City Tuned To Radio Pioneer

On September 22, 1927, pioneer Tampa radio station WDAE transmitted the area's first live network sports coverage, a heavyweight bout between champion Gene Tunney and challenger Jack Dempsey, live from Solider Field in Chicago. The response was tremendous.

"Eardrums of 40,000 to 50,000 Tampans will be tuned in tonight on the biggest sporting event in modern history," the Tampa Daily Times speculated that day. "Interest in the bout has the fever pitch attendant to a national election. And everyone who can but borrow or build a radio is preparing to shut himself away from business and domestic cares with a set of ear phones or a loudspeaker and drink in the details of the encounter."

That night 1,000 guests attended an invitation-only affair sponsored by the Studebaker Gulf Sales Co.  There were "hundreds of private parties" about town, and more than 10,000 fans jammed the streets adjacent to the Tampa Times building to hear sportscaster Graham McNamee call the fight over loudspeakers. The resulting chaos forced traffic to be rerouted and streetcars halted.

By that winter, WDAE had moved from Bay Isles to a bungalow on the Marjorie Park Yacht Basin and was broadcasting moonlight concerts by Harold Bachman's Million Dollar Band, direct from the Plant Park band shell. Longtime air personality "Salty" Sol Fleischman was broadcasting from the Moulin Rouge Night Club on 22nd Street one Saturday night when the place was raided on suspicions of illegal gambling. Claude Harris' Band was the evening's featured entertainment, and the show went on as usual, without any on-air mention of the incident.

One of the medium's darker moments took place in November of that year, when the station conducted another remote broadcast, this one from Raiford State Prison to cover the execution of convicted ax murderer Benjamin Franklin Levins. Levins had been the subject of an attempted lynching while in custody at the Hillsborough County Jail on Pierce Street the previous May, and by the time the National Guard dispersed the crowd, five people were dead and nearly 40 had been wounded.

Tampa society again made national news when more than 60 stations carried the first nationwide broadcast of the Gasparilla Coronation Ball on February 2, 1937.