September 30: This Day in TV History

[Stanislav]

Just a few random TV related events that happened on September 30. Discuss or comment as you please……

1931: Actress Angie Dickinson (Police Woman) is born (as Angeline Brown) in Kulm, North Dakota.

1939: The first telecast of a football game is made from Triborough Stadium, Randall's Island, New York as NBC’s W2XBS covers the season's opener between Fordham University and Waynesburg College. Two cameras are used -- one on the sidelines for close-ups, and another in the press box for broader perspectives.

1948: Brrrrr.....the start of The Freeze. The FCC halts the granting of new TV licenses while engineering studies are made to straighten out channel allocations and alleviate the serious co-channel interference problems that have already emerged, even with just 37 stations on the air. The proposed six-month freeze would end up lasting almost 4 years, during which time only the original 37 stations, plus 71 more which had already received construction permits, would be allowed to operate.

1950: WSM-TV (channel 4, now WSMV) signs on in Nashville, Tennessee.

1951: WLTV (channel 8 ) signs on in Atlanta, Georgia. Eventually to become WXIA-TV (channel 11), they may be another claimant to the “Most Sets of Call Letters Used” title: WLTV, WLWA, WAII-TV, WQXI-TV, and finally WXIA-TV. That’s five sets of calls aired, like Newark’s channel 68 (see yesterday’s TDITVH), which also had a sixth (never aired) set of calls originally assigned.

1953: WSJS-TV (channel 12, now WXII-TV) goes on the air in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

1953: WMT-TV (channel 2, now KGAN) begins broadcasting in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It is the first station to be given “split-market” status by the FCC, licensed to serve Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, and Dubuque.

1953: WICS (channel 20) debuts in Springfield, Illinois.

1954: Actor Barry Williams (The Brady Bunch) is born (as Barry William Blenkhorn) in Santa Monica, California.

1956: CBWT (channel 6) in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is connected to the Trans-Canada Microwave Relay System, allowing viewers there to watch CBC programming at the same day and time as eastern provinces for the first time.

1957: WKYT-TV (channel 27) signs on in Lexington, Kentucky.

1957: Actress Fran Drescher (The Nanny) is born in Flushing, Queens, New York.

1958: Naked City debuts on ABC.

1958: WBUF-TV (channel 17) in Buffalo, New York goes dark. Purchased by NBC in 1955 and used as a UHF experiment by that network, the station was never really able to overcome the technical problems of early UHF reception, with many viewers getting a better NBC signal from the more distant WROC-TV in Rochester. NBC subsequently would donate the license and some equipment to start educational WNED-TV on the channel.

1960: Have a yabba-dabba-doo time! The Flintstones premieres on ABC.

1961: Actress Crystal Bernard (It’s a Living, Wings) is born in Garland, Texas, the daughter of an evangelist (Dr. Jerry Wayne Bernard).

1962: KCRL-TV (channel 4, now KRNV) goes on the air in Reno, Nevada.

1962: Estación KMEX-TV (canal 34) empieza sus transmisiónes en español en la ciudad de Los Angeles.

1963: BBC Television first uses a globe as their symbol – a logo that would endure until 2002.

1965: Thunderbirds debuts on the U.K.’s ITV network.

1968: WCWB-TV (channel 41, now WMGT-TV) hits the airwaves in Macon, the first new commercial station in Middle Georgia since WMAZ-TV’s sign-on 15 years earlier.

1971: Actress Jenna Elfman (Dharma and Greg) is born (as Jennifer Mary Butala) in Los Angeles.

1975: The “Thrilla in Manila” – Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier in the Philippines – is broadcast by HBO via satellite (said to be HBO’s first satellite-delivered broadcast).

1982: NORM!!! Cheers debuts on NBC.

1982: Actress Lacey Chabert (Party of Five) is born in Purvis, Mississippi.

1984: Murder She Wrote premieres on CBS.

1991: Charlie Rose debuts on PBS.

2001: Law & Order: Criminal Intent premieres on NBC.

(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…..)

 

[LKellerIII]

Cheers premiered 26 years ago today. Now THAT is just plain depressing. Not the show...just the fact that so many years have gone by.

Charlie Rose - a great interviewer that mostly flies under everybody's radar...mine anyway. But always worth watching. when I'm up and remember to tune him in.

 

[Smittian]

1956:KSIX-TV (Channel 10) in Corpus Christi,TX signs on, unleashing decades of unintentional newscast comedy upon the South Texas area. The station becomes KZTV in 1958. The comedy comes to an end in 2002 as the station is sold, Walter Furley retires and the station actually begins spending money to upgrade the newscasts.

 

[landtuna]

Walter Furley retires and the station actually begins spending money to upgrade the newscasts.

I'm sorry. Couldn't resist. Mr. Furley?????

 

[Newname]

Wasn't he the guy who hired two women and a guy to read the news...but they pretended the guy was gay...and Furley kept eavesdropping and bursting in on the newscast because he thought they were having sex? ;D

 

[RicoGregg]

Well, yes, but as God is his witness, he thought turkeys could fly.

 

[Ultimajock]

...1951: Red Skelton begins a phenomenal 20-year stretch on weekly television with a half-hour filmed variety show on NBC. Red would jump to CBS two years later, and permanently expand to an hour-long format in 1961 after experimenting with that length for most of the summer of 1954. After CBS cancels Skelton, Jackie Gleason and Petticoat Junction in the first wave of its "Great Purge of 1970-71," Red returns to NBC and the half-hour format, where, despite being the lead-in for Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, competition from the first half of Gunsmoke on CBS and NFL Monday Night Football on ABC on the West Coast prove too much for old Red to handle, and aside from some ABC specials in the 1970s, Skelton's performances largely become limited to one-nighters at Nevada casinos and state fairs after NBC cancels him in 1971...

 

[stevezodiac]

1939: The first telecast of a football game is made from Triborough Stadium, Randall's Island, New York as NBC’s W2XBS covers the season's opener between Fordham University and Waynesburg College. Two cameras are used -- one on the sidelines for close-ups, and another in the press box for broader perspectives.

I'd love to see the 30's versions of the production camera switchers. Any known links? ??? Thanks in advance.

Also.....Thank you Stanislav for these nearly daily reports. I HAVE to check in often!

 

[Ultimajock]

1939: The first telecast of a football game is made from Triborough Stadium, Randall's Island, New York as NBC’s W2XBS covers the season's opener between Fordham University and Waynesburg College. Two cameras are used -- one on the sidelines for close-ups, and another in the press box for broader perspectives.

I'd love to see the 30's versions of the production camera switchers. Any known links?

...I highly doubt that there were any kinescopes made of the broadcast, as NBC-TV had only two stations at the time, W2XBS in New York City and W2XB (now WRGB/6) in Schenectady, and I rather doubt that there was much interest in Schenectady for seeing a football game between teams from a New York City university and a small-town college southwest of Pittsburgh, historic as it may have been. But that does bring up an interesting question -- does anyone know what the oldest surviving American kinescope is of? I have seen kinnies of what apparently was the theatrical television system operating in Nazi Germany in the '30s, and I think there's a clip or two of the BBC's pre-WW2 service that wasn't filmed first and run back on a chain, but even the famous clip of Bob Hope's opening broadcast on KTLA Los Angeles in January 1947 was filmed rather than kinnied (KTLA was owned by Paramount Pictures, Bob's cinematic employer at the time)...

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

1947: Game 1 of the 1947 World Series between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees is the first Series game to be televised (although coverage was limited to the NYC area). At Yankee Stadium, the hosts down the Dodgers, 5-3 (WP: Spec Shea; LP: Ralph Branca--of Bobby Thomson/"Shot Heard Round the World" fame 4 years and three days later) in a mere 2:20.

 

[bpatrick]

WXIA's call letters were to have been WCON (for Atlanta Constitution,
which had obtained the Channel 2 license in Atlanta). When the first
television stations were licensed in Atlanta, the Cox family owned the
Atlanta Journal/WSB (originally on Channel 8) combination; another
company owned the Constitution and a radio station, WCON, at 550
on the AM dial and an ABC affiliate. Before the Constitution could get
WCON-TV on the air, the Coxes bought the Constitution; under FCC
rules at the time, they couldn't own two television stations so they
switched WSB-TV to Channel 2 and sold Channel 8 to a company called
Broadcasting, Inc., which got the call letters WLTV. As I've noted before,
had the original plan worked out, ABC would have been on Channel 2
in Atlanta from the beginning; whether it would have stayed there is
an unanswerable question. (In 1953 Channel 8 was reassigned to the
University of Georgia, and the station by this time called WLW-A was kicked
upstairs to Channel 11.)

WSJS became WXII in 1972, thanks to the crossownership rules. The
Winston-Salem Journal-Sentinel owned WSJS radio and television (Channel
12); the FCC forced the divestiture of one of the properties. Multimedia
bought Channel 12, changed the call letters, and sold it to Pulitzer in (I
think) 1983; Hearst-Argyle owns it now. The radio station is still WSJS.

 

[Rob Jason]

The Paley Center in NYC has on file for public viewing a film made of a W2XBS (WNBC) TV broadcast from 1939. There's no sound. Someone at home filmed it. I've seen it --it shows a skit that was written as a turn-of-the-century melodrama. It doesn't look much different from what you would see later in the early days of commercial TV.

Dumont didn't invent the kinescope process until 1947. As well, the attitude in the earliest days of TV was "why save this? But here's what may be the earliest kinescope I've found -- WABD/NY carrying a ratio/TV simulcast of "The Breakfast Club" from WFIL in Philadelphia...It was an ABC show, but done before ABC-TV had a TV network. Since they're talking about the political conventions, it has to be from summer 1948, before the big 1948 kick-off season for commercial network TV:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ1gamhoH6k

Forgive me for not providing links -- but one website has film of a BBC transmission received on Long Island in sometime like 1937.

And about that world series game -- I believe that was also carried on NBC stations in Schenectady and Philadelphia. It's been said that that broadcast was the first million-viewer TV audience.

 

[Stanislav]

Forgive me for not providing links -- but one website has film of a BBC transmission received on Long Island in sometime like 1937.

I believe either the BBC site or the Alexandria Palace website has it. That's a rare and precious bit of footage, from both a TV history and TV-DX standpoint. It is, IIRC, the only filmed record of an actual high-definition (200 lines or more) TV transmission of the era. (For whatever reason, it never occurred to anyone AT the BBC to just stick a camera in front of a screen and document a few things just for history and posterity...I guess the concept of an "aircheck" was still well off in the future.) <s> And the reception was possible because it coincided with a peak of the 11-year solar cycle, during which F2 skip (which normally affects shortwaves only) can intensify and venture into the lower VHF realms for brief periods, yielding paths of potentially 2000-4000 miles or longer. Thus, it is also the earliest record of VHF TV-DX, a decade or more before the phenomenon would begin to attract DX hobbyists.

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

1946: Actress/puppeteer Fran Brill is born in Chester, PA. She is best known for her "Sesame Street" roles as the voice of Prairie Dawn, Little Bird, and Zoe. Her other TV appearances include roles on "How to Survive a Marriage," "Guiding Light," and "Kate and Allie."

 

[easttxtv]

Walter Furley retires and the station actually begins spending money to upgrade the newscasts.

I'm sorry. Couldn't resist. Mr. Furley?????

Wasn't he the guy who hired two women and a guy to read the news...but they pretended the guy was gay...and Furley kept eavesdropping and bursting in on the newscast because he thought they were having sex?

Sounds like the Ropers would have run the station better, but whoever heard of a GM's wife walking around a station with curly hair and caftans?? 8)