The First Martyr to the Radio: The Story of Lester Wolf

Speaker 1: I don’t know that.

Speaker 2: This is Leehabibe, and this is Our American Stories. In the early 1920s, a brand new innovation swept across America. It was audible, it was immediate, and as you’ll soon hear, dangerous. We’re talking about broadcast radio. Here to share the story of the early days of radio and the dramatic tale of Lester Wolfe, a nineteen-year-old radio tech who dropped out of high school to make a name for himself at WOK in the suburbs of Chicago, is Robert Anderson, his great-grandnephew. Let’s get into this story. Take it away.

Speaker 1: Robert, in Homewood, Illinois, a south suburb of Chicago. At the time, it was a community of about 2,000 people. Homewould actually had one of those radio stations in the early days of commercial broadcasting. The name of the station, the call letters WOK Radio, 1380 on your AM dial. WOK had come into existence in 1925, owned and operated by Neutraround Manufacturing Company, which made radio receivers—bulky, big, expensive, difficult to operate. WOK, like most radio stations at that time—even the stations in bigger cities like Chicago or New York—it was difficult to fill the time during the day with programming. There were no phonographs hooked up to mixers that would take a signal to a transmitter and be able to play a record on the air. It didn’t exist.

Speaker 2: Then.

Speaker 1: There were no talk shows; there were no broadcasts of news every hour. What do you put on the air for people to listen to? Well, a common program for stations all over the country and for WOK in Homewood was to broadcast from local dance halls and orchestra halls. And these are the programs that people were fascinated by. This is wireless telegraphy. This was a phenomenon. This is like magic. You turn on a box that’s hooked up to a power source and you can hear something. A matter of a short walk from the WOK transmitter, a family named the Wolf family lived on Dixie Highway, and the youngest of two boys to the Wolf family was Lester J. Wolf. In 1926, Leicester turned nineteen years old. He was fascinated by this new electronics-based industry of radio broadcasting. Lester was so enamored with local radio station that he actually dropped out of high school. His future was set. He was known as the nineteen-year-old kid who gave up school to learn about electronics and spent every hour that he could at the local radio station WOKA, helping them put their remote broadcast on the air. Those who knew him knew that Lester J. Woolf was the life of the party even when he was a kid. He had a pet goose named Hiram that all of the neighbors laughed about and enjoyed seeing him play with. He was the one cracking jokes, the one making fun of things, the one who had constant energy. He was always the life of the party, the kid who had something fun or funny to say, and he had the good looks to go along with that effervescent personality. Full had dark hair, tall, good-looking skin, kid. He was a musician. He played the ukulele. He was comfortable in public settings. He could ham it up. He enjoyed being the center of attention. He was always aiming to please. The equipment was primitive and dangerous—at least, potentially dangerous. WKA was powered by 5,000 small wet batteries. Batteries like in your grandfather’s old car. That could be potentially dangerous in a car; certainly, 5,000 wet batteries and a primitive radio station could also be potentially very dangerous. And the harnessing of the electricity generated by the batteries was also primitive and something to be very careful around. The circuit breakers really didn’t function all that safely. There weren’t checks and balances built into the equipment because the equipment was brand new technology. It wasn’t very advanced at all. Late that Saturday night on July 10th, 1926, it was a clean broadcast for WOK. They had the line hooked up to Hyde Park in Chicago, maybe some twenty, twenty-five miles away, and the dance band was coming in loud and clear, and the people listening in Homewood were enjoying the program, and they were enjoying it so much at the dance hall that there was thunderous applause that not only almost brought the house down, but it brought a fuse down back at WOK in Homewood. The fuse blew, and the station immediately went off the air; and those late Saturday night technicians were probably half asleep, and suddenly they’re wide awake. “We’re off the air!” That little panic sets in, and young Lester Wolf is among the crew there that night. Johnny-on-the-spot chance to impress the bosses. So, Lester takes it upon himself to get the station back on the air, change that fuse, and save the day. Little did he know what was going to happen. He charges into the room where the equipment that had been affected is located, by those 5,000 wet batteries. He puts in the new fuse, but having forgotten to take down the power of the station first, he becomes a conduit. He completes the circuit with his body. He has 65,000 volts of power go through his body, and he collapses is to the floor. He falls to the floor; he bounces right back up. He says, “I’m okay,” and he collapses again. This time he doesn’t get back up. Lester J. Wolf is on the floor of the radio station, dead at the age of nineteen. Two days after the tragedy, the WOKA studio located in Hyde Park received a telegram from WRNY Radio in New York from a Charles Isaacson. It was a short telegram message that said, “We want to do something in the industry to memorialize Lester J. Wolf, the first martyr to radio,” which is what he was already being called around this fledgling, close-knit industry around the country. Would family approve fundraising effort to build a monument for Lester? They liked the idea of some sort of a monument because the word had gotten around the country that something terrible happened at a radio station in Chicago and a nineteen-year-old has died as a result of a terrible accident. The goal was $10,000 in 1926. That was a big goal. The Neutrolound Company that owned WOK Radio in Homewood, where Lester worked and died, came up with the initial $1,000 to get the effort started. Other money came in from radio operators around the country. But after that, nothing—no money, no word about the money. The money never surfaced; someone absconded with it. It was gone. So the memorial for Lester J. Wolf never got built, but there is a memorial of sorts at Homewood Memorial Gardens Cemetery, a short distance from where Lester both lived and where he died at WOKA. There is on his tombstone a reference to him being the first to die in service at a radio station. His tombstone references Lester J. Wolf, born 1907, died 1926, while in service to WOK Radio. Lester J. Wolfe is the first martyr to radio.

Speaker 2: Had a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by John Elfner. He’s a history teacher in Illinois. The story of Lester J. Wolfe here on Our American Stories.