By: Jeff Stein (Making Waves) -- In the spring of 1922, some Marshalltown sports enthusiasts strung a cable from KFJB radio studio to Franklin Field, three blocks away, and broadcast a track and field meet - the first live remote broadcast of a sporting event in Iowa. However, even these young pioneers could never have imagined that 60 years later, an Iowa television station would be the first local station in America to originate an NCAA football broadcast and send it back to the station via satellite. It seems that Iowa broadcasters have always satisfied sports fans' desires with groundbreaking programming. While Marshalltown's KFJB was not officially licensed until June 2, 1923, the station was broadcasting regularly more than a year before that. Earl Peak and his partner in the Marshall Electric Company, A.J. Curtis, encouraged the efforts of two of their employees in developing an audio receiving station. Merle Easter and Chaunchy Hoover had been experimenting with a code signal station in the back of the Marshall Electric building. It was taking two long to encode and decode messages, so Easter added a tube to allow audio transmission to take place so he could more quickly communicate with a fellow enthusiast in Ames. The homemade effort soon became one of the first radio stations in Iowa. Earl Peak had experience working with various rural telephone companies, and had founded Marshall Electric in 1914. In May 1922, the skill of these young men led them to try something new. It seemed like a natural progression to them, but no one had every tried it before. Earl's son Eugene, who still lives in Marshalltown, was 10 years old at the time, but had already spent much time hanging around his father's business. He recalls personally being one of those who helped string an audio line from the business, down West Main Street for three blocks to the new athletic facilities. This track meet is the earliest recorded notation of a live remote broadcast of a sporting event in Iowa, and perhaps the first of a track meet anywhere in the country. "We pu7t the line in," Eugene Peak remembers, "and in the fall of 1922, we did high school football from Franklin Field." In U.S. radio history; there is no documentation of any other high school football game being broadcast live from the field earlier than this, making KFJB's high school football broadcast the first of their kind. Soon after the station began broadcasting high school football and basketball games throughout the region, using telephone lines to send the signal back to the station - a practice still in common use today. In the days before press boxes, KFJB sports announcers would carry their own "portable press box" to games - sheets of plywood that could be quickly assembled to create a "booth" in the stands to limit the amount of crowd noise that came over the air and provide some shelter for the announcer. Live coverage of sporting events quickly became a favorite source of programming, not only to members of the audience but for broadcasters, as well. The audience could experience the athletic event without having to travel to see it in person, while the broadcaster had a ready source of inexpensive programming to fill air time.
By: Jeff Stein
