to the truth of the matter today. So, I'll try to make some
educated guesses on the topic.
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Aimee Semple McPherson and Kenneth G. Ormiston
© Jim Hilliker Collection
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During
the years 1924 and 1925, KFSG became well established as a reliable
broadcaster and popular station in Los Angeles and in distant
states. A couple of books on McPherson's life seem to imply or
tell the reader that Ken Omiston and Aimee had a very close working
relationship, before, during and after all of her KFSG broadcasts, six
days a week. So, quite possibly, his friendship with her may have
caused him to not keep an eye on the transmitter meters when he should
have. But that's speculation on my part, all these years later.
Another explanation that makes sense to me is that broadcasting
transmitters in those days tended to drift off-frequency. In
fact, crystal-controlled radio transmitters to keep all stations locked
on their assigned broadcast frequencies didn't appear until 1926 and
later. So, it's very likely that KFSG may have wandered
off-frequency every so often in those early years on the air, as other
stations did too, due to the technology of the day. This caused
heterodynes or whistles and squeals to be heard by listeners as the
signal edged close to another station on the dial. But for
Ormiston to deliberately re-tune the transmitter to various wavelengths
every day instead of the usual KFSG frequency is difficult for me to
believe.
Another
book on the evangelist's life points out that during Angelus Temple
church services, the KFSG engineer, who was an agnostic, would talk to
Aimee via a telephone intercom from the KFSG control room on the
Temple's upper floor and her pulpit chair. He would frequently
crack jokes about the church services, the choir, the band, and how the
broadcast was going, which made Aimee get the giggles.
Apparently, due to the excellent acoustics, their private chats could
sometimes be heard in the second balcony, without either of them
knowing about it. The gossip about the two of them being more
than friends began to spread quickly.
Aimee
knew Mrs. Ormiston and dined with the Ormistons at their home and in
public, but the gossip continued. Aimee's mother, Minnie Kennedy, put
pressure on Aimee to fire Ormiston due to the gossip. But she
refused, and he stayed on as the KFSG chief engineer and producer of
all the KFSG broadcasts until December of 1925. He left his job
at KFSG on the last day of 1925, as the gossip put an unbearable strain
on his marriage. In January of 1926 while Aimee Semple McPherson
was on an overseas trip, Mrs. Ormiston told Aimee's mother she was
going to sue for divorce, naming Aimee as a correspondent. Ruth
Ormiston soon changed her mind, but did separate from her husband by
taking their son to live with her parents in Australia, after reporting
Ormiston missing on January 22, 1926.
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Jim Hilliker
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Jim Hilliker is a radio historian and former broadcaster. He has
written a number of articles on the history of broadcasting in Los
Angeles. He currently lives in Monterey, California.
This article is © 2003 - Jim Hilliker
Interested in reading more about LA Radio personalities? Buy Don Barrett's Los Angeles Radio People available through The Emporium Radio Heritage Store © and support the Radio Heritage Foundation.
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