Sex sells and selling sex also sells, or so would seem to be one lesson of Anthony Rudel's entertaining and informative history in which Pittsburgh was a pioneer.

Several names stand out among the scores who were prominent in the growth of radio as it moved from a hobby in the 1920s to a big business by the mid-1930s, but none more so than "Dr." (the quotation marks are advisable) John Romulus Brinkley. Brinkley's exotic, lucrative career is a leitmotif of Rudel's book.

		"HELLO, EVERYBODY: THE DAWN OF AMERICAN RADIO" By Anthony Rudel Harcourt ($26)

A snake-oil salesman, in essence if not in fact, Brinkley fetched up in Milford, Kan., in 1917, with a bogus medical degree after "years of learning, traveling and avoiding arrest."

There he stumbled across the dubious medical procedure that would make his name and fortune: Implanting goat glands into men complaining of "erectile dysfunction," then known as "flat tires."

His success skyrocketed when he began to sell his procedure over the airwaves from KFKB, the radio station he built in Milford.

Rudel, a novelist as well as a classical music and broadcasting specialist, gives a sometimes lively, always discursive account of his subject.

Herbert Hoover, with his gift for organization as President Warren G. Harding's secretary of commerce, was instrumental in regulating radio. He saw radio as a public service and warned against "advertising chatter." So much for that warning.

Pittsburgh was the site of several pioneering efforts, starting with Frank Conrad, a Westinghouse Co. engineer.

Operating out of his Wilkinsburg home, Conrad entertained an ever-growing group of radio enthusiasts by transmitting music from his nearby crank-operated phonograph. He even had commercials -- plugs for a local music store that let him borrow records.

Conrad received a federal license with the call sign 8XK in April 1920.

When Westinghouse obtained its broadcast permit for station KDKA a few months later, its efforts included:

• The "debut of broadcasting" with the broadcast of the 1920 national election results to a listenership estimated between 500 and 1,000.

• In sports, the 1921 lightweight boxing match between Johnny Ray and Johnny Dundee, the 1921 football game between the University of Pittsburgh and West Virginia University and the first play-by-play baseball broadcast, a 1921 Pirates-Phillies game, both by Howard Arlin.

• The beginning of the "unholy marriage between radio and religion" when KDKA installed microphones in Calvary Episcopal Church in 1921 to air Sunday morning services.

The author arranges his book partly by subject, and religion is one of the biggest sections. Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson and reactionary "radio priest" Father Coughlin have starring roles.

He shows that, for the most part, radio personalities then skewed the way they do today on television and cable -- hard-right and often bigoted.

The man "who really changed radio," he says, was Rudy Vallee, "the first pop-singing idol." After Vallee's initial exposure in 1928, he was rapidly all over the air -- and every other form of entertainment. Rudel credits him with creating the variety show.

As for Brinkley, when the authorities succeeded in exposing him as a quack, he simply moved his broadcasting operations to Mexico and his medical shop to Texas, shifting his focus from testicles to prostate, and the money -- up to $12 million -- continued to flow in.

Like Vallee and other innovative broadcasters of the early years, Brinkley understood that "radio enabled them to bond with the masses by speaking to the individual." But the bonding ended in 1942, when, after filing for bankruptcy, he died, pursued by litigation and shorn of much of his fortune.