Hours of historic St. Louis radio broadcasts are being added to the Library of Congress thanks to the work of Frank Absher, executive director of the St. Louis Media History Foundation. Absher says that the broadcasts accepted by the federal archive include such nuggets as the KMOX broadcast of the end of Prohibition in April of 1933, recorded live from the Anheuser-Busch brewery and fed to the CBS Network, and Harry Caray covering the sale of the Cardinals on KXOK in 1947.
But it’s not all seminal moments. Absher says the Library of Congress was interested in the snippets of day-to-day life that can be glimpsed in the recordings. “Their goal, from the Library of Congress perspective, is to get a good representation of what life was like, which has also been our goal,” he says. “So if you listen to an aircheck from KXOK, top-40 radio in the 1960s, you will hear what they were talking about, what they were advertising, all that sort of stuff.”
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Absher, himself a former KMOX announcer, has been working to preserve St. Louis radio history since 1987. He’s scoured the country for what are known as airchecks, gathering countless hours of local stations and DJs at work. A seed grant from the Missouri Humanities Council and matching private donations allowed him to digitize the recordings, which in many cases existed as electronic transcriptions, or ETs—discs that are 16 inches in diameter and need a special turntable to play.
Two years ago, Absher says, he made contact with staffers at the Library of Congress through a meeting of the National Radio Preservation Task Force. They were interested in his efforts, and agreed to accept a sample of his digital recordings. Now, he says, they’ve agreed those recordings passed muster, and he’s been given the greenlight to send more. (He plans to also share the original ETs at some point, too.)
One benefit is that the federal library can preserve the files in a way that simply uploading them to the cloud will not. Another is that they can make them available to researchers interested in, say, the end of Prohibition or day to day life in St. Louis in the 1950s. Airchecks they’ve accepted include a recording of KSD’s “Alpine Varieties,” a weekly music program produced by Russ David and sponsored by Alpen Brau Beer, and KMOX’s “Barnyard Follies,” what Absher calls a “live hillbilly show” fed to the CBS Network from 1949–50.
Eventually, Absher hopes to make the recordings available on the St. Louis Media History Foundation’s website as well. The biggest holdup has been the threat of music license services such as BMI or ASCAP coming after them for royalties. Absher has been working to pull out the music so the foundation won’t be liable. “Our attorney said it’s best, even though we’re making no money on it, this is going to keep the wolf from the door,” he says.
And in the meantime, he continues to avidly collect old recordings. When he first started, there were aircheck collectors who’d sell what they had accumulated as well as local DJs who donated recordings of their work. Now he’s searching for—and getting—materials that are much more obscure. Like, say, that 1933 recording for Prohibition’s repeal, which Absher describes as a surprisingly sedate affair.
“It was all scripted so no one would say anything that was not appropriate,” he says. “You can hear the truck driver driving out with a beer, reading from the script, ‘Oh, boy, oh boy!’” Now that moment is preserved in the Library of Congress. Oh boy!
Editor’s note: A previous version erred in referencing the music licensing services that Absher fears running afoul of. The service is BMI, not BMG.
