History at the Crystal Ballroom
Don Day | November 19, 2008The History of Idaho Broadcasting Foundation will hold a special meeting at the Crystal Ballroom – complete with lunch! Cool event to celebrate 80 years of KIDO. Hurry! Art needs an RSVP by 3pm today
Full details after the jump
The History of Idaho Broadcasting Foundation
is Pleased to Announce…
Our next Meeting is at the Crystal Ball Room
This Friday November 21st from 11:30 A.M-1:30 P.M.
The occasion is the 80th Anniversary of the sign-on of KIDO Radio which took place November 11, 1928! Of course, KIDO evolved from 7YA and commercial station KFAU, which were operated by Boise High School from 1920 to 1928.
The Crystal Ball Room is located on the mezzanine (2nd Floor) of the Hoff Building at 8th & Bannock in Boise, the former Hotel Boise. KIDO Radio’s AM & FM studios were located there from 1931-1949 in 3 different locations.
Our Program will be a live discussion and tour hosted by 3 people who actually worked at KIDO while their studios were at Hotel Boise. Attending this Friday are:
Jim Johntz Chief Engineer for KIDO AM & FM in the 1940s
R.W. Egelston Transmitter Engineer in the early 1940s
Pete Furno Announcer at KIDO in the late 1940s
We’ve talked with all of these folks and they have lots of KIDO history to share with us. Anyone else who worked at KIDO is welcome to attend and add their comments too. After lunch we will take a “walking tour” to locate KIDO’s 1931 basement studios, and their FM studios, upstairs on the 9th Floor.
Cost for the lunch is $16 per person (paid by check or cash before the meal).
Lunch includes
Lasagna
Tossed Salad w/dressings
Garlic Bread
Dessert (cookies)
Coffee, water, pink lemonade
China service and Full Staffing for the event
We will bring old photos of KIDO as well as newspaper articles with pictures of the “mezzanine studios” when they were located there. We hope all past and present folks from KIDO can attend. You can park for a fee in the lot North of the Hotel or in any of the other paid lots or garages. Metered parking is available too.
To eat lunch, we need your RSVP by 3:00 p.m. Wednesday November 19th, and need a final count by Noon Thursday. Thank You! We hope to see you there!
To RSVP - please call Art Gregory at 465-8007
or email us at pawzup@Qwest.net
Hi folks, just wanted to let you know Rockwell has added the photos and the Friday KIDO meeting on our website.
This was a historic meeting in that we were there in the same room celebrating 1928 KIDO’s sign-on just like they were 60 years earlier in November of 1948 when KIDO was only 20 years old. Pete Furno was there for both events and spoke on Friday, as did 4 other KIDO Pioneers.
They also all spoke about their “boss,” an extraordinary WOMAN – who just happened to start the first commercial Radio station in Boise, the first FM station in Idaho, and for all practical purposes the first REAL TV station (not counting the approximately two months Channel 6 KFXD-TV was on the air, but mostly only with a test pattern).
Georgia Marie Newport of Parma became Georgia Phillips in 1927, and then Georgia M. Davidson in 1946 after her husband “Kiddo” Phillips died in 1942. He was only 42 by the way, and she had two young daughters.
The courage this woman must have had was unbelievable, and then she put it all on the line to start Channel 7, and then to move it Deer Point and then continue to keep it on the air.
To do so, she sold KIDO radio in 1959 to Bill Boeing, son of the founder of the Aircraft Company in Seattle. On the website, you can here 83-year-old Jack Link (no relation to the Beef Jerky Company) speak of his assocation with KIDO. He worked for Georgia when Channel 7 signed on, when to KING Radio fr a few years, then got hired by Bill Boeing to come back to Boise and run KIDO when they bought it from Georgia in 1959. Almost 50 years later, he still works for Bill Boeing and I talked with him Thursday from Seattle. click here! http://www.historyofidahobroadcasting.org
Art