Vacant combination radio station and school in KY

Beattyville Grade School - WBKY Radio Station, Beattyville Kentucky

Date added: January 02, 2023 Categories: Kentucky Communications Facility School

View looking north onto the entire front facade

The Beattyville Grade School was built in 1926. The school housed not only students until its closure in 1967, but also housed the first public educational radio station in the United States, WBKY, aimed at rural communities from 1940-1941.

This parcel of land prior to 1920 served as the site for the Ninaweb Inn, which was known as the finest lodging establishment of Beattyville. According to local documentation, the Ninaweb was sold on November 26, 1907 by Mary P. Lyon and her husband F.G. Lyon to Sam Darch for the sum of $10,000. On August 27, 1920 the Ninaweb Inn was sold by J.F. Sutton and William Goocey, Executors of the last will and testament of Samuel Darch to A. B. Hoskins and the rest of the Trustees of Beattyville Graded Common Schools District and their successors in that office. The Ninaweb was torn down and some of the materials were used in the construction of the Beattyville Grade School, whose cornerstone was laid in 1926.

Following the school closing in 1967, the building was used by the Lee County Board of Education for the site of their offices. It was vacated around the turn of the century as the Board built a new office building. They continue to own the old Beattyville Grade School and maintain it accordingly.

The Beginnings of WBKY

The beginnings of radio technology in the United States roughly coincided with the turn of the previous century. By the early 1920s, radio communication in urban areas was beginning as a commercial enterprise, giving the public an increasing ability to access information and entertainment. The University of Kentucky initiated radio broadcasting in 1929 in cooperation with WHAS radio in Louisville. Each weekday, live musical and educational programs were broadcast from the campus studios over WHAS. However, rural areas were much further behind in terms of both access to radio stations and the capability to listen to the radio if a station existed.

WBKY's significance comes less because it was a great success, and more because it opened the doors for rural, public, educational programming, influencing educational broadcasting across the United States:

"Using listening centers for reception, this educational station was the dream and creation of Elmer C. Sulzer, who was then director of radio for the University of Kentucky and who later won the George Foster Peabody Award. Sulzer's idea of establishing listening centers in the Kentucky mountains grew out of a 1930 census which showed that there were eleven radio sets in one county, eight in another, and still fewer in others.

Elmer Sulzer saw an opportunity to do some good with the University of Kentucky broadcasts from their studios in Lexington, and in 1933 he began to install radio sets in homes and stores throughout the entire mountain area. These battery-operated sets were the gift of The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times. As the stocky, energetic Sulzer trudged his way from cabin to cabin carrying the first radio sets, a dream began to grow in his mind-a dream of establishing an educational station in the mountains with programs geared to the particular needs of the local people." "Educational Radio's First Rural Radio Station": Public Telecommunication Review. Sept.-Oct. 1979

Mr. Sulzer's idea to bring information and entertainment to rural areas gained traction in the late 1930s. Using listening centers, which were specified locations at which locals could gather to hear radio programming, Sulzer wanted to reach into the heart of Appalachia. "These Mountain Listening Centers caught on in the nation's capital, most notably with Eleanor Roosevelt, who visited campus at least once to show her support for Sulzer and to congratulate him on his excellence-in-broadcasting Peabody Award, then and now the most coveted award in radio." Mr. Sulzer's award-winning performance came about because of a series of informational programs he brought to the air about venereal disease, a very controversial topic in those days.

Elmer Sulzer managed to secure in 1940 one of five stations reserved on the FM band for educational programming for his next endeavor into Appalachia. He hired Ruth Foxx Newborg, a former student of his, to be the programmer and manager of station WBKY in Beattyville, Kentucky. This station would have ties to Lexington and Louisville, but its goal was to be the local Appalachian news engine that brought local and educational programming to the people of the mountains.

WBKY - A Reality

Ms. Newborg gives two exceptionally vivid first-person accounts of the station's operation. One is the article cited here in the Public Telecommunication Review; the other is the oral history archive of Ms. Newborg that is housed at the M.I. King Library on the University of Kentucky's Campus. These two accounts by Ms. Newborg are exceptional and telling of the effort brought to this station by everyone in Lee County.

Ms. Newborg arrived in Lee County a few weeks before the opening of the station. "WBKY was located in the Beattyville Grade School, which stood on a hill off Main Street. The auditorium was two stories high, with a stage at one end which served as the main studio. On the second floor, a narrow corridor ran behind the stage, which a small room at each end. The first room was my office and doubled as a studio for individual speakers. The far room housed the small transmitter designed by Orrin Towner, chief engineer of WHAS. A large window faced the stage below, and it was from there that I directed the programs in the method I had been taught."

The dedication for the radio station occurred on Thursday, October 17, 1940, in Beattyville. The Beattyville Enterprise ran a banner in the paper reading "Congratulations! Radio Station WBKY - The First Educational Station in the United States Ever to be Established to Serve a Rural Community." The Louisville Courier-Journal ran a similar headline and had an article describing the dedication programming: "Talks by educators, townspeople, a technician, and music by a hill billy band were included in the inaugural broadcast of Kentucky's newest radio station... (The station) will be operated in cooperation with the Lee County Board of Education in promoting the educational and cultural affairs of the county." Even the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, James Lawrence Fly, wrote a congratulatory letter that was read on the air.

The standard programming included musical guests from around the area as well as notable speakers from the community delivering farming news, weather, news, sports, conservation, and foresting news. Other regular programming included sermons and a type of local radio soap opera which chronicled life in Lee County from a typical family's perspective. Beattyville became the most radio-oriented small town in the country. And no one heard them.

The Demise of WBKY

The effort continued as Mr. Sulzer turned to the National Youth Administration to help fund his effort to place receivers around Lee County and in all of the schools. However, the topography of the land made it extremely difficult for any standard receivers to work and pick up much more than a very weak signal. The cost and difficulty in manufacturing a higher quality receiver during WWII made the effort futile in the long run. Citizens from across the county were eager to hear the programming since many of them or their relatives had participated in the creation of the material that was broadcast, but despite those eager to hear the station, it was doomed to failure. On Friday, June 27, 1941, the station broadcast for the final time.

The demise of WBKY led to the formation of WUKY, Lexington's public radio station. WBKY was the precursor to WUKY and a monument on the University of Kentucky's campus marks the transition. Mr. Sulzer ran the station for a few years but in 1952 left for Indiana University where he started their broadcasting school. There he was credited for inventing a relay system that help FM radio spread nationwide. In the early day of FM radio, at a time when AM frequencies were dominant, relaying Indiana football and basketball games to the local affiliates was a top priority. Sulzer's achievement in this task is not only journalistically important from a broadcast radio perspective, but it changed the sports atmosphere across Indiana and across the county as people became able to hear their favorite teams live on the radio.

Ms. Foxx Newborg left Beattyville in 1941 and went on to become a community editor of a commercial station in Atlanta, Georgia. She writes: "Elmer G. Sulzer's dream did not die in 1941. It pointed the path to the possibilities of broadcasting as a medium of education and culture to a vast audience that needed it and wanted it as a means to a better life. Many future educational stations would follow that path."

Building Description

Beattyville Grade School is located in the Town Hill Neighborhood. Town Hill and the adjacent downtown commercial district have been functionally intertwined since the late 1800s. This oldest neighborhood in Beattyville has a mixture of homes constructed starting from the late 1800s. In fact, many of the residents of Town Hill are direct descendants of the founding fathers of the business district and many of them are actively involved in operating businesses there. The vitality of the business district is tied to the past, present and future connectivity to the residents of Town Hill, both literally and figuratively.

Beattyville Grade School has a cast-in-place concrete foundation on the first floor and brick wall on the upper two floors. Double-hung windows in groups of three surrounded the building with limestone sills and lentils of soldier-coursed brick. From the front, both the left and right side of the building, have decorative brick panels framed in soldier-coursed brick with stone highlights in the corners. The main entrance to the building had a wall-mounted porch of simple construction that protected the stone steps up to the main door. The window pattern continues on both the left and right side of the building and on the third story of the school. The gymnasium, a two-story structure on the rear of the building, has Palladian windows overlooking the neighborhood.

Dual panel doors marked the three entrances to the building on the front, left, and right sides of the school. The cast-in-place foundation is scored to resemble a higher-quality limestone look. A limestone cornerstone marks the date of construction, 1926. Over the entrance, a large flag pole extended into the air.

The interior plan of the school is shaped like the letter "I", turned 90 degrees. The first (foundation level) floor is made of concrete and many of the mechanical rooms are located on this floor. Included on this floor is the kitchen and gymnasium, which doubled as the cafeteria, as well as the stage. Some classrooms also are on this floor and face the main entrance. On both the top and bottom of the "I" are classrooms and restrooms on each floor, though only the first-floor restrooms are original to the building. In 1926, water was pumped uphill from the Kentucky River to flush the restrooms on the first floor. Subsequent restrooms were added with the expansion of local water and sewer services.

The second floor's main hardwood hallway runs the length of the building. On the front side of the building was the principal's office, whose prominent moldings surely must be remnants from the Ninaweb Inn. The intricate fluting of the molding and dentils was not in line with the other more industrial and more period-specific details of the building. Across from the principal's office was a knee wall that overlooked the gymnasium. This also served as spectator seating for basketball games. From this level, one directly faced the Palladian windows of the gymnasium, and could see the stage area as well. As child safety became a greater issue, this knee wall was raised to the ceiling and there is currently no visual access from the second floor to the gymnasium beside a small window that was left to let the principal to have some visual access to the gymnasium/cafeteria below. Many classrooms were also on this level, and spanned the area roughly bounded by the double-hung windows in groups of three. Access to WBKY was also on this level, above the stage. Above the stage on the left was the WBKY programming studio, still covered in acoustic tile. A small window in the studio allowed visual access to musical acts and other acts that performed on the stage. On the right was the area where the transmitter was kept.

The third-floor classrooms were on the front and sides of the building, similar to the other floors. Windows also lined the main hallway and overlooked the roof of the gymnasium. All stairwells had heavy wood balusters and handrails. The base molding in all hallways and classrooms was tall, six- to eight-inch-wide stained wood. The classrooms had plaster ceilings and hardwood floors typical of school construction of this time. As the Board of Education occupied the building, they made some interior enhancements to the space. Floating commercial carpeting was added to some rooms and drop ceilings with fluorescent lights were added in some offices. Along with the windows, these are the most significant of the changes that affect the building's interior.