It was actually the late fall of 1926, just 85 years back at this time. The world of radio, the first “WWW” — for what RCA then called its “World Wide Wireless” — was in chaos. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s attempt to control it was struck down by a Fed Court. The result of this was the government could not forestall competing radio stations from broadcasting simultaneously on the same frequency.
Taking the lead in a Congressional rescue was its resident authority on broadcasting, Lewiston’s Wallace White, Jr. By early 1927, Congress passed a law based mostly on one White had been proposing since 1923, one that set up a communications commission that has been the magna carta for broadcast regulation ever since then.
White was a Lewiston attorney when first elected to Congress in 1916. By the early 1920s, White, spurred by the advent of Auburn’s WMB, one of the first approved list of radio stations in the country, became the nation’s leading advocate of legislation to meaningfully control the new medium. The capstone of these efforts came in late 1926 and early 1927 in the aftermath of the federal court decision that struck down Hoover’s efforts to interrupt. By February 1927, White’s bill, co-sponsored by Washington Senator Clarence Dill, became law.
The communications system for which Lewiston’s White provided the foundation some 85 years back has seen a considerable number of distinguished figures carrying out the inheritance. Here’s a look at only a few of them.
Denny Shute : The name of this pathfinder in both radio and early TV in Maine has most recently been invoked in this fall’s debate over same-day voting. Shute, as GOP Senate chair of the legislature’s Election Laws Panel, sponsored the original measure for same-day voting in 1973. (Shute would’ve been shocked by this year’s powerful interest in the law. In 1973, neither party discussed its enactment. This was due to Court viewpoints that appeared to require it.)
More eventful to Shute nevertheless , than his sponsorship of same-day voting, would be his career in Maine broadcasting. This included co-founding and handling Lewiston’s WLAM in the 1940s and becoming the morning host on Portland’s first TV station, WPMT, in 1953.
By the mid-1950s, Shute was off to the first of a new series of radio exclusive ventures. This included putting WKTQ online in South Paris in 1955. Shute did the same in 1959 for WKTJ in Farmington, a community which sent Shute to Augusta for three lawmaking terms in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his first term in the Maine House, Shute became the GOP’s nominee for Congress in 1968. As Head honcho of the Secretary of State’s Election Division in 1969-’70, Shute was an early fan of voting machines, which had only been legalized in Maine in 1967.
Shute returned to the legislature as a state senator for 4 years beginning in 1971. To Shute, the high spot of his service there had been not same-day voting, but sponsoring of legislation that led on to the state buying some 37,000 acres for the Bigelow Mountain preserve.
Shocked by the unexpected death at age thirty of his only child, Gary, Shute made religion the focus of his later years. He became an ordained minister in the early l980s in Florida where he lived till his death there in 1997.
Frank Fixaris : The day following the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, this icon of Maine broadcasting was reciting from memory every sweries champion and runner up for the prior 50 years. Nevertheless it was not just his memory but also his amiable on-air demeanor that made Fixaris one of the most influential on-air broadcasters for nearly 5 decades beginning in 1956. He was, as Portland’s Channel 6 sports anchor observed the day of Fixaris’s death in 2006 “the best sports anchor this town will ever have.”
Though Fixaris was sports anchor at Channel thirteen from 1965 to 1995, his career was book-ended by a range of on-air positions in Portland and Lewiston radio, his last 5 years as co-host of WJAB’s “Morning Jab” sports talk show. Throughout his career, Fixaris was a major booster of both highschool and pro sports groups alike. (A similar role, that of a play-by-play broadcaster, was in the 1940s and ’50 ‘ in Bangor played by John McKernan, pop of the future governor.) Off camera, Fixaris was a founder and shop steward for the announcer’s union at Channel thirteen.
Bob Anderson : Elections in Portland this fall has brought new attention to the position of its city’s mayor. Though Portland has had many of them, it’s only had one Duke. So well-liked was Bob Anderson it was on his head — during his reign as morning host at WMGX — that such a crown appeared, the results of resolutions by both the Maine lawmaking council and Portland Mayor Cheryl Leeman in the late 1980s.
Beginning in 1963 till his dying in 2003 — suffering an apparent coronary while broadcasting on air — Anderson was one of the most important draws of Southern Maine radio, helping also to host concert appearances for some of the nation’s leading rock performers. At one top in his career in the late 1960s he helped catapult WLOB, then a Top forty music station, into position as one of the highest rated in the country, capturing a 62 percent local share and just about a hundred % of all Portland area teens.
Notwithstanding carrying the huge stick “Duke” title, Anderson spoke softly. Personally, like Fixaris, Anderson was both relaxed and unpretentious, this in a business not always renowned for humility. It’s one of the reasons his career endured so long, even into a broadcasting world challenged by diverse new media choices.
Shute, Fixaris, and Anderson are in no way the sole meriting honorees in a Maine TV or Radio Hall of Fame. On the other side of the mic tower many who also played a vital back stage role. Venturesome Television reports photographers Dick Sturtevant of Channel 6, Gene Willman and Bill Goulet of Channel thirteen quickly are evoked. So too do such early risk-taking investors as Horace Hildreth, founding figure behind Channels 5 and eight, Channel 13′s Guy Gannett, and Channel 6′s Henry Rines.
Wallace White would not have known a lot of them. He’d still nonetheless , be attracted by the role each of them played in navigating the trail he initially helped to blaze, writes tagza.com.
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