Reminiscing with a Radio

Thank you to Ray Robinson, Jeff  White, and Dr Adrian M Peterson, for the Wavescan program - another excellent nostalgic story in radio history.

Reminiscing with a Radio: Radio to the Rescue – Lost in China!

Author: Dr.  Adrian M.  Peterson 

Jeff:  A few weeks ago in the middle of April, we presented a feature on some of the shortwave stations that were pressed into service for broadcasting across the Pacific from California during World War II.  As a follow-up to that today, we have a story that was written up by our editor-in-chief Dr. Adrian M. Petersen, about the way one of those stations was used to broadcast an emergency message, in June 1939.  From Los Angeles, Ray Robinson has the story.

Ray: Thanks, Jeff.  These days we are quite familiar with the multitudinous forms of electronic communication that are available for the purpose of passing on information in emergency situations.  Hand held walkie-talkies can be used for directing search and rescue teams, the telephone can summon help with the dialing of emergency numbers, the “Amber Alert” system in the United States alerts motorists along busy highways to keep a look out for wanted cars with a kidnapped passenger, radio and TV stations can provide important emergency information to the public very efficiently, and of course there are many ways of using the Internet to pass on information quickly.  All of these modern communication procedures might be described as “Lassie to the Rescue”, electronically.  However, as we are aware, it has not always been this way.  Back more than three quarters of a century ago, there was just the telephone and wireless and these were the only forms of electronic communication that could be utilized for quick emergency contact.

During the tumultuous events in Asia in the era immediately prior to the Pacific War, a famous Chinese dramatic soprano, Louise Kwan, was married to a professor at Nanking University in China.  He was granted the opportunity of postgraduate studies at Cornell University in New York State, and in order to make the journey, Louise Kwan left her infant son in the temporary care of her own parents.  However, while the university couple were in the United States, Nanking University, along with many other enterprises in coastal China, packed up and trekked inland ahead of an anticipated Japanese invasion.  While still in the United States, Louise made many attempts to find the location to which her parents and her infant son had relocated, but without success.

Finally, Louise and her husband decided that it was time to return to their homeland and they began their homeward-bound journey by traveling across the continental United States.  Arrangements had been made by the Reverend Stanley Hunter of St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California for Louise to stop off in San Francisco and make a live broadcast from the new shortwave station KGEI.  This was the only shortwave station in the United States at the time that was heard with a reliable signal in China.  During this era, it was on the air for the early morning broadcast with 20 kW on 9530 kHz in the 31 metre band.

This new shortwave station in California was established by the General Electric Company, which had previously placed stations WGEA & WGEO on the air in Schenectady, New York.  The original plans for their California-based station, as announced in 1937, called for two shortwave transmitters at 20 kW each, though the station was launched two years later with just one unit.  The first test broadcast from this new station, under the experimental callsign W6XBE, went on the air on February 18, 1939 on 15330 kHz.  This initial broadcast, on the opening day of the “Golden Gate International Exposition”, was heard in several areas of the United States and also in Australia.  Initially, this station verified by letter, though at least one listener-prepared card verifying the first test broadcast was signed and posted in San Francisco.

Thus it was that Louise Kwan stood before the open microphone in the Treasure Island studios of station KGEI in the early morning of June 21, 1939, and she sang songs in Chinese that she had sung on previous occasions, and in much better times, to her infant son.  She then made an urgent appeal for anybody in China who knew the whereabouts of her parents and her son to pass the information along.  Three days later, she and her husband boarded an ocean-going steamer for the long, and potentially treacherous, journey across the Pacific to mainland China.

At the time when Louise Kwan made her emotional broadcast, the General Electric station was still operating under the original experimental callsign, W6XBE, though a few weeks later, on September 1, the call was officially regularized to the more familiar KGEI.  The studios in which Louise made her broadcast were located in the “Palace of Electricity” on man-made Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay during the 1939 “Golden Gate International Exposition”.  The antenna was strung across two poles located at the harbor entrance to Treasure Island.  During the Pacific War, station KGEI was taken over by the United States ‘Office of War Information’ (or, OWI) as the first west coast station for the Voice of America.

photo via Ray Robinson

After some time of heart-wrenching searching in China, Louise and her husband did finally manage to locate their missing son, though Louise also discovered that her parents had died during the arduous trek inland.  The information was passed on to station KGEI in California via the Presbyterian church pastor, and listeners throughout the world heard the “rest of the story”, as radio-man Paul Harvey would say, about the re-union of the famous Chinese soprano, Louise Kwan, and her missing son.

Back to you, Jeff.

Listen to Rare Audio of  from the former KGEI San Francisco, California in 1941: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ_S0WeT3ts

California on Shortwave During World War II

 

KPH Marine Radio

Special thanks to Ray Robinson and Jeff white for sharing this week's program with our followers.

Jeff: A few weeks ago, I received an email from listener Bill Ruck in San Francisco, who volunteers with the Maritime Radio Historical Society.  He said he spends many Saturdays keeping maritime coastal station KPH on the air, operating from RCA’s building at the Bolinas transmitter site originally built by the Marconi Company in 1914.  Bill says he stumbled across an old article written by Wavescan’s editor-in-chief, Dr.  Adrian Peterson, and had some comments on it.  But before we get to those, let’s let Ray Robinson in Los Angeles remind us of what Adrian wrote, in his article first broadcast in Wavescan back in 2002.

Ray: Thanks, Jeff.   Adrian wrote that in December 1941, when the Pacific War flared up into an international conflict, the United States government didn’t own or operate any shortwave broadcasting stations on the west coast for coverage into Asia and the Pacific.  However, by the end of hostilities a total of a dozen different transmitter locations had been pressed into service during that dramatic four-year period.

A spate of intensive research into the available radio publications of the era indicates that programming from the Voice of America (VOA) and the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) was on the air from as many as 50 different shortwave transmitters at the dozen shortwave locations, all in California.

The only shortwave broadcasting station in California at the time was KGEI, a General Electric facility that had been launched as W6XBE in 1939 at the World's Fair on Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay.  After the fair was over, the station received a regular callsign as KGEI and the transmitter was transferred to a new site at Belmont, about 20 miles south, half way between San Francisco and San Jose.

In 1942, this station, along with many others along the eastern seaboard and in the mid-west, were all taken over by the government for the duration of the hostilities, to be used to transmit OWI-VOA programming.  

Additionally, in order to secure adequate coverage into Asia and the Pacific, the government contracted the usage of several utility transmitters that were already on the air with communication traffic.

RCA Bolinas

Most notable of these facilities were the RCA station at Bolinas, a few miles north of San Francisco on the coast (the station that Bill Ruck now volunteers at), the AT&T station at Dixon, some 60 miles northeast of San Francisco, and the Press Wireless station down near Los Angeles.

The RCA station at Bolinas was a long-established facility, often heard in pre-war days with the relay of programming to and from Hawaii and other countries on the Pacific rim.  Over a period of time, several of the Bolinas transmitters were noted with OWI-VOA programming.

Early in 1942, an additional 50 kW RCA transmitter was installed at Bolinas and this was noted with radio broadcast programming under the callsign KRCA.  A sister unit was installed three years later, and this was allocated the callsign KRCQ.  QSL cards were issued to verify several of the Bolinas callsigns, including KES2, KES3, and KRCA.

The utility station at Dixon was owned and operated by the telephone company AT&T, and this was on the air with OWI-VOA programming under six different callsigns, four of which were verified with the now famous red, white and blue QSL cards.  The callsigns on these cards are KMI, KWU, KWV and KWY.

The Press Wireless facility located near Los Angeles was used for wartime programming through two of its transmitters, one of which was verified with a QSL card – KJE8.

Other shortwave transmitters in California also carried VOA and AFRS programming, though little is known about these stations.  The U.S. Navy wireless station at San Francisco was noted with the relay of AFRS programming, as were also stations KZH and KNY, the specific locations of which are unknown.

At the same time as contract radio coverage was taken out over these many utility transmitters, plans were laid for the quick installation of additional shortwave transmitters at already established locations specifically for broadcast coverage.  The first of these new units was station KWID.

A 100 kW transmitter for KWID was co-located with a medium wave station, KSFO, at Islais Creek on the bay side of San Francisco, and the studios were installed in the Mark Hopkins Hotel on the seafront.  A 50 kW sister transmitter, KWIX, was installed at the same location the following year, 1943.

Another utility station was the Mackay facility located at Palo Alto, some 30 miles south of San Francisco, and two new 50 kW transmitters were installed there using the callsigns KROJ and KROU.  These units left the air forever after the end of the war.

In addition to these smaller units, two large shortwave stations were built specifically for trans-Pacific broadcast coverage, and these were the CBS station at Delano, 140 miles north of Los Angeles, and the NBC facility at Dixon.  The Delano station was inaugurated in 1944 as KCBA, and the Dixon station was inaugurated in 1945 as KNBA.

In 2002, Adrian Peterson wrote that, interestingly, only one of these many historic radio stations is on the air today with broadcast programming, and that is the very large Voice of America station located in a rural area near Delano, north of Los Angeles.  However, that station too was finally closed five years later, officially due to budget cuts, in September 2007.  One of the transmitters and the control console was recently removed from Delano to a museum in Bloomfield, New York, but as of 2025, the 800 acre site is still owned by the federal government, which is waiting to hear if the town of Delano’s proposal to build an airport on the site will be approved by the FAA.  If it is, the remaining antenna towers will be taken down.

During the hectic wartime period when all of these many shortwave transmitters were in use for radio programming, they were heard far and wide throughout the Pacific rim, as well as in Europe and elsewhere.  Many thousands of QSL cards were processed for these stations, and the Heritage collection which is now being scanned in Canberra at the Australian National Archive, contains a large album with nearly 50 of these neat red, white a blue QSL cards, each with its own distinctive callsign.

So, now back to Bill Ruck’s comments.  He said he got to know Far East Broadcasting Company and KGEI since he was the Engineering Manager of KNBR whose transmitter is next to KGEI in "Belmont" (now Redwood Shores).

He continues:  “You probably know the story of KGEI but the US State Department asked GE to put on a shortwave station to counter Nazi propaganda in South 

America.  They built KGEI at the San Francisco Treasure Island Exposition in 1939.  When the exposition was over the Navy wanted KGEI out, so GE purchased property from NBC's KPO (now KNBR) and built their transmitter in "Belmont".

KGEI QSL 

“The station had a directional antenna aimed at South America and programming was in Spanish provided by NBC.  When KGEI shut down they gave me some historic artifacts from the station including a drawing showing proposed antennas aimed west, dated December 2, 1941” (and Bill attached a photo of that drawing).  At the RCA Bolinas facility, Bill says:  “We did find evidence that RCA rented transmitters to OWI with the call sign KRCA but Dr. Peterson's paper is the first we have heard about KRCQ.”

“When RCA shut down their shortwave point-to-point service, most of the paperwork that had accumulated over 40 years was thrown out.  The last KPH station manager saved much of that paperwork, and took it home.  Unfortunately, he lived in Russian River and a few years later a flood turned all of the paper he saved into mush.

Finally, Bill said it was “curious that the first KROJ transmitter may have been a Press Wireless transmitter.  We know that when Press Wireless shut down their Belmont transmitter the PW-15 transmitters were moved to Mexico.  They did give us two PW-15 transmitters and one of them is operating every Saturday.  The second PW-15 is being restored and there is no reason why it won't be on the air in a few months.  With the cooperation of Globe Wireless, we operate KPH and KFS on Saturdays.  We have vintage RCA and Press Wireless transmitters on the air.”

So, thanks very much to Bill Ruck in San Francisco for that informative update.

(Ray Robinson/Jeff White/Wavescan)

Back to you, Jeff.

(photos/NPS/Wikipedia)