Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City

1 On the Very Air We Breathe

 one On the Very Air We Breathe Dr. Clayton E. Crosland, associate vice president of one of the Southeast’s finest finishing schools,wasn’t precisely sure what to say,but he did not wish to be misunderstood. “This is Ward-Belmont, Nashville,” he said, a bit too loudly, into his “microphone .” The contraption wasn’t entirely foreign—quite like a telephone without the ear-piece—but it was most modern. After a pause, Crosland spelled out the name of the school, as if to make sure: “W-A-R-D—B-E-L-M-O-N-T.” He continued, “We have today installed a radio sending station and will tonight broadcast the concert by Mr. Philip Gordon, the distinguished American pianist.” Crosland may have been on the air,but he was also on a stage.In the auditorium before him,a large gathering of poised young ladies in ruffles and bows, some attended by their even more put together mothers and fathers, canted forward in hushed curiosity, taking it on faith that Dr. Crosland’s voice was, in fact,spiriting out through the open air and reaching somebody—up to two hundred miles away, they’d been led to understand. Center stage, beneath a grand piano, sat two more microphones. Black cables converged at stage left, where a rolltop desk held glowing vacuum tubes and black machinery, all connected to a wire that ran out into a hallway and up to the roof. i-xx_1-286_Havi.indd 1 7/17/07 10:27:33 AM  —air castle of the south The assembler of this electrical conduit, a sixteen-year-old with a severe haircutandalong jaw,stoodofftotheside.Hewaslisteningthroughhardplastic headphonespluggedintoawarmmonitoringamplifierofhisownconstruction. John H. DeWitt Jr., “Jack” as he was called, was well known to Crosland and the other school officials. He lived just a block away, in the shady green bower of Belmont Heights, a brow of hill capped by the wedding-cake splendor of Ward-Belmont’s campus with its fountains and statues. By this evening, in the spring of 1922,he was well established as the local radio boy.The broadcasting antennahebuiltinhisbackyardwasaneighborhoodlandmark.Herodearound onabicycleriggedwithelectricalgearandaspiderwebantenna,listeningtohis friends transmit from his homebuilt sending station. Jack had already visited the Ward-Belmont campus two years before, when he demonstrated his wireless telegraph to the girls of the Agora Club.He had tuned in and decoded odd, buzzing dots and dashes from as far away as the Great Lakes,which the young ladies had found “novel and unusual.” Moreover, as Dr. Crosland well knew, Jack’s family meant a great deal to the school itself. His mother was Rebekah Williams Ward, whose father William was the Ward in Ward-Belmont. He had founded Ward Seminary, a finishing school that merged in 1913 with Belmont School. Hailed as one of the finest academies for Southern women,Ward-Belmont rarely trafficked in things futuristic,yet here it was making local history.WDAA,as it was called, was the third radio station licensed in Tennessee and the first in Nashville. The recital by Mr.Gordon was enthusiastically received,and before it was over four or five messages came in through the school’s telephone switchboard from people who were picking up the program clearly and with great satisfaction. The news sent a flush of surprise and wonder through the auditorium. Invisible waves really were spreading out from the school’s roof like ripples in an ethereal pond— racing north right through the walls of the sturdy homes on Sixteenth and Seventeenth Avenues and over the noisy automobile and trolley traffic of downtown.They rippled east,across Centennial Park with its mute, majestic Parthenon; west, across the Civil War battlements of Fort Negley; and south, to Franklin, Brentwood, and dozens of surrounding burgs. The waves radiated out to and over the city’s hilly perimeter and across vast acreages of the farms, verdant forests, and meandering creeks of Middle Tennessee. They crackled against the bell towers of the city’s mighty universities —all-white Vanderbilt and all-black Fisk. They outran the steam locomotives that pulled passengers and freight out of the city toward Cincinnati, i-xx_1-286_Havi.indd 2 7/17/07 10:27:33 AM Louisville,St.Louis,Atlanta,and points beyond.They pierced the miasma of oily smog that roiled up out of the railroad gulch and cloaked the clock tower of Union Station. They ricocheted off the broad shingle roof of the...