The 85th anniversary of the Magna Carta of broadcasting and a Maine TV-Radio Hall of Fame

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It was the late fall of 1926, just 85 years ago at this time. The world of radio, the original “WWW” – for what RCA then called its “World Wide Wireless” – was in chaos. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s attempts to regulate it was struck down by a federal court. The outcome of this was that the government could not prevent competing radio stations from broadcasting simultaneously 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 enacted 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.

White was a Lewiston attorney when first elected to Congress in 1916. By the early 1920s, White, spurred by the advent of Auburn’s WMB, one of the first licensed 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 federal court decision that struck down Hoover’s efforts to intervene. By February 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 has seen a number of prominent figures carrying out the legacy. Here’s a look at just a few of them.

Denny Shute: The name of this pioneer in both radio and early TV in Maine has most recently been invoked in this fall’s debate over same-day voting. Shute, as GOP Senate Chair of the Legislature’s Election Laws Committee, sponsored the initial measure for same-day voting in 1973. (Shute would have been surprised by this year’s vigorous interest in the law. In 1973, neither party debated its enactment. This was due to Court Opinions that seemed to require it.)

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

By the mid-l950s, Shute was off to the first of a new series of radio proprietary ventures. This included putting WKTQ on the air in South Paris in l955. Shute did the same in 1959 for WKTJ in Farmington, a community which sent Shute to Augusta for three legislative terms in the late l960s and early l970s. 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 l969-l970, Shute was an early advocate of voting machines, which had only been legalized in Maine in 1967.

Shute returned to the Legislature as a state senator for four years beginning in 1971. To Shute, the highlight of his service there was not same day voting, but sponsorship of legislation that led to the state buying some 37,000 acres for the Bigelow Preserve.

Stunned by the sudden death at age 30 of his only son, Gary, Shute made religion the focus of his later 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 every series champion and runner up for the previous 50 years. But it wasn’t just his memory but also his likeable 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 observed the day of Fixaris’s death in 2006 “the best sports anchor this town will ever have.”

Though Fixaris was sports anchor at Channel l3 from l965 to l995, his career was book-ended by a variety of on-air positions in Portland and Lewiston radio, his last five years as co-host of WJAB’s “Morning Jab” sports talk show. Throughout 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 l940s and ’50s in Bangor played by John McKernan, father 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 many of them, it’s only had one Duke. So popular was Bob Anderson that it was on his head – during his tenure as morning host at WMGX – that such a crown appeared, the result of resolutions by both the Maine Legislature and Portland Mayor Cheryl Leeman in the late 1980s.

Beginning in 1963 until his death in 2003 – suffering an apparent heart attack while broadcasting on the air – Anderson was one of the biggest draws of southern Maine radio, helping also to stage concert appearances for some of the nation’s leading rock performers. At one peak in his career in the late l960s, he helped catapult WLOB, then a Top 40 music station, into position as one of the highest rated in the country, capturing a 62 percent local share and nearly l00 percent of all Portland area teenagers.

Despite 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’s one of the reasons his career endured so long, even into a broadcasting world challenged by diverse new media alternatives.

Shute, Fixaris, and Anderson are by no means the only deserving honorees in a Maine TV or Radio Hall of Fame. On the other side of the microphone tower many who also played a vital back stage role. Venturesome TV news photographers Dick Sturtevant of Channel 6, Gene Willman and Bill Goulet of Channel 13 quickly come to mind. So too do such early risk taking investors as Horace Hildreth, founder of Channels 5 and 8, Channel l3’s Guy Gannett, and Channel 6’s Henry Rines.

Wallace White would not have known many of them. He’d still, however, be intrigued by the role each of them played in navigating the trail he initially helped to blaze.


Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@myfairpoint.net

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1 Comment

  1. Denny Shute also introduced ligislation that led to the formation of the Town of Carrabassett Valley
    Thank you Denny

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