In the 1920s, if you wanted to become a commercial radio operator or a shipboard radioman, you needed a Commercial Radio License, issued by the Department of Commerce. 

The best way to achieve this was to attend one of the few radio schools that operated in principal cities around the United States. Two of the most distinguished schools were in Washington, D.C.: the National Radio Institute and the Loomis Radio College. 

The latter was the only woman-owned radio school in the country. Mary Texanna Loomis was the principal instructor and that rare creature in the 1920s: a female authority on radio.

She was a distant cousin to Dr. Mahlon Loomis, who in 1866 had experimented with “stealing current from the atmosphere” using kites and metallic string.

In one experiment, he flew kites from two peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and was able to detect a change in current in a galvanometer in one kite when he grounded the line of the other. 

Subsequently, he was able to send Morse Code messages between the two locations, a distance of 18 miles. He was experimenting in wireless communication nine years before Guglielmo Marconi was born. 

Adult learning

Mary Texanna Loomis was born August 18, 1880, in a homesteader’s shack near Goliad, Texas, the second child of Alvan Isaac and Caroline (Dryer) Loomis. Her middle name was bestowed in honor of the state where she was born. 

The family moved to Rochester, N.Y., in 1883, where she had a respectable middle-class upbringing. She was sports-minded in her youth, participating in swimming, horseback riding and strenuous exercise. She also took voice lessons and became a good soprano. She learned to speak three languages: French, Italian and German. 

A grandfather was a strong influence; he taught her to use tools and to build mechanical devices, and he helped develop her interest in science and the new inventions of the industrial age. 

Loomis married Turner Erving Howard in October of 1898, in Buffalo. The marriage ended in divorce in 1917. It’s not known that she had any children. 

After her divorce, she moved to Washington, where she looked unsuccessfully for music employment. But her life took a new turn when she attended a lecture on the emerging technology of wireless communication. 

Fascinated, she proceeded to read everything she could find on the subject. At the age of 38, at a time when radio was the field of only a few experimenters and inventors, most if not all of them men, she graduated from radio school and earned her first-class radio telegraphy license. 

During World War I, she worked for the Red Cross and as a secretary in a wireless school. It was only then that she learned about the experiments of her distant cousin, and she resolved to open a radio operator’s school in his honor.

In 1920, she invested every cent she had and incorporated the Loomis Radio School. Located at 401–411 Ninth Street in the northwest quadrant of the city of Washington, it offered a six-month course preparing students for the first-class commercial radio license exam. Most students who graduated found positions as shipboard radio operators. 

Meeting any mishap

Loomis was the school’s president and principal lecturer. She taught radio using the equipment that she constructed herself in the school’s machine shop, and taught her students how to build radio equipment. 

“No man can graduate from my school until he learns how to make any part of the apparatus,” she said.

“I give him a blueprint of what I want him to do and tell him to go into the shop and keep hammering away until the job is completed. I want my graduates to be able to meet any emergency or mishap that may arise someday far out on the sea.”

She lived a frugal life in a boarding home, and worked 12 to 15 hours a day teaching, grading papers and writing. The Loomis Radio School offered four courses. One for commercial radio operators led to a first-class commercial radio operators license. A course for technical training taught how to build a receiving set. A third course led to a license as a radio amateur operator. And the fourth was for operators who needed to renew an expired license or who had been military operators and needed only minimal training. 

Her students also gained practical experience operating a radio transmitter through the use of the school’s amateur station, W3YA. 

Loomis was a noted lecturer and member of the prestigious Institute of Radio Engineers. She authored and marketed the popular book “Radio Theory and Operating for the Radio Student and Practical Operator.” This was a reference text of 886 pages and 700 illustrations, advertised at a reasonable price and offered postage-paid directly by the school. It found its place as a textbook used by many educational institutions and government agencies. 

By 1928 the Loomis book was in its fifth edition and amounted to 1,006 pages. “Radio Broadcast” Magazine called it “one of the most comprehensive volumes in its field.” 

She dedicated her book to her cousin Mahlon Loomis. 

The depression that began in 1929 affected the school severely, as it did tens of thousands of other businesses. Fewer students could afford the training, and larger schools like the National Radio Institute had more resources to weather the hard times. Further, a new competitor, the Capitol Radio Institute, would open in Washington in 1932. 

In 1930, Loomis reorganized the school as the Loomis Radio College, Inc., but it was dissolved in early 1933. 

Not much is known about Mary Texanna Loomis’ later life. She is known to have relocated to San Francisco in 1938; the census shows that she lived in the St. Francis Hotel and listed her occupation as a stenographer. She died in that city in June of 1960, at the age of 79, and was buried at the Woodlawn Memorial Park in Colma, California. 

Sources used in this article include:

• “National Electragist,” November 1921: “Woman conducts radio school”, by H.O. Bishop
• The Dearborn Independent, Dec. 31, 1921: “Woman conducts radio school”
• “The American Magazine”, January 1924: “This young woman founded a radio school”
• The Washington Post, March 15, 1931: “Mary Loomis bosses air students to high success”
• www.loomis-family.org
• www.wikitree.com
• “Mary Texanna Loomis” by W8SU, 2009
• “The Spectrum Monitor,” July 2022: “The First Lady of Radio” by Scott Caldwell

Another woman active in early radio was Mary Day Lee.

John Schneider has spent his career in broadcast technology development and sales. He is a lifelong radio history researcher. Email him at jschneid93@gmail.com.

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