Cdrals of the Air: Sister Aimee, Fighting Bob, and Early L.A. Radio

The softly glowing dial of a radio receiver illuminated nearly every middle-class living room in 1920s Los Angeles. Crooners and dance bands came over the airwaves. So did exercise routines and household hints. Recorded concerts played on weekday evenings. Sunday mornings were set aside for local pastors whose sermons were a little dull, like the ones that listeners had heard back home.

Back home was still very real for the majority of Angele os. Nearly half a million new residents had arrived in the decade of the 1920s, almost doubling the city's population. It had already doubled in the previous decade. Many of the newcomers were the chronically ill or retirees from the Midwest cashing in on the prosperity that the post-World War I boom had brought them. These new Angele os would be described later, somewhat unfairly, as lonely and troubled. A better description would have been unsettled.

Patricia O'Grady poses with a Majestic brand radio set, manufactured in Los Angeles. A radio set could be found in most middle-class homes in the 1920s. Photo courtesy of the USC Libraries - Dick Whittington Photography Collection.

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Radio vastly expanded the reach of Los Angeles personalities like Sister Aimee and Fighting Bob. Their radio ministries were controversial, however. Photo courtesy of the USC Libraries - Dick Whittington Photography Collection.

Saving Radio from Satan Aimee Semple McPherson - Sister Aimee to these unsettled Angele os - found them a place in Los Angeles. Originally an itinerant revivalist traveling with her formidable mother, McPherson was fundamentalist in theology; the Old and New Testaments were literally true. But she was Pentecostal in practice; divine healing, speaking in tongues, and being slain by the Spirit were essential to her faith. She began calling her message the Foursquare Gospel.

More on Aimee Semple McPherson

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If her theology was backward looking, her practice was thrillingly new. Pentecostalism, brought to Los Angeles in 1906, was non-denominational and welcoming. It cut across racial and class divides, at least initially. It promised as great a renewal of the spirit as Los Angeles promised heath of mind and body. Pentecostalism did not call on history or a sectarian creed for justification; salvation only required intensity of conviction.

At the urging of her mother, McPherson settled in Los Angeles 1918 and thrived. She moved her revival services from a rented church to the 3,000-seat Philharmonic Auditorium and repeatedly filled it. By 1922, McPherson had raised enough money to build her own church. On January 1, 1923, the Foursquare Gospel float in Pasadena's Tournament of Roses Parade guided McPherson's followers to Glendale Boulevard in Echo Park and to the dedication of the 5,300-seat Angelus Temple. McPherson filled it three times each day, seven days a week. She made certain her sermons were never dull.

Those who attended services at Angelus Temple, with its full orchestra, choir, Holy Ghost Revival, came for the costumed spectacle of Aimee Semple McPherson - Lady Evangelist. McPherson's theatricality did not disappoint them, but she had larger ambitions, tied to the new medium of broadcast radio.

It was not what she said that made McPherson such a presence but where she said it. She spoke in the homes of her listeners, at their side, with folksy humor and up-to-date cultural references, sharing their prejudices.

Radio was still so new in 1923 that it was possible for almost anyone to acquire a broadcast license from the U.S. Commerce Department. License holders were required to operate in the public interest, but that was broadly interpreted. McPherson, telling the faithful that radio must be saved from Satan, had no difficulty in raising $25,000 to install a first-class broadcast facility above the Angelus Temple auditorium. Bracketing its white dome were two, 250-foot towers. They glowed with the station's call letters - KFSG, an acronym for Kall Four-Square Gospel.

On February 6, 1924 at 8:00 p.m., McPherson stepped before a microphone and spoke, not to thousands but to tens of thousands, and not just in Los Angeles but across the West. Her voice by then was reedy, sounding strained from decades of unamplified preaching in revival tents. Her cadence was faintly singsong, a vestige of the country preaching style she (and her audience) knew well. Her enunciation was overly precise, but she spoke in an era of two-tube radios with very low fidelity.

Radio, thought Sister Aimee, was the cathedral of the air where anyone might worship. Photo courtesy of the Security Pacific National Bank Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.

KFSG stood for Kall Four-Square Gospel, broadcasting from Angelus Temple in Echo Park. Photo courtesy of the Herman J. Schultheis Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.

Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple, twin towers on the roof, drew thousands of congregants to weekly services and tens of thousands more to listen her radio broadcasts. Photo courtesy of the WPA Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.

She was probably the first woman to be issued a broadcast license for a religious radio station and the first woman to preach on radio. She had nothing new to say. She supported Prohibition. She denounced the teaching of evolution. Jazz was an instrument of Satan to snare the young. The world was about to end. The city's police took payoffs from bootleggers and brothel keepers.

She warned of Catholic influence and the uncertain loyalties of foreign-born citizens. She appealed to the Ku Klux Klan for support, at least initially. She was sure that America was a Christian nation.

It was not what she said

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