Bartell Group
They entered the radio business with Milwaukee station WEXT in 1947, on the belief that between them they had expertise in law, engineering, music, writing, and acting, all of which would prove useful in the field.
Some of the more well-known stations the Bartell Group owned include WOKY in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, KCBQ in San Diego, California, KRUX 1360 in Phoenix, Arizona, and Spanish-language WADO in New York City.
The Bartell Group was an important broadcasting entity during the post-World War II era and helped pioneer the Top 40 radio format.
[1] The father immigrated to the United States in 1911, with the mother following in 1913,[2] as part of the wave of Central and Eastern European Jews who came to America.
The family's interest in radio began with Gerald Bartell's time at the University of Wisconsin during the 1930s, when he was on the student staff of university-owned station WHA.
[14] Gerald subsequently became part of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin,[3] being named an assistant professor of radio education[13] in the Department of Speech[14] in 1940.
[15] While on the faculty he took advantage of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and worked at NBC in New York in sales, merchandising, and production tasks.
[18] Rosa too was a student at the University of Wisconsin and on the staff at WHA, where she was a singer, songwriter, program producer, and music librarian.
[3][8] Captain Melvin Bartell served in the United States Army in the Pacific Ocean theater of World War II as part of the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS).
[16] This operation was running the Far East Network through the Pacific, which provided important morale support to the armed forces engaged in the U.S. island-hopping campaign.
[18] Meanwhile, Rosa and Ralph Evans moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a civilian for the United States Navy in classified research into radar.
[8] Gerald Bartell enlisted into the United States Navy and at first was assigned to teach courses at a naval training school for radio operators that had been established on the university campus.
[15] Following that he became a naval aviation ensign and served for three years with the VPB-92 patrol bombing squadron including off the coast of Morocco during the North African Campaign.
"[26] With WEXT finding an audience but only barely profitable,[23] the Bartell family applied for full-time broadcast operations, and the result was a move down the dial to AM 920 and a new call sign, WOKY.
[23] WOKY initially aired a full-service variety format similar to WEXT's, including popular music shows and programs oriented toward housewives and children.
[22] WOKY is also noteworthy for being the first station in Milwaukee to broadcast traffic reports from a helicopter, courtesy of air personality Art Zander and his feature "The Safer Route".
[35][25] In a review, Billboard said of Pat and the Pixies that it was a "sensitive" and "warm" adaptation of an Irish folk tale, but that Bartell's following from Playtime for Children was not big enough to expect large-scale sales of the record.
[35] In addition Bartell appeared on television in the program Playtime with Jerry, a 15-minute show that was syndicated[36] to stations such as KTVI-TV Channel 2 in St. Louis, which broadcast it on Saturday mornings during 1957–58.
[7] One of the main programs on it was the culinary show What's Cookin', hosted by pioneering African American chef Carson Gulley and his wife Beatrice.
[46] The Bartell Group also became involved in the creation of Telecuraçao and Telearuba, television stations in the Caribbean islands of Curaçao and Aruba, with the former starting in 1960 and the latter in 1963.
[15] The full list of family television stations thus included: Gerald Bartell also appeared on air on these television stations, including one amusing episode in July 1961 when he interviewed Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who a few months earlier had become the first human to travel in outer space when he orbited the Earth.
[49] With this being the height of the Space Race, in which the Soviets were ahead at the time, American interest in the interview was piqued and General Maxwell D. Taylor, a top military advisor to President John F. Kennedy, called Bartell to find out if Gagarin had revealed a Moon mission schedule and to find out the interviewer's impressions of the cosmonaut.
[7] In 1956, Broadcasting/Telecasting magazine said that he had "combined a talent for artistry, a perspicacity for business and a decided penchant for perfection into a small empire builder in the past nine years.
"[52] In time, pop music became the primary component of WOKY's schedule, with disc jockeys choosing the songs they played based on the Billboard and Cash Box best-seller charts and on local record sales.
[3] The personality of the disc jockey was important; the New York Times described the Bartell formula as being "built around the folksy disk-jockey whose musical offerings were interrupted hourly with brief, cacophonous outbursts of news.
"[48] In continuing on this pathway, WAPL radio made its on-air debut in 1952 operating on a frequency of 1570 under the ownership of the Bartell family.
[22] KCBQ in San Diego, which Bartell bought in December 1955, became one of the nation's first rock 'n' roll stations, playing the music of Elvis Presley, Little Richard and others.
[43] In 1958, Gerald Bartell gave a speech to the Wisconsin State Radio Listeners' League in which he discussed the always-present question of commercial appeal versus artistic value, saying that he realized that Jussi Björling or Arthur Rubinstein were clearly artistically superior to Liberace or Mario Lanza, but that in any form of art and entertainment, not just radio, "all in a measure stand or upon their degree of public acceptance.
[69] But then in November 1967, the brokerage firm Weis, Voisin, Cannon purchased additional stock such that the siblings were for the first time now in the minority, owning only 35–40 percent of the company.
[3] In 2010, a monument to KCBQ was put up in the Santee suburb of San Diego, honoring the station and Lee Bartell's role with it.
