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)
Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen
(December 26, 1921 – October 30, 2000
Television and radio personality, comedian,
musician, composer, writer and actor.
Steve Allen, in 1954 achieved national fame
as the co-creator and first host of The Tonight
Show, which was the first late-night television
talk show.
Allen died in his sleep from chest trauma caused
by injuries sustained in an earlier traffic accident.
“The War of the Worlds”—Orson Welles’s realistic radio
dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth, was broadcast
on the radio on October 30, 1938.
Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater
company decided to update H.G. Wells’s 19th-century
science fiction novel The War of the Worlds for national
radio.
It was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little
idea of how legendary it would eventually become.
Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age
of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned
on. But most of these Americans were listening to Edgar
Bergen with his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and
only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch
ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story
of the Martian invasion was well underway.
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985)
