As many here know, I love radio history. And I just came across an article about what may be the most unusual radio station in all of North America.
 
WRR is the only station on the continent that’s fully owned by a city, in this case, Dallas, Texas. Even the way it started is completely odd. It was originated by the local fire department, after the phone lines burned down in 1921. So they started broadcasting emergency calls to fire trucks over the air. But sometimes, there were no calls and that’s when the bored folks at the firehouse decided to start airing other things in between, like singers or classical music records.
 
From the article:
 
“The dispatchers were almost like the original disc jockeys,” says Amy Bishop, host of WRR’s midday show. “During the time when they didn’t have emergency communication, someone said, ‘Why don’t we start playing music?’ People started coming on telling jokes. Some enterprising person thought ‘Hey, we’re starting to reach more people, what if we could sell this time?’”
 
As radio matured, those emergency calls were dispatched elsewhere and the station grew into an “anything goes” kind of place, attracting top talent who made no money and eventually found fame and sometimes even fortune elsewhere. But what a training ground!
 
They still air all the city council meetings, even though what ratings they do have drop off by 82% when it’s on!
 
And then there’s the great experiment told at the end of the piece that could only happen at a place like this.  
 
“Hal sits back at the control board and he said, ‘I’ll betcha if we had dead air nobody would notice.’ I say, ‘No, no way.’ … He’s got a record playing. He then takes another set of turntables … and he gets out a sound effects record. Cues it up to the sound of an explosion. I saw this with my own eyes.
 
“The record ends and Hal turns on the mic and puts his finger on the play button on that cue turntable, into the mic he says, ‘That was Les Brown and His Band of Renown, it’s one-fifteen on WRR, fifty-seven degrees,’ and in the middle of the sentence, as natural as you please, he pushed the button and played the sound effect of an explosion and put his feet up and said, ‘Let’s see how long it takes for someone to notice.’
 
“It was fifteen minutes. The phone rang and he said ‘WRR’ and someone said, ‘Do y’all know you aren’t broadcasting?’”
 
Still, someone must be tuned in. The station turns 100 years old next year.

The Weird, Wonderful Story of Texas’s First Radio Station

WRR Radio Website