Hours of historic St. Louis radio broadcasts are being added to the Library of Congress thanks to the work of Frank Absher, executive director of the St. Louis Media History Foundation. Absher says that the broadcasts accepted by the federal archive include such nuggets as the KMOX broadcast of the end of Prohibition in April of 1933, recorded live from the Anheuser-Busch brewery and fed to the CBS Network, and Harry Caray covering the sale of the Cardinals on KXOK in 1947.
But it’s not all seminal moments. Absher says the Library of Congress was interested in the snippets of day-to-day life that can be glimpsed in the recordings. “Their goal, from the Library of Congress perspective, is to get a good representation of what life was like, which has also been our goal,” he says. “So if you listen to an aircheck from KXOK, top-40 radio in the 1960s, you will hear what they were talking about, what they were advertising, all that sort of stuff.”
Absher, himself a former KMOX announcer, has been working to preserve St. Louis radio history since 1987. He’s scoured the country for what are known as airchecks, gathering countless hours of local stations and DJs at work. A seed grant from the Missouri Humanities Council and matching private donations allowed him to digitize the recordings, which in many cases existed as electronic transcriptions, or ETs—discs that are 16 inches in diameter and need a special turntable to play…