Pioneering station got streamlined in 1940s
Orlando Sentinel, The (FL) - Sunday, August 20, 2006 
Author: Joy Wallace Dickinson, Sentinel Staff Writer

My, "it's certainly cool in here," a woman's voice coos. 

"That's the air conditioning, Mrs. Listener," a confident baritone replies on the 1947 radio program that introduced listeners to WDBO's streamlined studios by Lake Ivanhoe. 
In those days, an indoor chill was not the norm year-round in Central Florida.
The program, produced by Ben Aycrigg, who went on to become Central Florida's version of Walter Cronkite on TV, touted the station's already venerable past as WDBO executive Harold Danforth gave "Mr. and Mrs. Listener" a tour of its state-of-the-art studios. 
Today that building near Lake Ivanhoe sits empty, waiting to be erased from the landscape and replaced by condo towers, according to reports last year. (It most recently housed Strollo Architects.) But in the days of post-World War II optimism, WDBO's Lake Ivanhoe home was about as modern as they come. 

From Angebilt to Ivanhoe 

Before the Lake Ivanhoe studios were built in the late 1940s, the station at 580 AM had operated much of the time in Orlando hotels since its founding in the 1920s. 

But after a strong 1944 hurricane destroyed the roof of its operation at the Angebilt Hotel, the station set up temporary quarters in another, the Orange Court, and got busy on a permanent home. 

Its engineers had planned the Lake Ivanhoe space to fit its broadcast needs, rather than adapting studios to fit into space designed for something else, Danforth and colleagues proudly told the pretend "Mr. and Mrs. Listener" during the 1947 broadcast. 

"These window are specially constructed of three sheets of plate glass separated from each other by air space," Danforth said, indicating the windows that allowed visitors in the lobby to look in on the station's three studios: A, B, and C, the latter designed especially for music. 

The building's exterior also projected its ultramodern function in 1947. One of the few Orlando commercial buildings in the art moderne style (the later relative of art deco), the Lake Ivanhoe studios sported the flat roof, streamlined horizontal lines, glass-block windows, and wavy-line accents that reflected an age of machinery and an emphasis on the future rather than the past. 

In two places, the letters WDBO were rendered in bas-relief, in round, stencil-like art deco letters. 

Inside, no detail had been spared to assure listeners excellent sound, the 1947 program stressed. 

"John, am I seeing things, or are those walls crooked?" exclaimed Mrs. Listener to her fictional husband during the program. The studio walls indeed were purposely not parallel, to improve sound quality. 

The special doors that helped muffle any outside sound were thick and heavy, the program explained, and layers of sponge rubber under the thresholds also reduced any unwanted noise. 

In the footsteps of KDKA 

All this advanced technology stood in sharp contrast to the station's beginnings 23 years earlier. WDBO began as a physics class project at Rollins College in Winter Park. 

The years 1923 and 1924 were indeed early to be getting into commercial radio, especially for a bunch of college students who raised money for their project by canvassing every member of the student body for a dollar donation. 

Commercial radio "wasn't a proven thing in 1923 and 1924," the program says, but the physics students were determined. 

"Come on, Prof, KDKA has been on the air for at least five years," college boys tell their professor in a dramatization on the 1947 show. They were referring to the legendary Pittsburgh station that went on the air in late 1920. 

By the way, historians of radio say that so many stations begin with K and W because from the beginning of licensing in late 1912, the federal government assigned call letters starting with K and W to commercial broadcasting stations. 

Stations in the West usually got K, while W went to stations in the East. The Mississippi River wasn't made the east-west divider until 1923, though, so some early K stations are east of the Mississippi. 

Eve Bacon's history of Orlando records that WDBO stood for Wander Down By Orlando, but the usual explanation is "Way Down By Orlando." 

The station's history on the Web site cflradio.net notes that some research indicates call letters were issued in alphabetical sequence, and the Rollins boys just got lucky, with WDBO coming after WDBN in Bangor, Maine, and WDBP in Superior, Wis. 

But other research, the site says, shows a definite request from Rollins for call letters that stand for Way Down By Orlando. 

On its first broadcast in May 1924 as a 50-watt station at Rollins, WDBO's programming lasted less than an hour and included a performance by the college glee club singing "Rollins Goes Rolling Along" and a bugle playing taps at sign-off, cflradio.net says. 

Announcer Dean Sprague asked anybody who could hear the 1924 broadcast to send a postcard to verify that the signal from the little wooden building at Rollins was being heard; the reward would be a box of oranges from the Gentile Brothers Packing House. 

Cards rolled in from Orlando, Apopka and Sanford, and a Central Florida broadcasting institution was born. 

NOTE: You can hear the 1947 broadcast of "Introduction to WDBO" on the station's Web site, 580wdbo.com, which also contains other historical nuggets, including a "scrapbook" of records about the station's founding from Rollins College Archives. 

The Web site cflradio.net includes many details of the station's past from historian Dick Camnitz, including links to biographies of station personalities past and present. WDBO radio moved from the Lake Ivanhoe building to its present studios on John Young Parkway in 1986. 

In a rare gaff, Eve Bacon's history of Orlando says WDBO meant Wander Down By Orlando, but a 1954 article from the Rollins `Sandspur' backs up the more usual explanation. Physics professor Edward "Riley" Jones led the class that started the station in the 1920s, the article says; he requested letters that would stand for Way Down by Orlando.

Copyright 2006 Sentinel Communications Co.