HomeMy WebLinkAboutProject HOLD FCC WTAWProject HOLD
WTAW Radio
FCC Says No to WTAW
Tom Turbiville | WTAW Radio Host
Laura Quezada | Transcriber
00:00:00 Dick Bolin (DB)
College Station, Texas, April 14, 1947, Dick Bolin talking. Here's the latest news from the
Associated Press…
[Unintelligible news broadcaster speaking]
00:00:07 Speaker 2
Aggies win 74-72! Here's your…
00:00:12 Speaker 3
…1620 WTAW.
-------------------------------
00:00:18 Tom Turbiville (TT)
This is WTAW, the First 100 Years, I'm Tom Turbiville. 1939, the year of Texas A&M's only
national football championship. The year of Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Germany
invaded Poland, and the FCC told WTAW, no. In the early days of AM radio, stations were only
allowed to broadcast when they specifically had something worth putting on the air. And what
was then called the Communications Commission, was the judge of that. Well, WTAW had
requested in 1939 that they be able to go from specific daytime hours to full daytime hours.
Yeah, they wanted the whole day from sunup to sundown, specifically to take over all of the
hours that they had been sharing with the Blue Network and KTBC in Austin. But the
commission ruled that the college had failed to show that WTAW needed additional time in order
to broadcast the educational programs of the college or to serve the public need of the College
Station area. So evidently, Texas A&M winning the national football championship in 1939,
well, that didn't carry any weight with the government. Just another story of the history of
WTAW, the First 100 Years.