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"Sesame Street," etc. on Commercial Stations

S

Stanislav

In browsing through TV Guides from the 70's, I have noticed that for a time there were some commercial stations carrying "Sesame Street" and the like, usually in markets where there was not yet a PBS affiliate. Anyone have examples of this, and in which markets were which shows carried?
 
WUTR-TV 20 (ABC) in Utica, N. Y. carried Sesame Street for a while in the early 1970's. It was underwritten by a local bank. It was one of their most popular programs.
 
Stanislav said:
In browsing through TV Guides from the 70's, I have noticed that for a time there were some commercial stations carrying "Sesame Street" and the like, usually in markets where there was not yet a PBS affiliate. Anyone have examples of this, and in which markets were which shows carried?
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WLWI/13 Indianapolis (now WTHR) carried Sesame Street for a few months in 1970, until WFYI/20 came on the air. WTIU/30 Bloomington was the only PBS station in central Indiana at the time and its signal didn't reach Indy.
 
KIII Channel 3 in Corpus Christi carried Sesame Street weekdays at 9:00 AM during the early 70's before the PBS station in Corpus Christi Channel 16 came into being.

KGBH Channel 4 in Harlingen carried Sesame Street weekdays at 3:00 PM during the early part of the 70's.

KRGV Channel 5 in Weslaco carried Sesame Street weekdays at 3:30 PM during the late 70's, apparently taking over for KGBH, since Harlingen and Weslaco are in the Rio Grande Valley. This was before Channel 60 in the Rio Grande Valley came along in the 1980's.
 
KFIZ-TV/34 Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, carried "Sesame Street" before Green Bay's PBS affiliate, WPNE-TV/38, started operating. In fact, KFIZ would sign on specifically for a relay of a morning broadcast of the series from either WMVS/10 Milwaukee or WHA-TV/21 Madison, then sign back off the air until 2:00 P.M. when they'd run "Make Room for Daddy" or "I Love Lucy"...
 
WLOS-TV, Asheville-Greenville-Spartanburg carried Sesame ST for several years in the 70s, maybe into the 80s even though two PBS stations were already well established in the area--WNTV/29, Greenville, and WUNF/33 Asheville.
 
In Fort Wayne IN, where there was no full-power PBS until the late 80s and not even a translator until the mid-70s, my wife remembers seeing Sesame Street and Electric Company on one of the three commercial stations - either WANE-TV or WPTA, she can't remember which.
 
I don't remember if it included "Sesame Street" but WLUK-TV 11, Green Bay, which was an ABC affiliate at the time, ran in-school programming for three hours mornings during the late 1960s, again prior to the establishment of WPNE-TV 38.
 
WNDU 16 in South Bend Indiana carried Sesame Street from 1970 - 1974, until WNIT 34 Elkhart/South Bend signed on in 1974. I don't know what time it aired, since I never lived in the South Bend market, nor was I born when it first aired on WNDU, and was less than a year old when WNIT signed on in 1974. But WNDU aired it commercial free during that time.
 
Hagerstown, MD's WHAG-TV 25 carried Sesame Street from the time they signed on ( 1970 ) until at least 1975. At 9am, just after the Today show.
 
Scott Fybush said:
In Fort Wayne IN, where there was no full-power PBS until the late 80s and not even a translator until the mid-70s, my wife remembers seeing Sesame Street and Electric Company on one of the three commercial stations - either WANE-TV or WPTA, she can't remember which.
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I've seen schedules which confirm WPTA used to run Sesame Street in the morning during the first half of the 70s. It seems WPTA moved it to a hour of half-hour earlier every year. I don't see any listings for Electric Co., however.

These same schedules also list WKEF Dayton and WIMA (now WLIO) Lima as carrying Sesame Street for the first couple years of the decade.
 
From some of the old tv guides I've seen WREX 13 in Rockford then ABC now NBC had Sesame Street on as late as 1983 or so.
 
RE:WLOS

Besides UNCTV and SCETV there was also WSJK (Ch. 2) serving East Tennessee. The only reason I can think WLOS carried Sesame Street was to provide the show as a public service to the many "Mom and Pop" cable systems that didn't carry a PBS affiliate but did carry WLOS. The station had wide cable coverage over many states. Just a guess, but the area was super served with PBS but those systems back in the day were as small as three or four channels.
 
radiorob2.0 said:
Besides UNCTV and SCETV there was also WSJK (Ch. 2) serving East Tennessee. The only reason I can think WLOS carried Sesame Street was to provide the show as a public service to the many "Mom and Pop" cable systems that didn't carry a PBS affiliate but did carry WLOS. The station had wide cable coverage over many states.
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Or even for off-air viewers -- WSJK would be fine for the Tennessee side of the mountains, but all of the PBS stations on the other side were UHF, and many folks back in the hollers probably had difficulty picking them up, even they even HAD UHF (I'm sure a lot of old TVs in those parts were pre-UHF). WLOS, with their blanketing signal from Mt. Pisgah, was probably the clearest station for many rural viewers (maybe even the ONLY one if you were in a particularly shielded location), and this way at least the flagship PBS shows could be seen so their kids could learn their ABCs and their "cipherin'."
 
I recall from a 1983 New Mexico "TV Guide" that Roswell's KSMS-TV (now KOB-TV satellite KOBR), an NBC affiliate, carried some PBS shows in their schedule, in lieu of syndicated, and even sports, programming.

However, they only carried second-tier PBS programming like "Six Gun Heroes" and "Kup's Show" -- not shows like "Sesame Street" or "Masterpiece Theatre".

KSMS also carried religious programming from CBN, but that's another thread.
 
Fort Wayne didn't get a PBS affiliate until about 1973 (and then, it was just a relay of WBGU in Bowling Green, Ohio). Until then, "Sesame Street" was carried by the ABC affiliate, WPTA/Channel 21.
 
KTVF here in Fairbanks ran Sesame Street in the early '70s (they were with CBS/ABC at the time) around the time KUAC signed on as the first PBS station in Alaska. Dunno about Anchorage, since they had to wait till 1975 for their own PBS affiliate. I'm thinking KTVA (KTVF's then-sister station) ran the show until then; I'll have to look at old schedules to find out.

Jonathan Allen
 
KAIT-8 in Jonesboro, Ark. aired "Sesame" for several years in the '70s, despite being within fringe reach of Memphis PBS station WKNO-10. Jonesboro would get a local AETN affil in 1976 (KTEJ-19).

Shreveport/Texarkana in the early '70s was a unique situation, at least according to a handful of TVGs I have (Arkansas Edition) from the '70-'72 time frame. It rotated between KTAL-6 (NBC) and KSLA-12 (CBS) both airing it at 9 AM. Not sure on how long each station had it, but I read somewhere that a local "Concerned Parents"-type of group in Shreveport literally bought a 60' block of time for "Sesame" to run.

--Russell
 
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