Outside the Law

It was enough of a mystery to throw the Federal Communications Commission into a dither. Somewhere in central Ohio an unlicensed radio station was broadcasting with the call letters WKGR. This report was handed to Investigator Edward Adams. Adams hurried into his car, equipped with all the gadgets for locating secret transmitters, and headed for the countryside around Columbus.

No Codes. In Ohio's rural Union County, Adams picked up his first, faint signal on a frequency of 650 kilocycles. To his surprise, station WKGR, instead of sending out cryptic or coded messages, was blithely broadcasting standard fare: recordings, news shorts and amateur talent shows, interspersed with hearty commercial plugs for such concerns as the Hildreth Jewelry Store and Conrad Coal Co. of the county seat, Marysville (pop. 4,272).

In maple-shaded Marysville, Agent Adams discovered that, far from being clandestine, station WKGR was a widely known local enterprise. He had no trouble finding its studio offices on the second floor of a building on Marysville's main street, and he was greeted by a cheerful receptionist who readily took him in to see the illicit station's five owners and operators. General Manager Gene Kirby, 19, admitted, with modest pride, that WKGR had "just grown" from a ham station he had built in his family's backyard garage five years ago, when the general manager was 14. His transmitter, from a beat-up B17, had been bought at an Arrny surplus sale. In December, when the owners decided to go on the air commercially, Station Engineer John McCarter, an oldster of 28 who holds a third-class radio operator's card, souped up the transmitter so that it covered a twelve-mile radius.

Four Letters. Advertising Manager Richard Pfar, 21, explained their choice of the call letters WKGR: they had gone over a listing of U.S. stations and picked four letters that didn't conflict with any others. Program Director Floyd Coil, 18, and Business Manager Curt Scheiderer, 22, added that they had thought all you had to do to start a business in the U.S. was start it.

Agent Adams sat down with the youthful free enterprisers and explained a few grubby, governmental facts of life. One hard fact: the maximum penalty for running an unlicensed radio station is a fine of $10,000 or two years in prison. After the lecture, Adams picked up WKGR's microphone and announced over the air that "the management" had no federal authorization to operate and was being closed by a representative of FCC.

Mostly because of the youth of the staff, FCC decided not to take legal action. Marysville businessmen at first rallied behind the boys, but seemed to lose interest on learning that it would take $20,000 to buy the equipment necessary to meet FCC requirements for a broadcasting license.

At week's end, station WKGR's chances of going back on the air were dim indeed. Owners Coil and Kirby left town for Texas, where they are now members of the U.S. Air Force. Owners McCarter and Scheiderer, both ex-servicemen, had just about decided to enlist. Ex-Advertising Manager Richard Pfar, daily expecting his own Army call, offered a final comment on the short, busy life of Station WKGR: "Gee, if we had known we were operating outside the law, we wouldn't have done it."

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