March 2023 • Nebraskaland 53
State Fair.
Early radio stations were often founded
to promote an existing business, such as
a newspaper or an oil company. In Wayne
in 1926, Dr. A.S. Lutgen founded radio
station KGCH on the grounds of the city's
fi rst hospital — which Lutgen had founded
several years earlier. He bought a ship's
"radio telephone" transmitter and hired a
young man named Merrill Shum to operate
the station.
Shum later recalled that KGCH broadcast
daily from 6:30 p.m. "until we ran out of
talent." He supplemented live musical
acts with recorded music, plus educational
programming by college faculty. He once even broadcasted a
Wayne State football game, but without a remote microphone
he had to use runners relaying messages from the fi eld to the
broadcast booth.
Relatively few people had radio receivers in the early years.
Radios were small, battery-operated and could be plugged
into headphones or an external speaker. Across the country,
manufacturers sprang up to meet the growing demand,
including the W. R. Cramer Company in Omaha, which billed
itself as "pioneer radio manufacturers."
As with automobiles and many other new products, a
market that began with hundreds of local manufacturers
soon consolidated into a few giant corporations. By the end
of the 1920s, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was the
hottest tech stock on Wall Street, rising to insane heights
until the stock market crash of October 1929. But even the
Great Depression couldn't stop the growth of radio across
Nebraska and the nation.
N
Breanna Fanta contributed research to this article. Learn
more about History Nebraska's publications, including free
history emails, at history.nebraska.gov/publications.
History Nebraska does not have an Omaha-built Cramer
radio in its collection, but it has this 1928 Steinite, built in
Atchison, Kansas, and owned by a Lincoln man who opened
a radio store. HISTORY NEBRASKA, 8003-9
Early radio fans often collected
"QSL" cards from stations they
heard. They would write to the
station, saying they heard a
broadcast on a certain date, and the
station would reply with a card like
this one. The exchange helped radio
stations track their broadcast range.
HISTORY NEBRASKA, 3006.AM
