UA Heritage: An Interview With Bill Putnam, Sr.; Part One of Three
By Larry Blakely

Reprinted with permission from the pages of Mix magazine.

Part One

M.T. "Bill" Putnam is a true Renaissance man in the recording industry. He is the founder of United/Western Recorders in Hollywood and UREI (United Recording and Electronics Industries). He is a respected pioneer in recording studio acoustics, was the first to use reverberation and echo for commercial recordings, developed the first multi-band equalizers, conceived ambient microphone techniques and did much early developmental work on stereophonic recording. Recently Bill took the time to tell us about his formative years in audio and acoustics.

Putnam was born on February 20, 1920, in Danville, Illinois, a town of 25,000 located south of Chicago. His father was in the coal mining business, owned some strip mines, some retail coal yards in Danville, started a manufacturing company for large truck scales, and encouraged Bill to be involved in business enterprises.

Bill's interest in music was primarily influenced by his father and mother. "My dad had a radio program on WDZ in Tuscola, IL, one of the older radio stations in the country, and the home of Gene Autry before he moved to WLS and the Number One country radio show, National Barn Dance.

"I think my interest in radio and electronics really started while I was in the Boy Scouts. I had decided to get a merit badge in something that was called 'wireless,' and built a crystal set and a one-tube radio (with my dad's help), which got KDKA in Pittsburg! I built my own private telegraph system which ran down the block to a couple of my friends' houses, but since none of us knew the Morse code very well, we weren't able to handle much traffic.

"It was through my interest in radio and a lot of encouragement from my dad that I became interested in ham radio. In 1933, at 13, I made my first attempt at taking the ham radio operator's exam in Chicago. I took my first taxicab ride to the Federal Communications building on Wacker Drive, the first skyscraper I had ever seen. To make a long story short, I flunked the code exam. Two years later I returned and got my Class B ham ticket, the equivalent to today's General Class ham radio license. So I became a ham radio operator at the age of 15. Hallicrafters, Skybuddy, Hammerlund and National, the popular brands of ham radio equipment, were too expensive for my very low budget, so I had to build my own.

"In my early years of high school I had a part-time job working for a friend in a radio shop where I learned repair. My friend also had a P.A. system, which I rented out to the local city parks for their amateur shows. From this I learned P.A. systems, and, most of all, about feedback, which made them howl.

"I have a great enthusiasm for show business and I liked singing with dance bands. At the age of 15, I sang on weekends with a number of regional bands that played primarily on college campuses. This was when I first started to develop my interest in jazz and the music business, and realizing that musicians were my favorite people."

I had built a belt-drive turntable, my first attempt at trying to put together some professional recording equipment.

Putnam went to high school with Dick Van Dyke and the well-known society entertainer, Bobby Short. "Dick was very active in all the high school plays and Bobby was frequently an entertainer and high school assemblies. I was also an entertainer at high school assemblies, and kept a balance between my interest in entertaining and electronics. My interest and activity in ham radio continued to grow through all these years. I became a ham in every sense.

"By the time I was a junior in high school, my activities were primarily singing with dance bands. I was making five bucks a night, a lot of money in those days. (This included the P.A. system rental, which might be a comment on how well I sang.) My activity in ham radio and my business enterprise had progressed to the point that I then owned my own radio shop. I must have had more nerve than sense, because I really was not well qualified. My dad, who believed strongly in doing everything on a business basis, rented me some space in the back of his office for seven dollars a month. I was able to hire another friend part time, who had graduated in high school, and I succeeded in making a deal with the Goodrich Silvertown Tire Service Company to install Motorola and Arvin car radios on weekends, charging something like two dollars to install a car radio. I did this on Friday nights and all day Saturday. I remember one disaster that I had working on a Cadillac. I had laid out the template for the car antenna and drilled the holes. Suddenly I discovered that the way I had mounted the standoff insulators prevented the door from opening. Fortunately, the owner of the car turned out to be a pretty reasonable guy and I had the panel refinished by the Cadillac dealer, who leaded in the holes. That was a bitter and, needless to say, very valuable learning experience.

"The radio shop was quite a success and I was very fortunate in that when I got in over my head repairing radios, which I frequently did, I could get on the phone with the distributor for RCA and National Union Radio tubes and he would help me wade through it. I had limited working capital but I was able to get National Union Radio tubes on consignment. After a certain quantity of tubes, I could buy test equipment from them at a discount. So I acquired most of my test equipment in this manner.

"After I sold the radio shop for $700 and had graduated from high school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do vocationally. I wanted to get into radio broadcasting in the technical area. I chose a small college in Valparaiso, Indiana, which had started out as Dodge Radio Institute and later became Valparaiso Technical Institute (VTI). At the time I started there, the school had just elected a new president by the name of Dr. J. B. Hershman, who had previously chaired the physics department at the University of Indiana, at Bloomington. This gentleman, and an individual by the name of Cloid Patton, probably had more influence on my academic career than anyone else. Hershman's field of specialization was sound acoustics and, oddly enough, antennas. These were exactly the fields of specialization I had chosen and I was absolutely enamored with him. It was not until the second semester that I actually met him as a professor. I stood in awe of him, both as a teacher and author.

"During the time I attended VTI, I continued my singing activities and worked with some bands, on a somewhat regular basis, around Gary, Indiana, Michigan City and Chicago. These were the days of the dance band remotes and I was able to get on some of the larger radio stations around Chicago, working with Bill Fryer who had a popular regional band.

"After my graduation from VTI, I applied for a position at a number of radio stations and was hired as a transmitter engineer at WDWS in Champaign, Illinois, a station owned by the Champaign News Gazette newspaper. This radio station was also the home of the University of Illinois, and it was my intention to continue my education there. Working the transmitter shifts gave me the opportunity to build a lot of equipment, in addition to experimenting. During this time I developed a greater interest in audio and high quality sound reproduction.

"In 1941 I confronted another example of 'not knowing what I didn't know' when I decided to start writing magazine articles. I submitted and article entitled 'High Fidelity Phonograph Amplifier' (with inverse feedback, yet!) to Gernsback Publications, which was published in Radio and Television magazine in 1941. Subsequently, I continued to write articles for the magazine, which was a Ziff Davis publication. The editor of this magazine was Oliver Reed, who later wrote a famous book called Tinfoil to Stereo."

Putnam got his First Class radio telephone license in 1939, at the age of 19. After working for about a year at WDWS in Champaign, a new radio station, WDAN, went on the air in his hometown of Danville. "The salary was five dollars a week better, so I applied, got the job and went to work there. They had a brand new RCA transmitter and their studios were in Danville's finest hotel. WDAN was also the station on which Dick Van Dyke started on his career as a disc jockey.

"One January evening I noticed that one of the tower lights was out. The company policy was to hire a guy from the power company to climb this 312-toot tower and replace the lights. Three-hundred-twelve feet was pretty high in January, especially with the snow and wind, but knowing they paid $25 to change the lights, I decided I would do this and be a wealthy hero. It was a very scary experience. I climbed the tower carrying a gunny sack with two 1,500 watt lights and, when I got to the top and braced myself, the tower was swaying back and forth like an upside-down pendulum. But I did get the bulbs changed, and it took me almost 2 hours to climb back down the tower. I had forgotten to tell anyone at the studio that I was leaving the transmitter and the phone had been ringing off the wall. The chief engineer was waiting for me and he said, 'Guess what? You're fired!' After our tempers had quieted down, I found out that they took a dim view of station personnel changing the tower lights. By the next morning I had succeeded in getting my job back.

"Approximately six months later I was contacted by the station owner and program director of WDWS in Champaign to see if I would be interested in coming back as chief engineer. It was an overwhelming challenge, and I accepted the job at a substantial increase in pay. Here, I had a lot of opportunities to originate network feeds. We were feeding NBC, ABC and CBS the Big 10 football games for national broadcast.

"The first play-by-play announcer I worked with was Tom Harman, an All-American football player who lacked experience as a radio announcer. Part of the job that I performed, as a remote engineer, was doing the spotting. I had rigged up a spotting device with a series of lights for both offense and defense. The lights had replaceable name cards above them, and I would turn on the appropriate light with a toggle switch, depending on who carried the ball and who made the tackle . . . a little gadget that proved to be very helpful in doing play-by-play football games."

Soon Putnam got involved in upgrading at the station. "I talked the boss into letting me build a transmitter rather than buying a new RCA or Western Electric, which were the most popular in those days. So I took it as a great challenge and built a transmitter and was even able to get the thing approved and signed off by the FCC inspector. The transmitter worked well and it stayed in service, to my knowledge, for about 10 years after that."

By 1941, at the age of 21, Putnam had received a draft notice. "I became aware, through the trade publication, that there were civil service jobs available in the radio engineering section of the 6th Army in Chicago. So I took a civil service exam, passed it and became a civil service employee as assistant Army Corps radio engineer for what was then known as the 6th Army Service Command. I was stationed at the Civic Opera Building, and I had a great chief signal officer who was a 'West Pointer.' I was involved in a variety of activities, being on temporary assignment to the air force, installing 'radio ranges.' At the time I didn't know much about this, other than that radio ranges had something to do with giving bearings to aircraft.

"Meanwhile, I continued my writing. I was writing articles primarily having to do with audio and high quality phonograph reproduction. I wrote an article on the various phase inverters, cathode followers and other types. It was a fairly comprehensive article. I wrote a couple of articles on carrier current devices and also on a 3-band tone control circuit with separate stages for low, mid, and high frequencies. It provided independent gain for each stage and each had its own independent control. This was published in Radio and Electronics and, to my knowledge, was the first amplifier that had three frequency bands with boost and attenuation.

In addition to installing radio ranges, Putnam became interested in mine detectors used by the Signal Corps. "They had a search coil on a large broomstick, and a very heavy battery pack with large vacuum tubes. I conceived that it might be possible to use hearing-aid tubes and more advanced bridge circuits as a way to miniaturize the mine detector. I started working this project in my spare time. I had talked at length with the chief signal officer of the 6th Service Command about the prospects of miniaturizing the mine detector and shortly thereafter had a visit from a couple of men in civilian clothes, whom I later found out were member of the Secret Service. They asked a lot of questions, like how small the device could be made. They told me that they were interested in making a personal gun detector that could be worn in the sleeve of a dress suit and could detect a small caliber handgun.

"I was then assigned full time to develop this project, working in a lab of a small hearing-aid company in Chicago on South Michigan Avenue. We developed a small, concealable gun detector, which was used at the Tri-Power Conference for the protection of President Roosevelt and Secret Service personnel.

"Another project I got involved in was setting up a backup link to Europe via Hudson Bay, using Rhombic and Grounded V antennas. RCA Communications and Federal Telegraph facilities were located at Crown Point, Indiana, at St. John, Indiana, and Merryville. With the permission of the Chief Signal Officer of the 6th Command, I was able to call in Dr. Hershman from VTI as a consultant. With his guidance and a lot of 'boning up' and homework on my part, we were able to complete the projects.

"My work with Armed Forces Radio also involved recording dance bands, one of which was headed by Wayne King. This was a low-priority assignment but something I enjoyed very much. I had to scrounge around and put together all the recording equipment. In that band were two famous singers, Bob Eberly, who recently passed away, and the late Buddy Clark. Bob Eberly was with the Dorsey Brothers and Buddy was an artist on Columbia Records. At this particular time both men were at the top of the Billboard charts as singers. Each had been drafted into Special Services or some other branch of the Army. We recorded a number of shows, which were played by Armed Forces Radio overseas and throughout the country as part of a recruiting program. I became close friends with Wayne King and that friendship lasted many years. I continued to record him after the war on Decca records on many, many occasions. A number of musicians I met in that band are now studio musicians in Hollywood.

"Recording, at that time, was a low-priority project, but for me it was a labor of love. I had built a belt-drive turntable, my first attempt at trying to put together some professional recording equipment. The mixers I used were purchased form Gates Radio, portable broadcaster mixers called the Gates Dynamote. The mikes were RCA 44Bs (that was before the 44BX), the RCA 74B (which looked like the 44BX but was only two-thirds the size), the Western Electric 633 salt shaker, Western Electric 630 Eight Ball, and the Western Electric 639 Bird Cage. It was surprising how well we did, considering the equipment we had to work with."

After a stint at Fort Sheraton, Putnam was inducted into the army and was attached to do specific projects for G2 (military intelligence) in covert operations. "I recall one occasion in which we hid in the attic of a house for some time while I was on loan from the Signal Corps to G2. This involved a phone-tap operation. I had some other contact with G2 installing communication equipment in vehicles disguised as laundry vans and delivery trucks. I got to know a number of the members of G2 through the gun-detector project and I had tremendous respect for the members of the Secret Service and G2 with whom I worked.

"As the war was winding down I was sent to Los Angeles and relocated out on Santa Monica Boulevard as an instructor for broadcast operations. We were setting up a number of low-powered broadcast stations to be operated by Armed Forces Radio Service in the European theater and we were teaching the fundamental operations of broadcast stations. It was during this time that my interest and activity as an author, writing about audio and sound equipment, stimulated a growing interest in recording, something in which I would get much more involved after the war."

Next month: Adventures in Recording! Part Two of the Mix interview.