Dr. William D. “Doc” Reynolds

Dr. William D. “Doc” Reynolds helped bring radio broadcasting to Colorado from his home workshop and studio in Denver. A physician and radio experimenter, he operated the amateur station 9ZAF before federal rules created a separate license category for broadcast stations. On March 10, 1922, his Reynolds Radio Company received the first broadcasting authorization in Colorado, and the station was assigned the call letters KLZ.

Reynolds built KLZ into a family-run early broadcasting operation. A 1925 profile in Radio in the Home described the station at the Reynolds home on University Avenue, where his wife Naomi played piano and Reynolds led a saxophone sextet; their young son George, known on air as “Sonny” or “KLZ Junior,” also became part of the broadcasts. The article captures an era when local stations were assembled around transmitters, antennae and performers in private homes.

KLZ later moved its studios to Denver’s Shirley-Savoy Hotel. Reynolds also helped extend his company’s reach beyond Denver: the Broadcast Pioneers of Colorado records that Reynolds Radio Company acquired Colorado Springs station KFUM in 1931 and changed its call letters to KVOR. Reynolds died in November 1931. KLZ paused broadcasting for three hours in his memory, a tribute to a pioneer whose experiments helped establish Colorado’s first licensed broadcast station.

Colorado stations: KLZ, Denver; KVOR (formerly KFUM), Colorado Springs.
Significance: Reynolds Radio Company received Colorado’s first broadcasting authorization on March 10, 1922. Reynolds was inducted into the Broadcast Pioneers of Colorado Hall of Fame in 2014.

Sources

• Broadcast Pioneers of Colorado, “William D. Reynolds” Hall of Fame biography
• Vera Brady Shipman, “KLZ Is a Real Radio in the Home,” Radio in the Home, February 1925, pp. 29–30