Just a few random TV related events that happened on April 24. Discuss or comment as you please……
1933: Actor/comedian/TV host John Barbour (Real People) is born in Toronto, Ontario.
1940: Actor Michael Parks (Then Came Bronson) is born (as Harry Samuel Parks) in Corona, California.
1951: Journalist Dwight Lauderdale is born in Columbus, Ohio. He would become the first African-American news anchor in South Florida (WPLG-TV) and one of the state's most watched and longest running anchors, retiring in May 2008.
1954: WSEE-TV (channel 35) begins broadcasting in Erie, Pennsylvania.
1955: Another of the very few historic channel 70-83 full-power stations moves lower in the band as WLOK-TV (channel 73) switches to channel 35, changing calls to WIMA-TV. (The station is now known as WLIO.)
1955: KFDM-TV (channel 6) launches in Beaumont, Texas.
1960: CBWFT (channel 6, later channel 3) signs on, bringing full-time French-language programming to Winnipeg, Manitoba. (CBWT, which had previously broadcast in both languages, becomes English-only.) Initially, lacking a live interconnection with the CBC, the station depends on videotapes and films sent from Montreal and delayed by one week.
1967: Public station KSPS-TV (channel 7) signs on in Spokane, Washington. The station’s beginnings are quite humble; its first studios are in the basement of an elementary school.
1974: Comedian Bud Abbott (The Abbott and Costello Show) dies in Woodland Hills, California of prostate cancer, aged 78.
1976: In one of the most remembered bits from the early years of Saturday Night Live, producer Lorne Michaels makes a tongue-in-cheek on-air offer to pay The Beatles $3,000 to reunite on the show. (He would later raise the offer on another show – to a whopping $3,200.) Unbeknownst to Michaels, Paul McCartney is visiting his old bandmate John Lennon, and they are watching the live show together in Lennon’s New York apartment. McCartney would later say that the two had briefly and jokingly considered actually showing up at the studio (just 20-odd blocks away) while the show was still on the air, but did not want to deal with the mob scene that would almost certainly ensue.
1977: The last original episode of McMillan and Wife airs on NBC.
1978: Card Sharks premieres on NBC.
1980: WTAE-TV (Pittsburgh) personality Nick Perry, who hosts Bowling for Dollars and also calls the lottery drawings for the Pennsylvania Lottery, fixes the Lottery's Daily Number so that the drawing would come up as "666." Thus begins the Pennsylvania Lottery Scandal, colloquially known as the “Triple Six Fix.” Perry would eventually serve jail time, and production of the Lottery broadcasts would move to WHP-TV in Harrisburg a year later. (In addition, broadcasts of the drawings would also be taken from WTAE, moving to KDKA.) The debacle would result in lotteries being audited and monitored with witnesses from the government and/or accounting firms hired by them. The real-life incident also would be the inspiration for the 2000 movie “Lucky Numbers.”
1997: Comedian Pat Paulsen (The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Pat Paulsen Half a Comedy Hour) dies of complications from colon and brain cancer and pneumonia in Tijuana, Mexico, aged 69. (His condition having been diagnosed as terminal, Paulsen felt he had nothing to lose and was undergoing experimental cancer treatments south of the border at the time of his death.)
1998: The second of the two Dallas reunion TV-movies, Dallas: War of the Ewings, airs on CBS, a little less than a year and a half after the first TV-movie, Dallas: J.R. Returns, was broadcast, and seven years after the original series finished.
2003: The final original episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch airs on The WB.
2004: At the Early Television Conference in Columbus, Ohio, the CBS Color Television System is demonstrated for the first time in 50 years. A restored original CBS color television receiver and color monitor are used to display signals from a homebuilt NTSC-to-CBS converter.
2007: The day after his 94th birthday, TV personality Lawson J. Deming dies in Cleveland, Ohio of congestive heart failure. For 15 years (1967-82) he entertained kids and adults alike in the Detroit-Windsor area on WJBK-TV (and, at times, in syndicated markets such as Cleveland and Washington, D.C.) as the horror-movie host “Sir Graves Ghastly.” Gone, but certainly not forgotten by fans, the character and the actor who portrayed him are the subject of a very extensive and detailed fan site.
(Just a little featurette I hope to do as time permits. It’s an entirely random selection based on a quick Net search, and is not meant to be comprehensive. So, don’t post nasty messages about “you forgot THIS” or “how could you not mention THAT?” Do so, and I’ll just take my keyboard and go home…..)
1933: Actor/comedian/TV host John Barbour (Real People) is born in Toronto, Ontario.
1940: Actor Michael Parks (Then Came Bronson) is born (as Harry Samuel Parks) in Corona, California.
1951: Journalist Dwight Lauderdale is born in Columbus, Ohio. He would become the first African-American news anchor in South Florida (WPLG-TV) and one of the state's most watched and longest running anchors, retiring in May 2008.
1954: WSEE-TV (channel 35) begins broadcasting in Erie, Pennsylvania.
1955: Another of the very few historic channel 70-83 full-power stations moves lower in the band as WLOK-TV (channel 73) switches to channel 35, changing calls to WIMA-TV. (The station is now known as WLIO.)
1955: KFDM-TV (channel 6) launches in Beaumont, Texas.
1960: CBWFT (channel 6, later channel 3) signs on, bringing full-time French-language programming to Winnipeg, Manitoba. (CBWT, which had previously broadcast in both languages, becomes English-only.) Initially, lacking a live interconnection with the CBC, the station depends on videotapes and films sent from Montreal and delayed by one week.
1967: Public station KSPS-TV (channel 7) signs on in Spokane, Washington. The station’s beginnings are quite humble; its first studios are in the basement of an elementary school.
1974: Comedian Bud Abbott (The Abbott and Costello Show) dies in Woodland Hills, California of prostate cancer, aged 78.
1976: In one of the most remembered bits from the early years of Saturday Night Live, producer Lorne Michaels makes a tongue-in-cheek on-air offer to pay The Beatles $3,000 to reunite on the show. (He would later raise the offer on another show – to a whopping $3,200.) Unbeknownst to Michaels, Paul McCartney is visiting his old bandmate John Lennon, and they are watching the live show together in Lennon’s New York apartment. McCartney would later say that the two had briefly and jokingly considered actually showing up at the studio (just 20-odd blocks away) while the show was still on the air, but did not want to deal with the mob scene that would almost certainly ensue.
1977: The last original episode of McMillan and Wife airs on NBC.
1978: Card Sharks premieres on NBC.
1980: WTAE-TV (Pittsburgh) personality Nick Perry, who hosts Bowling for Dollars and also calls the lottery drawings for the Pennsylvania Lottery, fixes the Lottery's Daily Number so that the drawing would come up as "666." Thus begins the Pennsylvania Lottery Scandal, colloquially known as the “Triple Six Fix.” Perry would eventually serve jail time, and production of the Lottery broadcasts would move to WHP-TV in Harrisburg a year later. (In addition, broadcasts of the drawings would also be taken from WTAE, moving to KDKA.) The debacle would result in lotteries being audited and monitored with witnesses from the government and/or accounting firms hired by them. The real-life incident also would be the inspiration for the 2000 movie “Lucky Numbers.”
1997: Comedian Pat Paulsen (The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Pat Paulsen Half a Comedy Hour) dies of complications from colon and brain cancer and pneumonia in Tijuana, Mexico, aged 69. (His condition having been diagnosed as terminal, Paulsen felt he had nothing to lose and was undergoing experimental cancer treatments south of the border at the time of his death.)
1998: The second of the two Dallas reunion TV-movies, Dallas: War of the Ewings, airs on CBS, a little less than a year and a half after the first TV-movie, Dallas: J.R. Returns, was broadcast, and seven years after the original series finished.
2003: The final original episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch airs on The WB.
2004: At the Early Television Conference in Columbus, Ohio, the CBS Color Television System is demonstrated for the first time in 50 years. A restored original CBS color television receiver and color monitor are used to display signals from a homebuilt NTSC-to-CBS converter.
2007: The day after his 94th birthday, TV personality Lawson J. Deming dies in Cleveland, Ohio of congestive heart failure. For 15 years (1967-82) he entertained kids and adults alike in the Detroit-Windsor area on WJBK-TV (and, at times, in syndicated markets such as Cleveland and Washington, D.C.) as the horror-movie host “Sir Graves Ghastly.” Gone, but certainly not forgotten by fans, the character and the actor who portrayed him are the subject of a very extensive and detailed fan site.
(Just a little featurette I hope to do as time permits. It’s an entirely random selection based on a quick Net search, and is not meant to be comprehensive. So, don’t post nasty messages about “you forgot THIS” or “how could you not mention THAT?” Do so, and I’ll just take my keyboard and go home…..)
