Gurney Seed and Nursery Company
Yankton, South Dakota

Trade Name: "Gurney Sunshine"

Gurney Seed and Nursery operated radio station WNAX.

The company sold tubes in the late 1920's with the brand name "Sunshine".

Charles W. Gurney (born May 13, 1840) a Lieutenant Colonel during the American Civil War, opened his first nursery, Hesperian Nurseries, in 1866 in Monticello, Iowa. The business remained in Monticello until 1882, when the business was moved to Dixon County, Nebraska. After realizing the trade potential in towns near rivers, Gurney moved Hesperian Nurseries to Yankton, South Dakota, in 1897.

C.W. Gurney's seven sons were very involved in the family seed business, and in 1906, C.W. Gurney and his sons, and one nephew, had the nursery incorporated as Gurney's Seed and Nursery Company. The company started listing products on a generic price list for mailing purposes, until 1910, when Gurney's published its first large seed and nursery catalog with a full-color cover. Upon Charles W. Gurney's death in 1913, his sons and nephew continued the seed and nursery business.  In 1919, Deloss Butler (D. B.) Gurney, one of the Colonel's sons, became CEO. The company diversified and grew quickly. By 1924, the Gurney seed house was one of the largest in the world, receiving orders from 46 of the 48 states and many foreign countries.

In 1925, John Chandler “Chan” Gurney, Deloss Butler’s son, made a name for himself as a radio announcer and programmer for the Yankton radio station WNAX. WNAX was owned by the Dakota Radio Apparatus Company in Yankton, South Dakota. The Dakota Radio Apparatus Company was established in Yankton in May 1922. President of the firm was E.O. Walgren, an accountant and former official of the Schwenk-Barth Brewing Company. E.C. “Al” Madson, a man from Mankato, Minn., with radio experience, applied to the U.S. Department of Commerce for a license to operate a “sending station” in conjunction with the company’s sales activities as a distributor of Crosley radios. Commerce Secretary and future United States President Herbert Hoover approved, and WNAX was first licensed on November 7, 1922 and is the oldest surviving radio station in the state of South Dakota. The call-letters came from a sequentially assigned list, and WNAX was the last station in the state to receive a callsign starting with a W instead of K (other than sister station WNAX-FM), as additional stations in the state were established after the January, 1923 shift that moved the K/W call letter boundary from the western border of South Dakota to the Mississippi River. 

At the same time Chan Gurney was making a name for himself at WNAX, his father, D. B. Gurney, began to notice the successful efforts of his major competitor, Henry Field Seed and Nursery Company of Shenandoah, Iowa, broadcasting on station their radio station KFNF,  advertising its products. To meet this competition, Chan was sent to Shenandoah to look over the KFNF set-up, and upon his return home, he recommended that his father purchase WNAX. Madson of Dakota Radio Apparatus sold the license to Gurney Seed and Nursery for $2,000 on February 28, 1926.

In 1926 Gurney Seed started selling radios to their customers just like the Henry Field Seed Company was doing in Iowa. In the winter of 1927, D. B. Gurney, announced that a 250-watt transmitter was being installed at the seed company with steel towers 125 feet in height to carry the antenna. Chan Gurney would be in charge of programming, which was expected to reach listeners within a radius of 500 miles.