October 2nd, 1924 and October 2nd, 2024 are random days on the calendar for most people. They're not so random for those of us at WCCO Radio however. This Wednesday is the day the station celebrates 100 years. For 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for a century, WCCO has been on the air. That's 36,500 days of broadcasts featuring thousands of personalities, journalists, sports teams and music.
You know the names by now. We've been "featuring" so many of them for the past 100 days looking back on the last century: Cedric Adams, Charlie Boone, Roger Erickson, Howard Viken, Joyce Lamont, Steve Cannon, Dick Chapman, Dave Lee, Ray Christensen, Sid Hartman and the dozens more I'm leaving out of a hall of fame list other stations can only dream about.
As we celebrate this 100th birthday, we thought it's a good day to go back to the very beginning. WCCO aren't simply call letters here. They stand for something just as historic, the Washburn Crosby Company.
Who? You might know it by a different name now. Washburn Crosby Company is General Mills. Wheaties and Cheerios and many, many other things. It's that original flour milling company, based in downtown Minneapolis, that started the iconic station that began broadcasting 100 years ago today.
WCCO took over for a station called WLAG which originally went on the air in 1922. By the summer of 1924, the station had run out of money. On July 31, the station went off the air following a weather report.
A man named Harry Wilbern stepped in and began looking for a possible investor to bring back the radio station. Despite failure after failure, he finally found an interested party at Washburn Crosby Company, the makers of "Gold Medal Flour". There is still to this day a "Gold Medal Flour" sign on top of the abandoned and recycled mills along the Mississippi river front, a callback to those days when little Minneapolis was literally America's bread basket. Wilbern was named the station's first ever manager.
The flour milling giant purchased the physical properties and assets of the now defunct WLAG in 1924. The promised $50,000 a year for three years (no small amount of money back then) to support the station if the money was matched by some commercial associations in the Twin Cities. The proposal was accepted and they secured new call letters for the station: WCCO.
Natasha Bruns is the Corporate Archivist for General Mills, and has researched some of the connections between that famous company and WCCO in those early years. She says what is clear is the original Washburn Crosby Company was interested in doing something to help the community.
"They really wanted to invest in the community first," Bruns told the WCCO Morning News with Vineeta Sawkar. "And also, if you think about radio as a communication tool at the time, farmers were depending on the radio to get grain market news, and information, and crop bulletins. hen the city was kind of left without a radio station for a little bit of time, people knew that they really needed this essential communication tool. Washburn Crosby kind of stepped up partnered with other civic agencies in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. They would invest in the station, build more state of the art facilities, and offered to pay half the operating costs because they knew what a great communication tool and what it meant to the city to have such a state of the art facility that would really serve not only the Twin Cities, but also the greater Midwest at the time."
On October 2, 1924, WCCO, the "Gold Medal Station," went on the air for the first time. It was not exactly the most riveting program if you're looking back through some romantic, early radio magic. It was a talk by Lt. Lowell Smith, Commander of the World Fliers who were a group that was the first to circumnavigate the globe via airplane. WCCO was one of 15 stations chosen across the nation to broadcast the program because its power of 500-watts would make the broadcast available over great distances.
One of America's most famous names also took to the airwaves on that first day of broadcasting.
"Betty Crocker also had her first broadcast on October 2nd, 1924," Bruns said. "And I think interestingly, she at the time was a helper in the kitchen. She was this helpful personality that was originally created to respond to consumer inquiries about cooking and baking and she was supposed to be this friendly neighbor that anybody could talk to and get advice. Radio, again, was a really great source of communication that could connect to consumers in their home, who are looking for a helpful voice in the kitchen and really opened up correspondence. And radio really developed Betty Crocker's voice as this trustworthy personality that people could rely on through some really challenging times in American history."
WCCO began by using the old WLAG studios in the Oak Grove Hotel in Minneapolis. The very same transmitter was used as well. But, as soon as WCCO went on the air, construction of a new transmitter facility began way out in the country in Anoka Township (now Coon Rapids). By March of 1925, a new transmitter with much greater reach was on the air, and the station moved to new studios in the Nicollet Hotel.
While WLAG couldn't financially support the station, early on WCCO became a commercial vehicle for Washburn Crosby, helping to prove radio's viability as a business and not just a "curiosity".
Washburn Crosby put together a singing quartet of a bailiff in municipal court, a grain company employee, a printer and an undertaker. They performed for 15 minutes a week and were paid $6 each on one of WCCO’s earliest homegrown shows.
It was on Christmas Eve in 1926 that history was made, when WCCO broadcast the world's first "singing" commercial, the famous “Wheaties Jingle”.
"Wheaties would not have lasted as long as it did without WCCO on the radio," Bruns said about the famous cereal. "I have some notes that show that the Washburn Crosby Company approached WCCO and asked them what they could do and said like, 'oh, well, we have this quartet,' and came up with this jingle. It really helped Wheaties sales soar not only in the Twin Cities, but they started to broadcast this jingle throughout the country and Wheaties' sales really took off from there."
But it's that grain, culled from the farm fields of Minnesota and the Dakotas, brought to flour mills along the Mississippi River, then to a group of entrepreneurs and radio operators in a small studio in the Nicollet Hotel, to a 500-watt transmitter way out in the country, that created the legend, and the century of broadcasting, right here on WCCO Radio.
MORE: See the history and evolution of WCCO's Transmitters.