WLS (AM) - History

History

In the 1920s, Sears, Roebuck and Company was a major mail order company. To target farmers, Sears bought time on radio stations, and then decided to form their own station. Just before the permanent station was ready, Sears began broadcasts on March 21, 1924 as WBBX with noon programs using the WMAQ studios.

Sears broadcast test transmissions from its own permanent studios on April 9, 10 and 11, 1924, using the callsign WES (for "World's Economy Store"). On April 12, 1924, the station commenced officially, using the callsign WLS (for "World's Largest Store"); and on April 19, aired its first National Barn Dance. Sears originally operated its station at its Chicago headquarters on Chicago's West Side where the company's mail order business was located. Sears then moved the WLS studios into the Sherman House hotel in downtown Chicago.

Sears opened the station in 1924 as a service to farmers and subsequently sold it to the Prairie Farmer magazine in 1928. The station moved to the Prairie Farmer Building on West Washington in Chicago, where it remained for 32 years. For a few months after ABC's 1960 purchase of it and the format change, the "bright new sound" that began in May 1960 was broadcast from the Prairie Farmer Building. WLS didn't make the move to downtown Michigan Avenue's Stone Container Building until October of that year. Thirty years later, it would move once more, to its present location at 190 North State in downtown Chicago. It was the scene of the National Barn Dance, which featured Gene Autry, Pat Buttram, and George Gobel, and which was second only to the Grand Ole Opry (in itself a local National Barn Dance spinoff) in presenting country music and humor.

The station also experimented successfully in many forms of news broadcasting, including weather and crop reports. Its most famous news broadcast was the report of the Hindenburg disaster by Herbert Morrison.

Starting in the 1930s, WLS had been an affiliate of the Blue Network of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and as such aired the popular Fibber McGee and Molly and Lum and Abner comedy programs (both produced at the studios of Chicago's NBC-owned stations, WENR and WMAQ) during their early years. When the Federal Communications Commission forced NBC to sell the Blue Network, WLS maintained its affiliation with the network under its new identity, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Under this affiliation, some programs from the network that were not commercially sponsored or which were scheduled to cross the time that WLS and WENR shifted its use of the same frequency (such as baseball or football games) were transferred to air on a third Blue Network/ABC affiliate in Chicago, WCFL. Blue/ABC network broadcasts of addresses by labor leaders were also shifted away from WLS and WENR to WCFL, which was owned at the time by the Chicago Federation of Labor.