paying homage to our ancestors
the real history of the knt call letters
KNT 1140AM Aberdeen, WA -and-
KNT 1380AM Kukak Bay, Territory of Alaska
According to a recently rediscovered document from a now-defunct website, KNT Radio is actually not the first to use the call letters "KNT."
The website ptialaska.net reported in November 2002 that the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, through its Bureau of Navigation, Radio Division issued a radio station licence bearing the call letters KNT to a Washington state company in the spring of 1922.
The North Coast Products Company was authorized to operate a 250-watt transmitter for "radio communication purposes" with its employees and affiliates, but not for broadcast to the general public. The restriction was lifted on Dec. 4 of that year when the Bureau extended KNT owner Walter Hemrich a "Class A" license, allowing his station to begin general broadcasting on the equivelant of what is now 1140 on the AM dial.
Hemrich split the license away from the company into a personal venture in early 1924, when he moved the station from Aberdeen to Kukak Bay, Alaska ("Territory of Alaska" at that time, as Alaska had not yet become a state). The reassigned license was for operation at 1380 kilocycles at reduced power (100 watts - about that of a standard livingroom light bulb).
The station didn't last long, for reasons we may never know due to such a small venture in a remote location being forgotten in the passage of more than eight decades. When Hemrich's KNT went dark in March 1925, he returned his license to the Radio Division and the call letters were deleted from the U.S. station roster by the end of that month.
1913 U.S. Ship Radio Calls
Digging even deeper into the history of the KNT designation, the following is drawn from the July 1, 1913 edition of Radio Stations of the United States with supporting background sourced from two issues of Merchant Vessels of the United States (June 30, 1911 and June 30, 1912):
Prior to 1913, station calls mostly consisted of two letters and were generally self-assigned by the radio companies operating equipment on board ships. By 1912, the Bureau of Navigation had begun assigning calls under its authority to specify ship signaling identifiers.
Today, station call letters are assigned by the Federal Communications Commission. Calls in the western half of the U.S. (roughly) begin with "K" and those more to the east start with "W," followed by three more letters (four total).
But in 1913, at the beginning of the Commerce Department's issuing of radio transmitter licenses, the Bureau issued three-letter calls beginning with "K" to ships near the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, and three-letter "W" calls were assigned to Pacific Coast vessels. (Confusing, eh?)
The call letters "KNT" belonged to a ship called the Montauk. This was not the same Civil War-era vessel upon whose deck the autopsy of John Wilkes Booth was performed, nor the World War II ship that was later recommissioned as USS Galilea. Records online are sketchy, but it appears that the Montauk that bore the KNT radio designation might have been a merchant vessel affiliated with Isaac Jeanes & Co., a mercantile house in Philadelphia.
