KOMO Radio

KOMO Radio is the broadcast link through which music and rowing reach listeners at home, turning performances and races into shared local experiences. Its role ranges from airing Thula Rantz live in Seattle to carrying NBC’s coverage of races on Lake Washington and the Washington crew’s Olympic final in Berlin.

Local Broadcasts and Thula Rantz

In the spring and summer described in the book, KOMO Radio aired a series of live performances by Thula Rantz. For the first time, thousands of people heard her play, giving her growing musical career a local audience beyond the rooms where she had practiced. The broadcasts followed an audition with Fritz Kreisler that had encouraged the possibility of a place with a major orchestra; they offered Thula a public platform even though that larger opportunity had not yet materialized.

Bringing Lake Washington Into the Home

KOMO Radio also carried NBC’s broadcast of the varsity race on Lake Washington. At Fred Rantz’s house, Harry Rantz had bought a secondhand Philco radio for the occasion, and the family gathered as he turned it up to hear the race. The arrangement made the broadcast part of the day’s physical setting: Harry watched the distant lake through binoculars while the radio brought the announced contest into the house. The family’s disappointing sales that morning and their expectation of eating peanuts for a while sharpen the contrast between their modest gathering and the scale of the sporting event they were following.

Before the varsity start, the NBC Red Network began coast-to-coast prerace coverage at 4:15 p.m. KOMO carried the broadcast as the crews faced a strengthening tailwind and rough water. The account presents radio not as a substitute for the race but as an additional way to encounter it: listeners could follow a contest whose outcome was still unfolding on the lake, while the announcers’ coverage gave distant audiences access to its progress.

A Berlin Race Heard at Home

For the Olympic race, radio extended KOMO’s reach beyond its local rowing audience. Some households had bought new Philco 61F Olympic Special cabinet radios, with shortwave equipment intended to receive both NBC’s standard broadcast and transmissions from Berlin in several languages. At Harry Rantz’s nearly finished house, however, the family relied on the older Philco bought for the California race. Harry checked that it worked before dawn, and Joyce later sat down beside it with a pressed four-leaf clover Joe had given her, listening as NBC commentator Bill Slater’s voice began to crackle over KOMO’s airwaves at 9:15 a.m.

That domestic scene places the Berlin competition inside a wider American audience. Millions of people were turning their radio dials before work or farm chores, waiting to hear whether the Washington crew would add another chapter to the country’s Olympic story. KOMO’s relay gave listeners in Seattle rowing and labor-conflict city a point of access to the race as it happened; the small gesture of laying Joe’s clover on the radio makes the connection between the distant course and the family at home especially tangible.

Broadcast and Public Memory

Across these episodes, KOMO Radio serves as a recurring channel between performers or athletes and people unable to be present. Thula’s live music reaches thousands; NBC’s rowing coverage brings Lake Washington into a family gathering; and the Berlin relay makes an overseas race part of a morning routine at Harry’s house. The book’s attention to radios, dials, and listeners shows how broadcasting enlarges the audience for an event without erasing the distance between the household and the scene being described.