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I arrived in Iowa just a couple years too late to hear Dick Petrik on the air at KOEL (950) AM, where he served as radio news director from 1952 to 1993. His 41-year career there remains one of the longest tenures in the nation for a radio news director.

I did get a chance to later meet Petrik in person after his retirement. He was not a flashy man (you don’t need to be flashy in radio), but always had the quiet confidence and clever glint in his eye that communicated here was a guy who could get to the bottom of the story.

Imagine a radio news version of Peter Falk’s Columbo character. As Petrik said in an interview with Cedar Falls Times editor Anelia Dimitrova last summer, “I guess I always had a yearning to find out when something was happening exactly what was happening.”

In broadcast news circles in Iowa, Petrik has legendary status as an incredibly tireless news director and skilled mentor. A lot of current news broadcasters learned at his side for those 41 years.

Petrik died last December in Oelwein at age 76, but stories from his career—including his heroic coverage of the 1968 Oelwein tornados—live on in Making Waves: The People and Places of Iowa Broadcasting (WDG Publishing, 2004). The book, written by Wartburg College communication arts professor Jeff Stein, is a fascinating history of radio and television broadcasting in the state, richly documented with photos and including a multimedia CD with audio, video, and images.

Iowans often lament that the state has never been at the forefront of national affairs. But, in the case of broadcasting, Iowa was firmly in the midst of the development of radio and TV broadcasting. Even the term broadcasting derives from the agricultural term for dispersing seed widely.

Stein suggests that it may indeed be the rural nature of Iowa, with people separated by long distances, that made the state the perfect place to pioneer in broadcasting. “Perhaps…it was just more important to the audience here than in other places,” Stein writes.

The book is filled with interesting stories. For example, the first radio station licensed by the government in Iowa was station 9YA (eventually renamed as WSUI) in 1919. The founding station manager was student Carl Menzer, who stayed with the station in Iowa City until his retirement in 1968!

In Shenandoah, in the southwest corner of the state, two seed company owners – Henry Field and Earl May – battled for listeners across the upper Midwest and used programs to promote their seed catalogs. May later established KMA and in 1926 was voted by nearly a half-million listeners as the “World’s Most Popular Radio Announcer” in a contest sponsored by Radio Digest magazine. May’s company grew into the eponymous garden center chain that still flourishes in the Midwest.

The photos in the book alone are priceless, including WHO’s Jack Shelley interviewing servicemen in Guam in 1945, “Miss Bonnie” Noonan and KWWL’s Romper Room children’s program in the 1960s, a young Bill Riley doing his Talent Search show at the state fair, and WMT-TV’s Barry Norris and Ron Michaelson looking quite mod as MDA telethon hosts in the 1970s.

Making Waves is a reminder of how far broadcasting in Iowa has come—-technical advances like Doppler radar images certainly trump a hand-drawn TV weather map.

But it also reminds us what is nearly lost in an era of media consolidation: the kind of localism where each media market in the state had a whole slate of local radio and television personalities and programs, from great news directors like Dick Petrik to simple but charming children’s shows like Romper Room.