Retro:Buffalo, New York Monday, November 23, 1953

[Tim L]

WBEN-TV 4 (All Networks)

WBEN (now WIVB) was Buffalo's first and only TV station at the time..While DuMont was one of Channel 4's affiliated Networks, A cursory look at the week's schedule indicated no DuMont programs..

Source:TV Today Magazine

7AM Today and Garroway-NBC
8:55 News-Jack Oglivie
9AM Girl Talk-Mary J. Abeles
9:30 Learn and Live
9:45 Garry Moore-CBS (Delayed from 1:30 in the afternoon)
10AM Ding Dong School-NBC
10:30 Arthur Godfrey-CBS
11:30 Strike It Rich-CBS
Noon-News-Jack Oglivie
12:15 Love Of Life-CBS
12:30 Search For Tomorrow-CBS
12:45 Guiding Light-CBS
1PM Matinee Playhouse
1:45 Johnny Corbett
2PM Double Or Nothing-CBS
2:30 Meet The Millers-Bill/Mildred Miller
3PM Big Payoff-CBS
3:30 Kate Smith Show-NBC (Joined In Progress)
4PM Welcome Travelers-NBC
4:30 On Your Account-NBC
5PM Fun To Learn
5:15 Children's Theatre
5:30 Howdy Doody-NBC
6PM Sagebrush Trail
6:30 News-Ed Dinsmore
6:45 Sports-Chuck Healy
7PM Ozzie And Harriet-ABC (delayed)
7:30 Goin' Paces-Travelogue
7:45 (Camel) News Caravan-Swayze-NBC
8PM Name That Tune-NBC
8:30 Voice Of Firestone-NBC
9PM I Love Lucy-CBS
9:30 I Led Three LLives-Syndicated
10PM Studio One-CBS
11PM News-Harry Webb
11:10 Sports/Weather
11:25 What's The Record
11:30 National Pro Football Highlights
Midnight Suspense-CBS (delayed)

 

[Ultimajock]

WBEN-TV 4 (All Networks)

WBEN (now WIVB) was Buffalo's first and only TV station at the time..While DuMont was one of Channel 4's affiliated Networks, A cursory look at the week's schedule indicated no DuMont programs..

9:45 Garry Moore-CBS (Delayed from 1:30 in the afternoon)

...anyone know if WBEN would have gotten next-day kinoscopes overnight from CBS New York, or week-later kinnies from CBS, or even if they were known to make their own kinnies?...

 

[bpatrick]

Was Channel 4 an NBC primary? I notice they carried
John Cameron Swayze instead of CBS's Douglas Edwards,
and the network whose newscast a station carried usually
gives a pretty good idea of its primary affiliation in those days
(exception: WTVD, an NBC primary from 1954 to 1956, carried
ABC's John Daly).

I'm surprised at the number of stations with multiple affiliations
that carried "Voice Of Firestone" instead of "Arthur Godfrey's
Talent Scouts" at 8:30 Monday nights. Here in North Carolina,
both WFMY and WBTV, CBS primaries, did this, although by
November 1953 WFMY was carrying Godfrey, since WSJS (now
WXII), the new NBC affiliate, had "Firestone."

I'm also surprised that Channel 4 didn't carry "Art Linkletter's
House Party."

 

[Tim L]

bpatrick:
I should have indicated it in the original post, but WBEN actually was CBS primary, due to its relationship to WBEN-AM 930, which was one of the first CBS radio affiliates in 1928..WBEN/WIVB has never changed its primary afiliation all these years..

 

[Ultimajock]

bpatrick:
I should have indicated it in the original post, but WBEN actually was CBS primary, due to its relationship to WBEN-AM 930, which was one of the first CBS radio affiliates in 1928..WBEN/WIVB has never changed its primary afiliation all these years..

...but WBEN Radio did not keep its CBS affiliation very long, By 1938, and the night of the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" broadcast, that affiliation had moved to WKBW. I have also owned an aircheck of Glenn Miller's last CBS "Chesterfield Moonlight Serenade" broadcast before he went into the Army Air Corps, which was in 1942, and at the end of the program a local utility announcer IDs WKBW...

 

[JeeperOne]

bpatrick:
I should have indicated it in the original post, but WBEN actually was CBS primary, due to its relationship to WBEN-AM 930, which was one of the first CBS radio affiliates in 1928..WBEN/WIVB has never changed its primary afiliation all these years..

...but WBEN Radio did not keep its CBS affiliation very long, By 1938, and the night of the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" broadcast, that affiliation had moved to WKBW. I have also owned an aircheck of Glenn Miller's last CBS "Chesterfield Moonlight Serenade" broadcast before he went into the Army Air Corps, which was in 1942, and at the end of the program a local utility announcer IDs WKBW...

Except for two things.....

1). WKBW-TV wasn't even on the air yet (And even when it did , it eventually wound up affiliating with ABC instead of trying to lure CBS away from WIVB. Look it up on Wikipedia for yourself if you'd like)

2) I think broadcasters learned from the lesson the backlash that the War Of The Worlds broadcast created by the 1950s (At least I would hope so!) ;D

Cheers & 73 ;D

 

[Ultimajock]

bpatrick:
I should have indicated it in the original post, but WBEN actually was CBS primary, due to its relationship to WBEN-AM 930, which was one of the first CBS radio affiliates in 1928..WBEN/WIVB has never changed its primary afiliation all these years..

...but WBEN Radio did not keep its CBS affiliation very long, By 1938, and the night of the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" broadcast, that affiliation had moved to WKBW. I have also owned an aircheck of Glenn Miller's last CBS "Chesterfield Moonlight Serenade" broadcast before he went into the Army Air Corps, which was in 1942, and at the end of the program a local utility announcer IDs WKBW...

Except for two things.....

1). WKBW-TV wasn't even on the air yet (And even when it did , it eventually wound up affiliating with ABC instead of trying to lure CBS away from WIVB. Look it up on Wikipedia for yourself if you'd like)

...do you have some sort of reading comprehension problem? I specified *radio* and did not make any reference to WKBW-TV...

2) I think broadcasters learned from the lesson the backlash that the War Of The Worlds broadcast created by the 1950s (At least I would hope so!) ;D

...and what are you talking about *here*? Any "backlash" was quickly diminished by Dorothy Thompson's popular syndicated newspaper column about the broadcast a few days afterward...

 

[Bob1370]

Interesting how there was nothing listed for Channel 17, WBUF-TV, which I believe was on the air by the late fall of 1953. This was almost two years before NBC bought it in that failed experiment to see if a network could make an O&O on UHF a viable way to extend its fleet of big-market stations..an experiment it abandoned in 1958 when WKBW-TV was two months away from sign-on on VHF Channel 7.

I believe the early, pre-NBC-ownership Channel 17 carroed shows from all four existing networks that WBEN-TV didn't want, at least until WGR-TV was up and running on Channel 2 the next year as a split ABC/NBC affiliate, and later ABC primary.

 

[Tim L]

Interesting how there was nothing listed for Channel 17, WBUF-TV, which I believe was on the air by the late fall of 1953. This was almost two years before NBC bought it in that failed experiment to see if a network could make an O&O on UHF a viable way to extend its fleet of big-market stations..an experiment it abandoned in 1958 when WKBW-TV was two months away from sign-on on VHF Channel 7.

I believe the early, pre-NBC-ownership Channel 17 carroed shows from all four existing networks that WBEN-TV didn't want, at least until WGR-TV was up and running on Channel 2 the next year as a split ABC/NBC affiliate, and later ABC primary.

Accoring to the Buffalo Broadcasters webpage, WBUF signed on in August 1953.  TV Today was based in Sandusky, Ohio and primarily covered the Cleveland and Detroit/Toledo Markets..Buffalo listings were on one page in the back and Youngstown stations (27, 73) on two pages after Buffalo..It might have been a case of a new station not being established yet, and having to add more pages to the magazine that they decided to hold off on carrying channel 17 listings.  Might also explain why 4 carried no DuMont shows at this point..

 

[fybush]

And of course there was another UHF on the air in Buffalo on that Monday in November: WBES 59 had signed on in September, lasting not even three months before collapsing in on itself in mid-December 1953. The Buffalo Broadcasters have more (with a few erroneous mentions of "channel 58") here:

http://www.buffalohistoryworks.com/broadcasters/hist_uhf.asp

Given how shaky both WBUF-TV and WBES were, it's no surprise they weren't listed in out-of-town publications!