Evening star., 1937-02-07

waters were still rushing to their
crest and engulfng everything IN
their path.
IF YOU tuned to 800 kilocycles and
receiving conditions were favor
able, you heard the 50,000-watt WHAS,
of the Louisville er-Journal, ex-
cept for the day or so its power supply
failed and it was forced to remain
silent on its own wave length. If you
tuned to the 650-kilocycle channel,
you heard the 50,000-watt WSM,
Nashville. which itself was not in the
danger zone but which from the mo-
ment the flood menace appeared
hooked up" with its sister station in
Louisville and stayed on the air day
and night to carry anything and
everything the Louisville station want
ed broadcast.
You could hear official directions
and reports broadcast over these sta
tions simultaneously thus doubling
the likelihood of reception) to police,
military, Red Cross and other rescue
and relief workers. You could hear
Mayor Neville Miller of Louisville and
his staff giving orders to their aides
or telling the Nation what Louisville
and its neighboring communities
needed from the outside world. You
could hear calls for missing persons,
orders to patrols to rush to SUCH
and-such an address to rescue the
stranded or bring them food and
clothing and medicine.
You could even hear instructions
to police and soldiers to shoot looters
on sight as official reports were broad
cast of such ghoulish activities at
certain places.
You heard nothing over these two
channels of the ether but urgent flood
orders or messages for whole week
no trif1ing entertainment, no jazz
orchestras, no piffling commercial
blurbS.
WHEN the story of the great 1887
flood is written, a chapter will
certainly be devoted to the work of the
broadcasters and to the amateur,
police and military radio services for
their performances during the crisis.
One of the high lights of that chapter
and the tradition it will set for the
youthful radio industry will be the
story of the devotion to human needs
and the aid to its beleaguered fellow
broadcaster which the big Nashville
station was able to furnish because it
can be heard quite clearly in and
around Louisville by reason Of its
clear channel and its high power,
though located some 100 air miles
away.
This is not to belittle the work of
other broadcasting stations during
the flood. In Louisville, a smaller
station, WAVE, kept on the air just
as many hours as its bigger sister,
was quite as important to the local
rescue and relief work. fed just as
many reports to the network, and at
times hooked up" in much the same
way as WHAS-WSM with the giant
500,000-watt WLW in Cincinnati to
get its messages farther and wider to
the outside world.
But WAVE itself, because it is a
regional channel in the flood area
could not be tuned in from very far
outside their immediate areas and
thus were forced to render largely a
local service. That they did magnif-
icent work is acknowledged on all
hands, and in many instances the
radio authorities in Washington had
to order other stations of their wave
lengths to avoid interfering with their
emergency broadcasts.
These smaller stations were the
local captains in the quickly mustered
army Of radio, which needed generals
and found them In powerful clear
channel outlets such as WHAS, WSM
and WLW.
IT WAS more than a mere Damon
= and Pythias act which WSM staged
when, the moment the danger to
Louisville became apparent, it Of
fered its facilities to WHAS Though
the two stations are members of rival
netWorks) and stayed on the air with
WHAS broadcasts until after the
Ohio's crest had been reached and
had eased the rescue job. Thus Louis
vile, except for the hours that its
power supply was lost, was on the air
constantly and the rescue workers
had an outlet at all times for their
orders.
WSM swept aside all other programs
for Louisville's relays, which were
carried to it over a telephone wire
momentarily expected to go out Of
commission and thence rebroadcast
so that Louisville workers could hear
one or the other station at all times
That the outside world might also
tune in WSM was secondary to the
main purpose-that of reaching the
rescuers in the boats and on auto
patrols, the people in their beleaguered
homes and the outside world from
which supplies and assistance were
constantly called for.
When Louisville's power supply
failed, ordinary electric radio sets were
of course useless, but automobile radios
were hastily torn out with their bat
teries so that emergency broadcasts
could be heard. If WHAS and WAVE
could not be heard, it was a poor
radio indeed which could not depend
upon WSM for local reception.
To1ox,seio~, Roe,,1<e