100 years ago in Spokane: The city’s first radio show was broadcast across the Northwest, and the high-school morality debate intensified

The age of radio was kick-started when “Spokane’s first radiophone concert” was broadcast to more than 500 amateur radio operators in the Northwest.

“Operators at Sprague, Ritzville, Harrington, Moscow, Pullman and other Northwest points listened to the music, consisting of 16 of the latest Columbia records played on a Grafonola, furnished for the occasion by the the Grafonola shop,” said The Spokesman-Review .

Amateur radio operators had been active in Spokane for years, but this was the first broadcast by what could be considered a true radio station.

“This is the first limited commercial station in Spokane to receive a license to broadcast music or conversation by radiophone,” said William (Billy) Irish, a Spokane radio pioneer who started the station.

It had been licensed as KFZ just a few days earlier.

From the school beat: The debate intensified over this question: Were Spokane’s high schools hotbeds of wanton, immoral behavior?

Superior Court Judge RM Webster insisted that they were, and made a counterattack against school superintendent Orville Pratt, who said that Webster grossly exaggerated the situation.

Webster said Pratt was “not receptive or open-minded” and became “combative and antagonistic” when Webster made those controversial charges.

Webster doubled down on his call for an end to co-education in Spokane’s high schools. He believed that segregating the sexes would solve many of the current problems. Webster said that Pratt was “evidently resentful toward me” because of “my criticism of the system of co-education.”

“(Pratt) even made the sweeping statement that San Francisco had the system of segregated high schools and that the San Francisco high schools were the worst in the United States,” Webster said.