PAYSON PEOPLE

 

James F. Hiatt Jr. was born in Payson in 1897. A certified electrical engineer—he earned his diploma from the American School in Chicago, Illinois in 1933–Hiatt worked as an electrician for Payson City for 28 years. And he repaired radios at a time when families gathered around the mass medium tech for entertainment and the news of the day. The ad for his repair service that appears here was published in The Payson Chronicle in 1937, when an estimated 75% of U.S. households had at least one radio receiver. It was the Golden Age of Radio.