Officially known as the “Keep Growing Wiser

Order of Hoot Owls,” the Hoot Owls are the

stuff of which legends are made. A group of

prominent Portland businessmen, joining with

some professional entertainers, created a

weekly 90-minute entertainment revue which

quickly took the nation by storm - and set the

standard for public service.

Stories about the program and its originators abound. One holds that

the program’s concept originated with Oregonian associate editor,

Ronald G. Callvert, who was an inveterate radio buff. Supposedly,

Callvert happened to listen to the “Nighthawks Frolic” program from

WDAF Kansas City, when that station a station was only seven months

old). An alternative story is that Oregonian editor Edgar Piper was

traveling late in December 1922 and either heard the “Nighthawks”

while passing through, or staying in, Kansas City.”

A third version was later told by Richard Haller, an Oregonian staffer

who was assigned to KGW when the station signed-on. Haller, who

had graduated from the University of Michigan and the Sorbonne, first

worked at the New York Journal before coming to the Oregonian as

its book editor. Soon conscripted to KGW assignment, he went on to

manage the station for six years. By the time Haller left KGW in 1929

-- to become director of production for the ill-fated American

Broadcasting Company network in San Francisco, he was

acknowledged as the “dean” of broadcasting in the northwest” by the

Oakland Tribune.

Haller’s recounted the Hoot Owls’ founding as stemming from his

tiring of announcing station breaks -- “This is KGW” - every few

minutes. Believing that listeners were probably as tired as he of that

litany, he thought that a more personal relationship needed to be

developed between KGW and its listeners and the idea of a radio

“fraternity” came to his him.

The real circumstances of the Hoot Owl’s founding may, like many

other events, have unfolded nearly simultaneously from several like

minds as an undertaking whose time had come.