KFSG

Say a Little Prayer for the History of KFSG

(May 15, 2003) LARadio is not only dedicated to providing the most current news about Southland radio, but also preserving the rich history of the past. Jim Hilliker loves the history of L.A. radio and has frequently provided insight into the evolution of station frequencies, formats and antennas. Today he looks back at KFSG, one of the earliest stations in town. His Herculean effort provides a story that would rival any of those in today's tabloids.

The Legend and Legacy of KFSG
Pioneer L.A. Christian Station Stops Broadcasting After 79 Years
By Jim Hilliker, ex-KNOB, KYMS

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SETTING HISTORY STRAIGHT

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*Third, KFSG owner Aimee Semple McPhersonMcPherson was still the only woman at that time to own a station, which may have been the case for many years. She was also most certainly the first woman to own and operate a Christian radio station.

*Finally, I wanted to clear up some false information given in a book by one of McPherson's biographers in 1993. The author stated that every morning, Aimee Semple McPhersonMcPherson and her listeners for helping during the emergency.

SISTER AIMEE AND HER CHURCH
McPherson (1890-1944). Her story has been told numerous times in at least 7 biographies published over the years, along with several Web sites that tell about her life and times. She founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a Pentecostal mission, and settled in Los Angeles in 1918. (The church was officially incorporated as a Protestant denomination in 1928). Between, 1920 and 1922, Aimee traveled with her mother on a non-stop series of evangelistic services. The purpose of those trips was to preach the word of God and raise money to build her home church in the Echo Park area of L.A., at 1100 Glendale Boulevard. With the cash donations, her 5300-seat church, Angelus Temple, opened on January 1, 1923 for $1.2 million dollars. It was dedicated to service and was debt-free. One year later, the church would boast its own radio station.

Sister Aimee, as her followers called her, was no stranger to innovation and controversy. Married three times, she was widowed and divorced twice. Her third marriage took place, even though it was against her religion to marry if a divorced spouse was still alive. One Web site on her life claims that Aimee McPherson

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ESTABLISHMENT OF A NEW LOS ANGELES RADIO STATION
Aimee knew in 1922 she wanted to spread the word of God and bring people to her church through the use of radio, which was first gaining popularity at the time. The official church history states that she was the first woman to preach a sermon over the radio in April of 1922, on the Rockridge radio station (KZY) in Oakland, California. This station went off the air in 1923, and did not become KNEW, as the KFSG history Web site has written.

With about 500 radio stations in the country in 1923, Aimee gained more radio experience on station KHJ, which donated time on Sunday mornings to Protestant preachers. This helped her decide to put her own radio station on the air. The experts told Aimee there were about 200,000 radio sets within 100 miles of Los Angeles, with more being built and sold every day. Operators of other Los Angeles radio stations advised McPherson

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Scarce had the station come on the air, till telegrams and dispatches began to arrive from Arizona, Colorado, Canada and the Mexican border, stating that the program was being received as clearly as though the listeners-in were seated in the Temple.

STATE PRESS AND CLERGY OFFICIATE

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When KFSG first began broadcasting, a group of Christians formed a Radio Missionary Society for the station. Each member took a day to pay back the pastor, making it a tribute to a loved one, a cherished event or in appreciation for the broadcasts. In this manner, KFSG was sponsored for many years, solely by its listeners and was non-commercial. Sister Aimee also decided to get word out about KFSG and broadcasting her church services in a unique way. Since not every household had a radio at that time, she set up tents around various Southern California communities, where large groups of people gathered to hear KFSG. For some, it was also their first time listening to a radio.


LISTENERS FROM NEAR AND FAR

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The letters from Los Angeles area listeners of the 1920s are just as fascinating, thanking KFSG for broadcasting the church services for shut-ins, the Sunshine Hour program every morning, or simply the sounds from the Angelus Temple choir and band. These are just a few of the many thousands of letters received by KFSG during its early years. It was fairly typical then for other radio stations in L.A. and across the U.S. to also get flooded with letters and cards reporting reception of their signals in those days, from fairly great distances.


KFSG was then assigned to 1080 on the AM dial and on 1090 from April 1925 to February 1928. KFI was at 640, KHJ was at 740 and KNX was on approximately 833 kilocycles, and 890 by the end of 1924. If Aimee was allowing KFSG to use other frequencies other than the one she was assigned to broadcast on, she was not alone. There were plenty of newspaper stories in the mid-1920s, especially in larger eastern cities, about radio stations moving up or down the dial to escape interference from other stations. Whatever took place possibly kept happening between 1924 and sometime in 1925. There must have been some warning from the Department of Commerce that KFSG could lose its license if the station continued breaking the rules, but we have no date of such an incident.

In response to these warnings from the radio regulators, at some point, a frustrated Mrs. McPherson fired off an angry telegram to Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. He was in charge of regulating radio broadcasting at the time, before he was elected President of the United States in November of 1928. The telegram to Hoover from Sister Aimee reportedly said:

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McPherson telegram to Hoover is difficult. All who have written on Hoover, the Department of Commerce and radio mention the McPhersonMcPhersonMcPhersonMcPherson

In the radio speech from 1945, the words Hoover spoke are nearly the same as in his memoirs, except for the last three sentences of the telegram, which he read this way:

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As for the exact date or year this incident took place, the radio history books and internet articles on McPhersonMcPhersonMcPherson, as owner of KFSG giving the orders on how to run the station.

Not long after McPherson

It's also interesting to note that the story about the telegram McPherson sent to Hoover is never mentioned once in any of the biographies or other books about Aimee Semple McPherson


During the years 1924 and 1925, KFSG became well established as a reliable broadcaster and popular station in Los Angeles and in distant states. A couple of books on McPherson

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THE KIDNAPPING STORY HEARD ROUND THE WORLD
On May 18, 1926, Aimee went for a swim at Ocean Park, between Santa Monica and Venice, during a day of relaxing at the beach and writing some sermons. Her secretary stayed behind on the sand, while Aimee was swimming. She was not seen again all day. At first, it was feared that McPhersonMcPherson claimed she had been held captive.

With the earlier gossip about Kenneth Ormiston and Aimee having a secret romance, there were newspaper and police reports that a woman who looked like Aimee Semple McPherson had been seen with the former KFSG engineer, spending time inside a cottage in Carmel, CA and other towns up and down the coast during McPhersonMcPherson and Ormiston had been seen checking into the same hotels at various times in California, prior to the alleged kidnapping. Thomas also stated that a grocery receipt signed by McPherson was found in the Carmel cottage where it appears Aimee had met Ormiston during the time she was allegedly kidnapped. Several eyewitnesses testified that they saw the two together during that time. Suspicion led to a Grand Jury investigation in L.A., with charges of perjury and manufacturing evidence. The newspapers dug up witnesses and handed them over to the district attorney. On August 3rd, the Grand Jury reconvened to look at possible charges against Aimee, her mother, Kenneth Ormiston and a woman named Lorraine Wiseman.

McPherson. The newspapers ate it up and Aimee was front-page news from Los Angeles to New York, in all 48 states. The complete transcript of the hearing covered more than 3,500 pages!

Suddenly, after the months of investigation and the media circus during the court hearings, the case was dropped before it even came to trial! One of the witnesses changed her story again, saying that Aimee did not hire her to perpetrate a hoax on the public. On January 10, 1927, L.A. County District Attorney Asa Keys reluctantly asked the court to drop the charges against Aimee and her mother. The case was formally dismissed on July 8th of that year.

AFTERMATH
McPhersonMcPherson and Bette Davis as her domineering mother. Also, in the 1960 Academy Award winning movie Elmer Gantry with Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons and Shirley Jones, taken from the Sinclair Lewis novel, the character of evangelist Sharon Falconer was created by Lewis, based on McPherson).

The press later reported that Kenneth G. Ormiston acted like a gentleman and never spoke of the alleged incident with Aimee Semple McPherson

McPherson was as famous as Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh.

KFSG THRIVES DESPITE NEW CHALLENGES
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THE DEPRESSION YEARS
The hard times of the Great Depression years put a strain on nearly everyone in the United States. There are some writers who claim that the popularity of Aimee Semple McPherson

McPherson continued to keep busy, working to help the lonely and ill, bring people to Christ and minister to those who already were saved. Besides the KFSG broadcasts and the illustrated dramatic sermons performed onstage at Angelus Temple, she also syndicated some of her sermons, which were recorded and sent to various radio stations across the nation.

1937 to 1944
During the earliest years of KFSG and Angelus Temple, Aimee Semple McPhersonMcPherson or her church. Also, because of Giles Knight taking charge, during the last 7 years of her life, the lawsuits stopped and not much was heard from Sister Aimee, except over radio KFSG and inside Angelus Temple. She also did some occasional traveling and made public appearances in many cities, much in the way Billy Graham traveled and preached around the U.S. later.

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THE LEGACY OF KFSG
Aimee Semple McPherson

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KFSG radio continued to grow and prosper and change through the decades after Sister Aimee died. After being a non-profit station for many years, it became a successful commercial operation, but continued its mission as a Christian station spreading the word of Jesus, until it left the air the night of February 28, 2003.

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