June 29: This Day in TV History

[Stanislav]

Just a few random TV related events that happened on June 29. Discuss or comment as you please……

1907: Actress Joan Davis (I Married Joan) is born (as Madonna Josephine Davis) in St. Paul, Minnesota.

1908: Composer Leroy Anderson is born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His main connection to TV comes in the use of his composition “Syncopated Clock” as the theme song for WCBS-TV’s long-running Late Show late-night movie slot. Another Anderson piece, “Plink, Plank, Plunk!" was used as the theme song to I’ve Got a Secret from 1952 to 1961.

1915: Actress Ruth Warrick (All My Children) is born in St. Joseph, Missouri.

1936: NBC begins field-test television transmissions from station W2XBS (later WNBT/WNBC) to an audience of 75 receivers in the homes of high-level RCA staff, and a dozen or so sets in a closed circuit viewing room. As a result of the continuing tests, scanning would be stepped up to 441 lines, and programming would be expanded to include remote pickups from outside the studio.

1953: KCSJ-TV (later KOAA-TV) signs on for the first time on channel 5 in Pueblo, Colorado. (Some sources claim June 30 as the actual sign-on date.)

1961: You Bet Your Life ends its original network run on NBC. Fortunately for Groucho fans, the show was filmed (not live), thus not suffering the same fate as other early game shows, which largely do not survive.

1961: Actress Sharon Lawrence (NYPD Blue, Desperate Housewives) in born in Charlotte, North Carolina.

1961: ETMA (Educational Television for the Metropolitan Area) agrees to purchase WNTA-TV (channel 13, Newark, New Jersey) for $6.2 million, and the FCC converts the station’s commercial license to non-commercial. The deal becomes finalized in December, and WNTA-TV is taken off the air, to be reborn 9 months later as WNDT (later WNET), the New York market’s first educational TV station. DYK: Despite being associated with New York, the channel is still allocated to Newark, thus WNET rebroadcasts New Jersey Network's nightly NJN News to satisfy its local programming obligations.

1966: KMTW-TV (later KSBC-TV) begins broadcasting in Los Angeles on channel 52. Starting life as a low-budget, short schedule independent, the station later became one of the longest-lived survivors of the “subscription TV” boom, running ON-TV from 1976 through 1985. In the same time frame, it gradually added more Spanish language programming, eventually morphing into a full-time Spanish outlet, and today is the Telemundo affiliate for L.A.

1973: KRWG-TV (channel 22) signs on from New Mexico State University as a PBS affiliate serving Las Cruces, New Mexico and area.

1981: TBS begins utilizing “Turner Time,” scheduling programs to start at :05 or :35 after the hour. The move is intended to both make TBS shows stand out in TV listings, as well as encourage viewers to stay with the channel rather than flip to a competing program already in progress.

2000: Oopsie! A CBS microphone catches an annoyed Bryant Gumbel blurting out "What a f**king idiot" just after finishing a hostile interview on The Early Show with Robert Knight of the Family Research Council.

2007: Film critic Joel Siegel (Good Morning America) dies in New York of complications from colon cancer, aged 63. DYK: Siegel worked as a joke writer for Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and was at the Ambassador Hotel the night the he was assassinated.

(Just a little featurette I hope to do as time permits…..don’t expect it every single day. 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…..)

 

[RicoGregg]

1961: You Bet Your Life ends its original network run on NBC. Fortunately for Groucho fans, the show was filmed (not live), thus not suffering the same fate as other early game shows, which largely do not survive.

Unfortunately, many episodes of You Bet Your Life aka Best of Groucho do not survive. In the early 70s, an NBC corportate boze orders many kinescopes and early video tapes of past NBC programming burned in order to clear up some warehouse space. In addition to Groucho, most episodes of Art Linkletter's People Are Funny, NBC White Paper, and Victory at Sea are lost. Fortuately, the Naval film archives had copies of the latter program, and it lives on in home video today.

1915: Actress Ruth Warrick (All My Children) is born in St. Joseph, Missouri.

Miss Warrick is also widely remembered as playing the part of Emily Monroe Norton, the first wife of Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles' masterpiece, Citizen Kane.

1966: KMTW-TV (later KSBC-TV) begins broadcasting in Los Angeles on channel 52. Starting life as a low-budget, short schedule independent, the station later became one of the longest-lived survivors of the “subscription TV” boom, running ON-TV from 1976 through 1985. In the same time frame, it gradually added more Spanish language programming, eventually morphing into a full-time Spanish outlet, and today is the Telemundo affiliate for L.A.

The present call letters are KVEA. The actual city of license has been the same since the beginning, Corona, in Riverside County. I used to watch reruns of The Life of Riley with William Bendix on this station. For some reason, they didn't show the Jackie Gleason episodes. What a revoltin' development.

2000: Oopsie! A CBS microphone catches an annoyed Bryant Gumbel blurting out "What a f**king idiot" just after finishing a hostile interview on The Early Show with Robert Knight of the Family Research Council.

I hope people cut Bryant Gumbel some slack. He was only speaking the truth.

 

[Ultimajock]

1966: KMTW-TV (later KSBC-TV) begins broadcasting in Los Angeles on channel 52. Starting life as a low-budget, short schedule independent, the station later became one of the longest-lived survivors of the “subscription TV” boom, running ON-TV from 1976 through 1985. In the same time frame, it gradually added more Spanish language programming, eventually morphing into a full-time Spanish outlet, and today is the Telemundo affiliate for L.A.

The present call letters are KVEA. The actual city of license has been the same since the beginning, Corona, in Riverside County. I used to watch reruns of The Life of Riley with William Bendix on this station. For some reason, they didn't show the Jackie Gleason episodes. What a revoltin' development.

...may it be possible that the Gleason episodes were (a) unavailable at the time, or (b) unavailable in the package Channel 52 bought? I recall the Gleason Rileys were run on a New York station not too horribly long back, and the general reaction was they weren't as good as the Bendix version...

 

[wbhist]

...may it be possible that the Gleason episodes were (a) unavailable at the time, or (b) unavailable in the package Channel 52 bought? I recall the Gleason Rileys were run on a New York station not too horribly long back, and the general reaction was they weren't as good as the Bendix version...

Very plausible. The station that ran the Gleason version was WPIX (Ch. 11), the same station that ran the "Classic 39" Honeymooners episodes lo these many years; I.I.N.M., the Bendix version was on WOR-TV (Ch. 9). Meaning, completely different packages.

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

Another June 29 birthday:

1901: Nelson Eddy (d. 1967)--born in Providence, Rhode Island. The venerable actor's TV work included guest-starring roles in 1951 on "The Alan Young Show" on CBS, the unseen 1952 pilot "Nelson Eddy's Backyard," and other guest appearances on shows including "Make Room for Daddy," "The Colgate Comedy Hour," "The Edgar Bergen Show," "The Bob Hope Show," and "The Dinah Shore Show."

 

[wbhist]

1908: Composer Leroy Anderson is born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His main connection to TV comes in the use of his composition “Syncopated Clock” as the theme song for WCBS-TV’s long-running Late Show late-night movie slot.

The recording WCBS-TV used for The Late Shows first two decades, however, was conductor Percy Faith's - which was issued on Columbia Records, whose then-parent was CBS, the owner of WCBS-TV.

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

Yet another June 29 birthday:

1948: Actor/politician/political commentator Fred Grandy ("Gopher" on "The Love Boat," and Iowa Republican Congressman from 1987-95), is born in Sioux City, IA.

 

[Ultimajock]

Another June 29 birthday:

1901: Nelson Eddy (d. 1967)--born in Providence, Rhode Island. The venerable actor's TV work included guest-starring roles in 1951 on "The Alan Young Show" on CBS, the unseen 1952 pilot "Nelson Eddy's Backyard," and other guest appearances on shows including "Make Room for Daddy," "The Colgate Comedy Hour," "The Edgar Bergen Show," "The Bob Hope Show," and "The Dinah Shore Show."

...slightly off-topic, but Eddy's most notable broadcast was on the NBC Red Network radio show The Chase & Sanborn Hour, hosted by Don Ameche and starring Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, on October 30, 1938. After Eddy's first segment ended about 13 minutes into that show, a lot of listeners started changing the dial to see what else was on -- and, at that very moment on CBS, the Martians were crawling out of the cylinder at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, on the Mercury Theater On-The-Air adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of The Worlds, the broadcast that made Orson Welles a household name overnight...

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

1958: Actor Jeff Coopwood, whose television credits include the former Illinois Lottery game show "$100,000 Fortune Hunt" (1989-94, primarily on WGN) and the host of the local pledge drives on LA PBS station KCET, is born in Chicago.

 

[wbhist]

1908: Composer Leroy Anderson is born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His main connection to TV comes in the use of his composition “Syncopated Clock” as the theme song for WCBS-TV’s long-running Late Show late-night movie slot. Another Anderson piece, “Plink, Plank, Plunk!" was used as the theme song to I’ve Got a Secret from 1952 to 1961.

Let me add on some more Anderson factoids: He was also the composer of an instrumental called "Forgotten Dreams," which (I.I.N.M.) was heard for a time in some segments of Captain Kangaroo. In addition, two different recordings by Anderson of that piece were used by a different ABC O&O in different contexts over the years. His original 1954 recording was used for a time in the early to mid 1980's by KABC-TV in Los Angeles as the background music heard during the sign-off (either by Len Beardsley or Dean Webber, depending on what day), while his 1959 version was used by WABC-TV in New York for much of the 1970's as the closing music for Friday evening and late weekend night editions of Eyewitness News, played to film footage of New York traffic at night.

 

[Stanislav]

1908: Composer Leroy Anderson is born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His main connection to TV comes in the use of his composition “Syncopated Clock” as the theme song for WCBS-TV’s long-running Late Show late-night movie slot. Another Anderson piece, “Plink, Plank, Plunk!" was used as the theme song to I’ve Got a Secret from 1952 to 1961.

Let me add on some more Anderson factoids: He was also the composer of an instrumental called "Forgotten Dreams," which (I.I.N.M.) was heard for a time in some segments of Captain Kangaroo. In addition, two different recordings by Anderson of that piece were used by a different ABC O&O in different contexts over the years. His original 1954 recording was used for a time in the early to mid 1980's by KABC-TV in Los Angeles as the background music heard during the sign-off (either by Len Beardsley or Dean Webber, depending on what day), while his 1959 version was used by WABC-TV in New York for much of the 1970's as the closing music for Friday evening and late weekend night editions of Eyewitness News, played to film footage of New York traffic at night.

Apart from TV-related pieces, Anderson is also responsible for the holiday season ear worm "Sleigh Ride," which generally drives me mad every year as I hear it a few hundred times. As an ex-trumpeter, I also have to mention a piece of fluff he wrote called "Bugler's Holiday," a perversely infectious (just mentioning the title, I will be hearing that music ALL DAY) miniature for band or orchestra featuring three solo trumpeters. One of those pieces that is really rather simple and inane, but sounds impressive to a lay audience, especially for younger school-age bands who manage to have three trumpeters that can handle the rapid double-tonguing passages.

Actually, I think you could pretty much describe most of his compositions as "infectious" -- they're pretty much designed to be catchy, accessible, and will sink their teeth deeply and permanently into your cerebral cortex, whether you like it or not.