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 On One White Had Been Proposing Since 1923, One That Set Up A Communications Commission That Has Been The Magna Carta For Broadcast Regulation Since Then.

It was the late fall of 1926, just 85 years ago at this time. The sector of radio, the first “WWW” — for what RCA then called its “World Wide Wireless” — was in chaos. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s attempt to regulate it was struck down by a federal Court. The outcome of this was that the central authority could not forestall 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 mostly on one White had been proposing since 1923, one that set up a communications commission which has been the magna carta for broadcast regulation 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 state’s leading fan of legislation to meaningfully control the new medium. The capstone of these efforts came in late 1926 and early 1927 in the result of the Fed court call that struck down Hoover’s efforts to intervene. 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 outstanding figures carrying out the legacy. Here’s a glance at only a few of them.

Denny Shute : The name of this front runner in both radio and early TELEVISION in Maine has most lately been invoked in this fall’s debate over same-day voting. Shute, as GOP Senate chair of the legislature’s Election Laws Panel, backed the original measure for same day voting in 1973. (Shute would be stunned by this year’s vigorous interest in the law. In 1973, neither party discussed its enactment. This was due to Court viewpoints that seemed to need it.)

More eventful to Shute nonetheless , than his support 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 TELEVISION 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 on air in South Paris in 1955. Shute did the same in 1959 for WKTJ in Farmington, a community which sent Shute to Augusta for three lawmaking terms in the latter 1960s and early 1970s. In his first term in the Maine House, Shute became the GOP’s nominee for Congress in 1968. As Head honcho of the Secretary of Country’s Election Division in 1969-’70, Shute was an early fan of voting machines, which had only been legalized in Maine in 1967.

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

Stunned by the sudden death at age 30 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 till his dying 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 50 years. But it wasn’t just his memory but also his amiable 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 city will ever have.”

Though Fixaris was sports anchor at Channel 13 from 1965 to 1995, his career was book-ended by a spread of on-air positions in Portland and Lewiston radio, his last five years as co-host of WJAB’s “Morning Jab” sports talk show. All though his career, Fixaris was a major booster of both school and professional sports groups alike. (A corresponding role, that of a play-by-play broadcaster, was in the 1940s and ’50 ‘ 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 latter 1980s.

Beginning in 1963 till his death in 2003 — braving an clear heart attack while broadcasting on the air — Anderson was one of the largest draws of Southern Maine radio, helping also to stage concert appearances for some of the state’s leading rock performers. At one top in his career in the latter 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 percent local share and just about 100 percent of all Portland area teenagers.

Notwithstanding carrying the enormous stick “Duke” title, Anderson spoke softly. Personally, like Fixaris, Anderson was both relaxed and unpretentious, this in a business not necessarily known for humbleness. It’s one of the explanations his career endured so long, even into a broadcasting world challenged by various new media options.

Shute, Fixaris, and Anderson are by no means the only meriting honorees in a Maine TELEVISION or Radio Hall of Fame. On the other side of the microphone tower many who also played a critical 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, creator of Channels five and eight, Channel 13′s Guy Gannett, and Channel 6′s Henry Rines.

Wallace White wouldn’t have known many of them. He’d still nevertheless , be intrigued by the role every one of them played in navigating the trail he initially helped to blaze, writes tagza.com.