The Tri-States lost a local radio icon Thursday after
Dennis Oliver passed away at the age of 69 after a
battle with Alzheimer’s Disease for several years.

The Pittsfield native entertained the Tri-States for
40 years and touched the lives of many.    

“White Christmas,” written by the formidable composer and
lyricist Irving Berlin, receives its world premiere on December
25, 1941 on Bing Crosby’s weekly NBC radio program, The
Kraft Music Hall. It went on to become one of the most
commercially successful singles of all time.

Jim Ladd, the legendary disc jockey who was a staple of
FM rock radio and inspired songs by some of the format’s
top stars, died Saturday after suffering a heart attack.

Fellow DJ Meg Griffin announced Ladd’s death at the start
of his SiriusXM “Deep Tracks” show on Monday. 

The satellite radio service confirmed his death with a post
on X, formerly Twitter.
(The Messenger)

Irish-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi ushered in a new era of
global communications, sending the first radio transmission
across the Atlantic Ocean on this day in history, Dec. 12, 1901.

The message was the letter "s" in Morse code (dot-dot-dot). But
it proved after years of advances by Marconi that radio could
make the world a smaller place.

The wireless signal traveled 2,000 miles from a transmitting
station in Poldhu, Cornwall, in the far southwestern corner of
England, to a receiving station in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi
(25 April 1874 – 20 July 1937)

George Dewey Hay (November 9, 1895 – May 8, 1968) was 
an American radio personality, announcer and newspaper 
reporter. He was the founder of the original Grand Ole
Opry radio program.

The Grand Ole Opry, one of the longest-lived and most popular showcases for western music, began broadcasting live from
Nashville, Tennessee on November 28, 1925. The showcase
was originally named the Barn Dance, after a Chicago radio
program called the National Barn Dance that had begun
broadcasting the previous year.

Impressed by the popularity of the Chicago-based National
Barn Dance, producers at WSM radio in Nashville decided
to create their own version of the show to cater to southern
audiences who could not receive the Chicago signal. Both
the Grand Ole Opry and the National Barn Dance aired on
Saturday nights and featured folk music, fiddling, and the
relatively new genre of country-western music.

The home of country music and original broadcasting site
of the Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman is one of the most
historic and widely visited tours in Tennessee.

Minnie Pearl (Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon)
(October 25, 1912 – March 4, 1996)