In December 1929, an unusual Christmas card was sent out from Columbus and Meridian. It said:
This is Station XMAS at the North Pole Broadcasting a Program of Yuletide Greetings by Remote Control Through Station WCOC “Down in the Old Magnolia State”
We are broadcasting on the holiday wave length of nineteen hundred and twenty-nine meters extending our hearty good wishes for Christmas and the New Year
This is Santa Clause Announcing
Please Stand By
T.C. Billups
WCOC in Columbus was one of the first radio stations in Mississippi and apparently the state’s second commercial station. The station went on the air on February 26, 1927. It was owned by Hubert Holmes, Jr. who was partners with his father H.B. Holmes in the Crystal Oil Company. The station manager and chief announcer was T.C. Billups.
Mississippi’s first commercial radio station was KFNG in Coldwater which began broadcasting in 1922 but did not receive a commercial license until 1924.
An application for a commercial radio license for the Crystal Oil Company was filed on February 4, 1927, with the Federal Radio Commission. The forerunner of the FCC, The Federal Radio Commission, was created in 1926. Eugene O. Sykes of Aberdeen, a cousin of Billups, was an original member of that commission and later served as the first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
The station was located in the Crystal Oil Company building at Fifth Street and Ninth Avenue North in Columbus. There was no other commercial radio station within a 100 mile radius of Columbus. Its original power of only 100 watts was increased to 250 watts in August 1927. Because there were so few radio stations at that time, its signal was received from New York to Oregon and it had listeners in more than 30 states.
The station became known as the “station down in the old Magnolia State.” A 1928 Commercial Dispatch newspaper article stated that the radio industry was basically a public service as stations “are expensive ” and “net few results to their owners.”
In addition to Holmes and Billups, the original staff was made up of director Mrs. Marietta Bishop, assistant announcer J.C. Moody and operator and engineer J.K. Moore. The station was “on the air daily from 5 to 6 PM and each Tuesday and Friday night from 8 to 10. It had a wide range of programs that included ‘daily market reports and late news flashes.'” The station was to operate 72 hours a week.
One of the interesting accomplishments of the station was a claim that in November 1927 it carried the first football game “broadcast direct from the field” in Mississippi. It was a game between the Columbus Lee High Generals and the Philadelphia Tornados, played at Mississippi A&M College.
By 1929 the station claimed to be the largest and oldest commercial radio station operating in Mississippi. Its studio was described as a “special studio with velvet drapes, built on top of the Crystal Oil Company building.”
The station staff included T.C. Billups as announcer and station manager and John Rogers and Laws Meador as operators with Meador as chief engineer. The weekly payroll for the three employees was $200.
In October 1929, the station moved to Meridian, and increased its power to 1,000 watts. While serving as station manager and chief announcer in Meridian, Billups was traveling back and forth to Columbus where the family farm was located and he had been elected to the Columbus City Council.
Later in 1930 Billups left the station and back in Columbus became circulation manager for The Commercial Dispatch. There he gave future Disney animation effects director Josh Meador his first job as a Dispatch “paper boy.” Meador’s brother Laws had been WCOC radio station’s chief engineer. Billups and his brother-in-law Harris Hardy were both killed in a 1947 plane crash in Arkansas.
A radio station did not return to Columbus until WCBI went on the air on Oct. 2, 1940.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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