Harrison Holliway

In his brief lifetime, Harrison Holliway played a major role in the growth of Bay Area radio.

The San Francisco native developed a fascination with radio at an early age. At eleven, he built a carborundum crystal receiver. He became the President of the Lowell High School Radio Club and an officer in the San Francisco Radio Club.

Stockton Evening and Sunday Record December 25, 1930

By 1920, Holliway was a licensed amateur radio operator, setting a world record for voice transmission distance when he contacted another ham operator in Vancouver, BC.

Holliway enrolled at Stanford University, spending his summer months as a radio operator aboard a steamship plying the Pacific Ocean. In 1922, he took a leave of absence from Stanford to help launch The Emporium department store’s new radio station, KSL. When that venture failed a few months later, he returned to school.

Holliway’s summer job in 1924 was at a downtown San Francisco radio shop. The owners of the store decided to launch a radio station, and Holliway was hired to manage the brand-new KFRC. He never went back to school.

As manager of the fledgling station, Holliway did a bit of everything. Within a few months, the City of Paris department store acquired KFRC, and Holliway helped move the station to the store’s prime Union Square location, where street-level studios were built to shoppers could look in on the broadcasters.

Holliway’s role at KFRC was broad, including a great deal of on-air work. He was the announcer for the popular Blue Monday Jamboree variety program, which wound up with network distribution.

In 1925, Holliway was tagged for speeding. Recognizing his celebrity, the judge ordered Holliway to spend a week making nightly broadcasts of the number of people killed and injured by automobiles in San Francisco during the month. Apparently, the message didn’t take, as Holliway made the news again nine years later, cited for speeding near Monterey.

Holliway anchored a notable 1934 KFRC broadcast that was distributed nationwide on the Columbia network: a live remote from inside the cofferdam built to allow construction of the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. Network publicists called the site “the only dry spot in the Pacific Ocean”.

KFRC had been acquired in 1926 by auto dealer Don Lee, who was building a West Coast radio empire. Holliway moved to Los Angeles in 1935 to become general manager of KFI, operated by Don Lee’s fierce competitor in both the audio and radio businesses, Earle C. Anthony.

Harrison Holliway died in 1942 at the age of 41.