Waco History Podcast

This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Kim Patterson. Pirate radio stations in the U.S. were born when President Taft initiated federal regulation of the airwaves in 1912. Navy ships had been complaining that unlicensed broadcasters were interfering with their transmissions. Even with the new laws in place, pirate stations continued to pop up all over the country, for radio was still relatively new and full of magic and possibilities, and equipment was easy to build. Charles Armstrong recalls the influence of his after-school stops by a local radio store in Waco in the thirties: "There was a little shop down on the corner of Thirteenth and Clay, and I'd just go by there on the way home from school and go and talk to him. I was real interested in it. And when they'd have the boxing matches they had, you know, way back there, well, a lot of people was interested in them, and I despised them. And so I made me an old device I could kn