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Which TV Guide local editions were available in the areas you grew up/once lived in?

T

Tim from Springfield IL

What pre-Oct. 2005 TV Guide local editions were sold in/near the areas that you grew up and/or once lived in? Were there even any editions that your area was assigned to but not all of the OTA channels available via antenna or cable in your community were listed?

Although my family never subscribed to the magazine growing up, all of the areas I grew up and went to college/graduate school in until 2002 (Peoria County--Peoria DMA; Warren County--Quad Cities DMA; McDonough County--Quincy/Hannibal DMA) always received the Western Illinois edition. I also had seen the Western Illinois edition sold east of the Illinois River from Peoria in Tazewell County. (Although some online sources list the Eastern Illinois edition as the "home" edition for the Peoria/Bloomington stations. But I know Bloomington received that edition, while Peoria always got Western Illinois).

Moving to Springfield, IL: Eastern Illinois edition always sold here until local editions were discontinued. This meant those who bought TVG and used one of the previous incarnation of the local newspaper's TV insert (State Journal-Register) could easily get their channel 2's and 10's confused (Eastern IL TVG carried WTWO-2 and WTHI-10 from Terre Haute; SJ-R's old TV insert always carried St. Louis's KTVI-2 and Quincy's WGEM-10, but never the Terre Haute stations as their coverage area didn't extend that far east).

What old TV Guide local editions were available in your area--and were there any oddities in what your edition's listings were compared to what was actually received/available in your area?
 
When I lived in Northern Virginia back in the 80s the main TV Guide was the Washington-Baltimore edition but one really didn't have to go too far to get the Southeastern Virginia ( Hampton Roads, Richmond, Harrisonburg and Charlottesville ) edition. Just take a short trip to Kings Dominion amusement part and one could that edition there. Southeastern PA ( Lancaster, Harrisburg, York, Lebanon ) didn't have to go too far to get that edition either. Just take a quick drive through Frederick, Maryland and cross the PA boarder and there you go.

Looking back I never could quite figured out why the Washington-Baltimore edition had listings for WGAL out of Lancaster, PA but not for the Richmond stations considering that I just do not remember any cable system in Maryland offering WGAL but many Northern Virginia cable systems ( though unfortunately not ours ) did in those days offer at least some channels from Richmond especially WTVR channel 6. Likewise with the DC stations in Central Virginia. Yes both WDCA and WTTG were available as far south as the Carolinas and they were listed in their TV Guide but even Charlottesville at least on their cable in those days at least got Washington's channels 7 and 9 and they weren't.

The newspaper version of TV Guide....I do remember that in the mid 80s in the Cumberland, Maryland paper their listings did feature most of the DC stations except WRC and only one Baltimore station ( WJZ ) but they did feature listings from Pittsburgh, Altoona, Johnstown, Hagerstown ( of course ) and even listings from Clarksburg, Weston and Wheeling out of West Virginia even though I can't see how with all of those nearby mountains how they would get those signals. Oh they also got the Washington-Baltimore edition of TV Guide too.
 
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Where I grew up in West Central Ohio, 2 editions were carried in the stores through the 70s. You could pick up the Southwest Ohio edition or the Northeast Indiana edition (at least I think that's what they were called). Most homes were configured with a VHF antenna aimed at Dayton, a UHF toward Fort Wayne, and a smaller UHF pointed to Lima. WIMA-TV (later WLIO) was listed in the Fort Wayne version. (NBC shows listed as 16, 33, 35) - 16 being WNDU, South Bend. The Southwest Ohio edition carried Dayton, Cincinnati and Columbus as I recall.
I also lived in Quincy IL for a short time. We couldn't get a TV Guide for all the channels we got on cable. The Western Illinois Edition had Hannibal/Quincy (7 and 10), Kirksville-Ottumwa (3 which was Hannibal Quincy's default ABC station), Quad Cities and Peoria. To see schedules for the St. Louis stations we got, we had to drive across the river and get the edition sold in Hannibal (I don't remember what it was called-I don't think it was the St. Louis edition though.
My time in Indiana was mostly the Central Indiana edition. When I visited my now ex-mother-in-law in Southern Ohio, they got the West Virginia Edition, which included Huntington, Wheeling and the major Columbus stations (plus KET-Kentucky Educational Television)
 
gr8oldies said:

I also lived in Quincy IL for a short time. We couldn't get a TV Guide for all the channels we got on cable. The Western Illinois Edition had Hannibal/Quincy (7 and 10), Kirksville-Ottumwa (3 which was Hannibal Quincy's default ABC station), Quad Cities and Peoria. To see schedules for the St. Louis stations we got, we had to drive across the river and get the edition sold in Hannibal (I don't remember what it was called-I don't think it was the St. Louis edition though
Click to expand...


The old Western Illinois edition also included the stations licensed to Springfield (WICS-20, then NBC now ABC; WRSP-55, indy then Fox), but you needed the Eastern Illinois edition for the rest of the Springfield-Decatur-Champaign market's stations. Also the Fox affiliate for Peoria whose COL is Bloomington, WYZZ-43, was carried in the Western Illinois edition.

Hannibal did apparently have the St. Louis edition--which had those market's stations only. Unless they were carried when TVG first started, no non-St. Louis stations were included in this edition, not even KHQA (the Quincy CBS affiliate which was licensed to Hannibal).
 
I remember the cable system out there had the St. Louis stations on the numbers of the Peoria stations before moving them. That would lead me to think they carried the Peoria stations at one time, but it got easier to pull St. Louis TV and FM via microwave (CBS and NBC duplicated programming was switched to KHQA and WGEM. )
 
gr8oldies said:
I remember the cable system out there had the St. Louis stations on the numbers of the Peoria stations before moving them. That would lead me to think they carried the Peoria stations at one time, but it got easier to pull St. Louis TV and FM via microwave (CBS and NBC duplicated programming was switched to KHQA and WGEM. )
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If you're talking about the Quincy and/or Hannibal cable systems, except for tropo I don't think it would have been possible to effectively pick up the Peoria stations that far southwest, as they were (and still are in the digital era) all-UHF (ABC-19, NBC-25, CBS-31). Your best bet at receiving Peoria stations OTA or cable anywhere in the Quincy DMA would (and still) be along and east of US-67 (Macomb-Rushville-Beardstown northeastward). Similar deal with making attempts to pick up Springfield-licensed stations (WICS-20, WRSP-55).

Although as Quincy didn't have its own ABC station (except for the ill-fated WJJY Jacksonville and the 1987-88 KTVO 2000-foot stick disaster), there were some cable/OTA viewers that tried to pick up Peoria's channel 19 (now WHOI) for their de facto ABC station (and similar for WQAD-8 Moline, WAND-17 Decatur and later WICS-20 Springfield after Labor Day 2005, KTVI-2 and later KDNL-30 St. Louis, and on the Missouri side KTVO plus KMIZ-17 Columbia).

However, in the pre-Fox/syndex era, could it have been possible that the cable systems in Quincy and Hannibal might have made an effort to try to pick up WRSP-55 Springfield in its indy/early Fox days (after it built its current transmitter at Mechanicsburg, IL in 1982)? WRSP had a strong presence on several Quincy/Hannibal DMA cable systems in the analog era as Quincy also lacked an OTA Fox station pre-digital (especially Rushville, Beardstown, Pittsfield, Mt. Sterling, maybe even Macomb for a time?).

Anyway, going back to the original topic, IMO the old TVG St. Louis edition represented a situation where a case could be made to either add immediate out-of-market stations to the edition (e.g., Springfield/Decatur/Champaign, Cape Girardeau/Paducah/Harrisburg, Quincy/Hannibal, Columbia/Jefferson City, maybe Terre Haute) in addition to St. Louis (but it could split this edition into "Missouri" and "Illinois" versions), or just downgrade that edition to a cable-oriented one just for the immediate city/suburban/Metro East area and then just add St. Louis channels to the Western/Eastern Illinois, Paducah/Evansville, and Missouri editions (while expanding their distribution areas). If that had happened the Missouri edition could have also added KTVO, KHQA and WGEM too and had become the issue sent to Hannibal.
 
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Interesting. I was only in that market for a short time in 1985-86. Fox wasn't around then as I remember; I do remember independent KPLR on the cabie with the rest of the major St.Louis stations. I could get a weak signal from KTVO, and it was carried on the cable, so I'd think an outdoor antenna could get them. I had heard about the plan for the big power. An interesting thing was the amount of commercials for small radio stations I saw on 3, thus we had both KTVI and KTVO for ABC. I don't know who the first Fox affiliate in the STL market was.
 
The Memphis edition was carried where I lived in the Dyersburg, TN area. It had all the stations for Memphis and Jackson, plus Northern MS, and Jonesboro, AR. I culd get most of the Memphis and Jackson and Jonesboro stations OTA, but not the MS stations. I also occasionally picked up the Paducah, KY edition from Union City, which was about 30 miles away from Dyersburg. It carried the Paducah/Cape Girardeau, MO/Harrisburg, IL stations and also Evansville, IN.

There was also a period in the early 2000's where I could get the Nashville edition when Hastings, a book, music, and video chain in Dyersburg, carried it, probably because of getting their magazines from a Nashville area distributor. That was corrected after a few months.
 
Here in New Britain, CT, we would receive the Hartford/New Haven Edition. Besides our locals, it listed the 3 full-powered stations from Springfield, MA (NBC 22, ABC 40 and PBS 57) and the VHF stations from metro NYC. WSBK-TV channel 38 of Boston was listed under Cable/Pay TV as "38B". Oddly, if you went as close as the University Of Connecticut campus and/or Willimantic, you'd get the Providence Edition, despite still being in this market. Much of H/NH was listed, along with Providence, New Bedford, MA, Boston/Cambridge and Worcester, MA.

When I lived in Old Orchard Beach, ME, we'd receive the New Hampshire Edition. Maine stations carried were channels 6, 13 and 51 Portland, 8 Poland Spring and 26 Biddeford. (Channel 35 of Lewiston, ME wasn't on the air yet.) Boston/Cambridge was also included (2, 4, 5, 7, 25, 38 and 56...not sure about channel 27 Worcester). The same edition was sold to the west in Brattleboro, VT, which made sense, since Windham County, VT is the northwest fringe of the Boston/Worcester market, then and now.
 
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When our family lived in Rockford, my grandmother had been a longtime TV Guide subscriber, and so she got the Illinois-Wisconsin edition. Chicago, of course, had its own TV Guide edition, but the Rockford, Madison, and Milwaukee markets pretty much exclusively used the IL-WI edition (this edition was published in Milwaukee). The IL-WI edition all of the Rockford and Madison stations (13-17-23-39 and 3-15-21-27-47-and later 57, respectively); all of the Milwaukee stations, except WVCY-30 and WJJA-49 (now WMLW); the Chicago stations except WYCC-20 and WYIN-56 (both PBS), WSNS-44 and WEHS-60 (pre-Spanish), and WCIU-26 (pre-"The U" era).

My grandmother also used the local newspaper's weekly TV guide insert (Rockford Register-Star's "TV Week"), and prior to most of the Rockford area's cable systems got all absorbed by Comcast, they used to have a cable conversion chart for each system within the area (probably at least 10-12 systems listed). As a side note, before Comcast came to Rockford, the city was served by Insight Cable, and prior to that Cablevision (yes, the Long Island-based TV provider) was the primary operator. In contrast to the local TV Guide edition, the Star's TV Week only had WGN, WFLD, WTTW, and WHA listed as the only out-of-town stations; WFLD (for some strange reason) wasn't carried on cable in Rockford proper unlike the other three, while some areas east and south of Rockford/Winnebago County did get that station.

Also, I was always surprised that Rockford Cablevision (and its successors) didn't carry some of the Milwaukee stations (in particular the PBS duopoly or even the present-day Sinclair duo of WVTV and WCGV)...distance wouldn't necessarily been an issue, because Rockford is equidistant to both Milwaukee and Chicago (about 90 miles apiece), and capacity wasn't too much of an issue--they had a 36-channel system in place for years, but prior to a channel lineup expansion in 1988, they only utilized channels 2-28 (if memory serves) at the time. At that time (the 1980s), WVTV was pretty sports-heavy--the Bucks, the Brewers, Big Ten basketball, and I believe even some Marquette basketball games as well, and WCGV was a good indie as well. At least in Rockford, WQRF carried some of that stuff (which could explain why no other out-of-town indie besides WGN was carried on cable in Rockford), but those other out-of-town stations did offer some syndicated stuff that none of the Rockford stations carried...that alone should have put the out-of-town stations on the cable lineup there.
 
Through the 60s and into the 70s (at least), the Los Angeles edition of TV Guide included San Diego and Santa Barbara. I don't recall when they took SD out, and I assumed they got their own edition - some time in the late 70s perhaps. IIRC, Santa Barbara stayed in the LA edition.
 
We had the Pittsburgh-Youngstown edition, which included outlying markets like Steubenville, Wheeling, Johnstown
and Altoona. I believe it might have included Erie, PA as well.
 
We had two editions in Seattle. You could get the Seattle-Tacoma edition, which had all of the Seattle stations and CBUT-2/ch 99 cable. Cable channels were listed by the channel numbers on TCI/AT&T Broadband.
The other one was the Western Washington State Edition, which had less cable channels and more broadcast. KCKA-15 was included w/ KBTC-28, KVOS-12, CKVU-10, CHAN-8 and CHEK-6 were also additions.

In Eastern Washington there was just the one edition (Eastern WA) that had a good variety of stations from Spokane, Tri-Cities and Yakima. KSKN-22 Spokane was missing however.
 
ShawnHill1 said:
When our family lived in Rockford, my grandmother had been a longtime TV Guide subscriber, and so she got the Illinois-Wisconsin edition. Chicago, of course, had its own TV Guide edition, but the Rockford, Madison, and Milwaukee markets pretty much exclusively used the IL-WI edition (this edition was published in Milwaukee). The IL-WI edition all of the Rockford and Madison stations (13-17-23-39 and 3-15-21-27-47-and later 57, respectively); all of the Milwaukee stations, except WVCY-30 and WJJA-49 (now WMLW); the Chicago stations except WYCC-20 and WYIN-56 (both PBS), WSNS-44 and WEHS-60 (pre-Spanish), and WCIU-26 (pre-"The U" era).
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Unless the areas of northwestern Illinois within range of both Rockford and the Quad Cities' stations (e.g., Sterling, Dixon, Savanna, etc.) received the Western Illinois edition instead, I've always been surprised that the old TVG Illinois-Wisconsin edition didn't include the QC market stations [WHBF-4 CBS, KWQC (formerly WOC)-6 NBC, WQAD-8 ABC, KLJB-18 Fox (signed on summer 1985), and for PBS Moline's WQPT-24 and perhaps even Iowa Public Television from KIIN-12 Iowa City (maybe with the 12W "cable" designation it had in the W IL TVG)]. Especially with far northwestern Illinois counties of Carroll, Jo Daviess, and Whiteside part of the QC DMA (but also within Rockford's coverage area--plus even some Madison channels, usually WHA and WISC-3, on cable on some systems even in the northern fringe of the QC market). Does anyone know if those counties got Illinois-Wisconsin TVG or Western Illinois?

Then again, if the QC's were added to Illinois-Wisconsin TVG, they might have had to add Dubuque's channel 40 (ABC, then Fox, now religious), and maybe even the main Cedar Rapids/Waterloo stations.
 
gr8oldies said:
I also lived in Quincy IL for a short time. We couldn't get a TV Guide for all the channels we got on cable. The Western Illinois Edition had Hannibal/Quincy (7 and 10), Kirksville-Ottumwa (3 which was Hannibal Quincy's default ABC station), Quad Cities and Peoria. To see schedules for the St. Louis stations we got, we had to drive across the river and get the edition sold in Hannibal (I don't remember what it was called-I don't think it was the St. Louis edition though.
Click to expand...

This was in the late 80s, but I also remember seeing the Western Illinois TVG sold in far northeastern Missouri during family travels in that area (Kahoka-Alexandria areas in Clark County, MO--maybe even in Palmyra). Do you know if Keokuk, Iowa--which is part of the Quincy market--was a similar case of receiving an out-of-state TVG (Western Illinois), or did they get their home state's edition (which didn't carry Quincy/Hannibal stations and would have been useless for NBC and CBS listings unless they received Quad Cities stations via antenna and/or cable)?
 
LKellerIII said:
Through the 60s and into the 70s (at least), the Los Angeles edition of TV Guide included San Diego and Santa Barbara.
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I always wondered about KEYT 3 Santa Barbara. How did the ABC network feed get to them--was it the left coast Telco line, or a microwave link from Prospect? And their listing for local news always said "News--Bill Huddy." He must have been there for years.

In Arizona in the early '60s, there was just an Arizona edition, with listings for Phoenix and Tucson. I don't remember if any Yuma station(s) made the cut. By the mid-60s, it was split into two editions--one for Phoenix and one for Tucson.
 
Living in SoCal as a child, I recalled the Southern California (Los Angeles) edition as well. We moved to Macon, Georgia in 1965, and they had the Georgia Edition (Atlanta, Macon, Chattanooga). Some time after moving to Atlanta, Macon started getting the South Georgia edition (Macon, Columbus, Savannah, Atlanta, Albany, Dothan, Panama City, Tallahassee, Jacksonville).
 
Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, we got the boring Columbus edition. Mostly just our local stations with three out-of-town stations ... WHIZ (NBC from Zanesville, 55 miles east), WOUB (PBS from Athens, 75 miles southeast) and WUAB, a Cleveland independent station widely carried in this area until about 10 years ago because of its status as flagship TV station for the Indians and, for some time, the Cavaliers. WHIZ and WOUB have never been carried in Columbus proper, but as close as 25 miles in to the east and southeast.
That edition was combined into a Southern Ohio Edition in the early 2000s that included stations from Columbus, Cincinnati and Dayton.
My grandparents in western Ohio - not far from where gr8oldies grew up - got the much more packed Toledo-Lima edition that back in the 1980s and 1990s included all the stations from Toledo, NBC from Lima, ABC/CBS/NBC from Dayton, ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC from Columbus and Fort Wayne, PBS from Bowling Green and a handful of Detroit-area stations that were carried on Toledo cable. Those were the CBS affiliate that went to Fox in 1994, NBC, ABC, the former Fox affiliate that eventually went to UPN, and CBC.
Lima now has affiliates for all four major networks, three of them LP and all commonly owned. That has severely cut into the carriage of Fort Wayne stations across northwest Ohio, at least in the area I am familiar with.
 
It does seem an odd business decision to have a separate edition for individual markets like Tucson and Phoenix. Perhaps stations in those markets were more willing to spend bucks with TV Guide than smaller markets. (Was Phoenix a top 50 TV market in the 60s?)

And I'm thinking I just answered my own question. Ad rates in the larger metro editions would have been too expensive for stations in outlying markets. So call me Captain Obvious!

I'd agree, a single market edition would have been much duller than a regional one. If memory serves me, the Iowa edition would have included all of the Des Moines stations, including KVFD-21 Fort Dodge until 1977, all of the Cedar Rapids-Waterloo stations plus KDUB-40 Dubuque, all of the Quad Cities stations, and KTVO-3 Kirksville-Ottumwa, but not KHQA-7 Hannibal or WGEM-10 Quincy. I can only speculate that the two Iowa counties in the Quincy-Hannibal DMA received the Western Illinois edition.
 
I remember that Toledo-Lima edition coming later (I had forgotten what it was called) and had all of the markets typically carried on cable. I seem to even recall it listing the Detroit network affiliates. (A given system could have had up to 4 CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox affiliates). That replaced the dual Fort Wayne and Dayton TV Guide racks at the local stores. I'm curious if those counties surrounding Lima only get Lima on their cable systems now, or do Dayton, Toledo and Columbus still have carriage?
 
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