Long wave
For three weeks there, the oldest living president was the incumbent for the first time since Richard Nixon. Joe Biden took over from Jimmy Carter, the only US President to reach 100. Carter was four years younger than the oldest radio station in America, eight years old when FDR broadcast his first "fireside chat" as President, and nine when the White House telephone was moved from the foyer to the President's desk.
The year Carter was born, 1924, Sears started up radio station WLS AM in Chicago. Sears’ call sign stood for ‘World’s Largest Store’ and, when Prairie Farmer, a newspaper serving the farming community in Chicago’s hinterland, bought the station in 1928, they kept it. WLS operated out of the Prairie Farmer Building at 1230 West Washington which is where field journalist Herbert Morrison headed with six lacquered discs that held his gut-wrenching live reaction to the Hindenburg disaster on May 6, 1937. WLS broadcast it the following day as the earliest recorded first draft of history.
Carter took the White House in 1977. He didn’t revive the weekly radio broadcasts that FDR had started, and WLS and sister stations across America carried, but his successor, Ronald Reagan, brought them back in 1982 and they continued into the first few months of Donald Trump’s first term.
Carter was not a secret recorder like Nixon, FDR, JFK, and Johnson, but any hidden microphones would have picked up constant classical music. His secretary put together the playlist — Bach, Verdi, Puccini, Mozart —?and typed it up on three-by-five yellow cards so he could follow along. (JFK would take a 15-minute swim after lunch while listening to Broadway show tunes on a record player.)
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Chicago's WLS went all-talk in 1989, shortly after Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine — which required broadcasters to cover major issues with balance — and unleashed the hounds of talk radio. WLS moved into NBC Tower, as little brother to the local TV and FM stations.
I recently visited the original Prairie Farmer Building. The building interior has been hollowed out and turned over to self-storage units; empty space is now more valuable than local radio studios. Google moved its Chicago HQ just around the corner in 2013, the same year search revenue blasted past radio advertising in the United States. The fortunes of radio, for decades the pulpit of Presidents, in a few city blocks.