WSBT radio: the Tribune's station, from WGAZ to 960

1922–2016

The first licenses: Radio in South Bend begins with a station that failed. The city's first commercial license went to WBAQ, licensed to Myron L. Harmon and located at the YMCA building — first licensed 29 April 1922 and deleted from the federal list on 7 November 1922. The second license built the century. On 29 June 1922 the South Bend Tribune was issued a license — a Limited Commercial license, serial number 513 in the Radio Service Bulletin — for a new station on the shared 360-meter entertainment wavelength that the Department of Commerce had set aside the previous December. The call letters, WGAZ, were randomly assigned from the sequential roster of available calls; the station was one of nineteen that month to draw calls beginning with WGA. The reading later attached to them — "World's Greatest Automotive Zone," for Studebaker's city — was suggested in the Tribune's own columns three years afterward, on 6 April 1925; the federal record of the assignment governs, and it was chance. WGAZ made its formal debut broadcast at 7:30 p.m. on 3 July 1922, "given through the courtesy of the Ries Furniture Company," with local musical performers, from the third floor of the Tribune Building — the company's new building at 225 West Colfax, where the station's first studio stood on the stage of the third-floor auditorium. The Producers chapter carries the men and women who built what came out of that studio.

On 9 September 1925 the call letters became WSBT, for the South Bend Tribune. The station's climb up the dial is the federal record of early radio in one line: assigned 1230 kilohertz on a time-sharing basis with Indianapolis's WFBM and Fort Wayne's WCWK in the nationwide reallocation of 11 November 1928; a CBS Radio Network affiliate from 1932, carrying the network's dramas, comedies, news, and big bands through radio's golden age; moved to 1360 kilohertz in 1934 at 500 watts; moved again in 1940 to 930, on the condition that the Tribune end operation of its companion station WFAM, on 1200 kilohertz — the company's second station, surrendered in the bargain; shifted with the continental NARBA reallocation of March 1941 to 960 kilohertz, where it remains; raised to 1,000 watts in 1942 and to its present 5,000 watts in 1947.

The station settled into the full-service middle-of-the-road format of music, news, and sports, then to talk and sports as the music left AM; a daily sports talk show began on 10 January 1994, and the station is today the flagship for Notre Dame football and men's basketball and for the South Bend Cubs. Jon Thompson, "J.T.," the longtime morning host, made his last broadcast on 2 March 2018. An FM translator at 96.1 megahertz has carried the station since 30 March 2012, with an interruption from June 2021 to July 2024. When Schurz Communications announced its exit from broadcasting on 14 September 2015, the sale ended ninety-three years of the newspaper company's ownership of its station; Gray Television's purchase assigned the radio group instead to Mid-West Family Broadcasting for $5.5 million, and that sale was consummated on 16 February 2016. The station's studios stand today on East Monroe Street in downtown South Bend, its transmitter off Ironwood Road at the city's south side, and its signal is still rated to reach, with a good radio, from Lake Michigan to Fort Wayne.

Sources:

1. Radio Service Bulletin (U.S. Department of Commerce), 1 July 1922 and 1 October 1925 — the WGAZ license of 29 June 1922, serial 513, on 360 meters, and the call change to WSBT of 9 September 1925; the station's FCC-derived record for WBAQ (licensed 29 April 1922, deleted 7 November 1922), the frequency course of 1928–1947, the WFAM condition of 1940, and the translator's course.
2. South Bend Tribune, 3 July 1922 — the debut advertisement and announcement ("WGAZ Starts Broadcasting 7:30 To-night"); South Bend Tribune, 6 April 1925 — "Firmin Uses 'WGAZ' as Slogan For South Bend," the slogan suggested three years after the calls were drawn.
3. Schurz Communicator, Spring 2012 — "It all began in 1922 on the third floor of the Tribune building"; the station's reference record for the golden-age affiliation, the talk-and-sports course, the 1994 sports show, the flagship affiliations, and the 2015–16 sale to Mid-West Family Broadcasting.