Accidental Preservation: How KIRO Radio Saved CBS’s World War II Broadcast History

Feliks Banel explained in a RadioWorld article:
One of the most valuable audio archives of World War II exists today only because of a fortunate accident at Seattle’s KIRO Radio more than 70 years ago.

During his keynote at the first Radio Preservation Task Force Conference, archivist Sam Brylawski explained how KIRO’s routine practice of “timeshifting” CBS network news created a nearly complete record of wartime broadcasts. CBS programs were broadcast live for the Eastern Time Zone, so KIRO recorded them on 16-inch lacquer discs at its downtown Seattle studios and replayed selected portions hours later for West Coast listeners.

Instead of discarding the discs after use, KIRO staff moved them—against network policy—to the station’s transmitter site on Vashon Island. In the 1950s, University of Washington Professor Milo Ryan discovered the collection while searching for Winston Churchill speeches.

Recognizing their immense historical value, Ryan catalogued the discs, secured funding from CBS, and transferred the recordings to the University of Washington in 1957. There, with help from KCTS and KUOW engineers, the fragile lacquer discs were copied onto reel-to-reel tape.

As Ryan later noted, if reusable magnetic tape had existed during the war, the discs likely would have been erased and reused daily. Because lacquer discs could only be recorded once, KIRO’s timeshifting inadvertently preserved a priceless chapter of American broadcast history.