Taking The Lead In A Congressional Rescue Was Its Resident Authority On Broadcasting, Lewiston’s Wallace White, Jr. By Early 1927, Congress Implemented A Law Based On One White Had Been Proposing Since 1923, One That Set Up A Communications Commission That Has Been The Magna Carta For Broadcast Regulation Ever Since .

It was actually the late fall of 1926, just 85 years ago at this time. The world of radio, the first “WWW” — for what RCA then called its “World Wide Wireless” — was in chaos. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s try to control it was struck down by a Fed Court. The result of this was the central authority couldn’t stop competing radio stations from broadcasting concurrently on the same frequency.

Taking the lead in a Congressional rescue was its resident authority on broadcasting, Lewiston’s Wallace White, Jr. By early 1927, Congress passed a law based totally on one White had been proposing since 1923, one that set up a communications commission that has been the magna carta for broadcast regulation ever since then.

White was a Lewiston lawyer when first elected to Congress in 1916. By the early 1920s, White, spurred by the arrival of Auburn’s WMB, one of the first licensed list of radio stations in the country, became the nation’s leading advocate of legislation to meaningfully regulate the new medium. The capstone of these efforts came in late 1926 and early 1927 in the aftermath of the Fed court decision that struck down Hoover’s attempts to interpose. By Feb 1927, White’s bill, co-sponsored by Washington Senator Clarence Dill, became law.

The communications system for which Lewiston’s White provided the foundation some 85 years ago saw a considerable number of prominent figures carrying out the inheritance. Here’s a look at just a few of them.

Denny Shute : The name of this pathfinder in both radio and early TV in Maine has most lately been called upon in this fall’s debate over same day voting. Shute, as GOP Senate chair of the legislature’s Election Laws Committee, bankrolled the initial measure for same-day voting in 1973. (Shute would have been stunned by this year’s vigorous interest in the law. In 1973, neither party debated its enactment. This was due to Court views that appeared to need it.)

More eventful to Shute nonetheless , than his sponsoring of same-day voting, would be his career in Maine broadcasting. This included co-founding and handling Lewiston’s WLAM in the 1940s and becoming the morning host on Portland’s first TV station, WPMT, in 1953.

By the mid-1950s, Shute was off to the first of a new series of radio exclusive ventures. This included putting WKTQ online in South Paris in 1955. Shute did the same in 1959 for WKTJ in Farmington, a community which sent Shute to Augusta for three legal terms in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his first term in the Maine House, Shute became the GOP’s nominee for Congress in 1968. As Chief of the Secretary of State’s Election Division in 1969-’70, Shute was an early champion of voting machines, which had only been legalized in Maine in 1967.

Shute returned to the lawmaking council as a state senator for four years beginning in 1971. To Shute, the high spot of his service there was not same day voting, but sponsoring of legislation that led on to the state purchasing some 37,000 acres for the Bigelow Mountain preserve.

Stunned by the sudden death at age thirty of his only boy, Gary, Shute made religion the focus of his subsequent years. He became an ordained minister in the early l980s in Florida where he lived until his death there in 1997.

Frank Fixaris : The day after the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, this icon of Maine broadcasting was reciting from memory each sweries champ and runner up for the previous fifty years. It was not just his memory but also his amicable on-air demeanor that made Fixaris one of the most influential on-air broadcasters for nearly five decades beginning in 1956. He was, as Portland’s Channel 6 sports anchor noted the day of Fixaris’s death in 2006 “the best sports anchor this town will ever have.”

Though Fixaris was sports anchor at Channel 13 from 1965 to 1995, his career was book-ended by a range of on-air positions in Portland and Lewiston radio, his last five years as co-host of WJAB’s “Morning Jab” sports talk show. Through his career, Fixaris was a major booster of both high school and professional sports teams alike. (A similar role, that of a play-by-play broadcaster, was in the 1940s and ‘50 ‘ in Bangor played by John McKernan, dad of the future governor.) Off camera, Fixaris was a founder and shop steward for the announcer’s union at Channel 13.

Bob Anderson : Elections in Portland this fall has brought new attention to the position of its city’s mayor. Though Portland has had most of them, it’s only had one Duke. So preferred was Bob Anderson it was on his head — during his reign as morning host at WMGX — that such a crown appeared, the results of resolutions by both the Maine legislature and Portland Mayor Cheryl Leeman in the late 1980s.

Beginning in 1963 till his death in 2003 — suffering an obvious heart attack while broadcasting on the air — Anderson was one of the most important draws of Southern Maine radio, helping also to put on concert appearances for some of the nation’s leading rock performers. At one top in his career in the late 1960s he helped catapult WLOB, then a Top 40 music station, into position as one of the highest rated in the country, capturing a 62 p.c local share and just about 100 p.c of all Portland area kids.

In spite of carrying the big stick “Duke” title, Anderson spoke softly. Personally, like Fixaris, Anderson was both relaxed and unpretentious, this in a business not always known for humility. It is one of the reasons his career endured so long, even into a broadcasting world challenged by diverse new media options.

Shute, Fixaris, and Anderson are by no means the only meriting honorees in a Maine TV or Radio Hall-Of-Fame. On the opposite side of the mike tower many who also played a crucial back stage role. Venturesome Television news photographers Dick Sturtevant of Channel six, Gene Willman and Bill Goulet of Channel 13 quickly spring to mind. So too do such early risk-taking investors as Horace Hildreth, founder of Channels five and 8, Channel 13’s Guy Gannett, and Channel 6’s Henry Rines.

Wallace White would not have known many of them. He’d still nonetheless , be drawn by the role each one of them played in finding a way through the trail he initially helped blaze, writes tagza.com.