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Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
History |
TV was also very new in the 1950's to most people.
My aunt recollects that the first public demonstration she can remember
seeing was a Cleveland Indians game set up in an auditorium on the second floor
of the Mair Building on Front Street in 1948.
We got our first set, an RCA with a round screen in a rosewood cabinet,
in 1953. The stations available
locally were: VHF channel 3 ( KYW/
NBC), channel 5 (WEWS/ CBS), channel 8 (WJW/ ABC) and UHF channel 49 (WAKR/
independent). VHF reception
required a rooftop antenna and 300-ohm flat lead wire; the most common antenna
was a two or four bay conical, for you technical folks, and it didn’t require a
rotor since all of the signals came from the same direction.
They were usually attached to the chimney, and I suspect that working on
those slanting slate roofs to install them
 was
sometimes pretty scary.
UHF reception only required a small loop antenna, but since earlier sets
were VHF only a converter attached to the VHF terminals was also required for
those sets. My grandmother was very
concerned about possible lightning strikes on the antenna, even with the
installed “lightning arrester” and made everyone turn off the TV and stay at
least three feet from the set during a thunderstorm. She was also convinced that attempting to watch programs from
other cities that sometimes arrived via “skip” during the summer nights would
strain the set and cause its demise.
 The
early stations operated with finicky transmitters that required constant
adjustments and had limited operating hours, so if you tuned in after 10 PM and
before 8 AM, you likely saw either snow or a test pattern which incorporated the
call letters of the station along with rays and concentric circles to help the
engineers align their equipment.
I remember the WEWS pattern as having a lighthouse in the center.
When programs were on, they were often locally produced before the
networks got geared up for the new medium.
WAKR, with no network affiliation, was forced to come up with a lot of
independent programming and often featured concerts by local high school choirs
at Christmas and local school sports.
Morning fare on most stations was aimed at children, with cartoons or
educational shows like Ding Dong School and Romper Room.
For the housewives, cooking shows were a staple, also variety shows like
The Paul Dixon Show (Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear) and Mike Douglas.
Noontime, local kids programming included Captain Penny for many years. Afternoons, the networks provided a continuation of the old
radio soap operas- Molly Goldberg, One Man’s Family, etc. Evenings were news and drama programs, many again adapted
from radio. Most shows were a half
hour in length, with some of only 15 minutes.
A popular
episode shows Lucy and Ethel unable to keep pace with chocolates on a
conveyor belt gone berserk.
I won’t even
attempt to chronicle this vast array of programs, but will comment on a few that
I found of particular interest.
In the realm of kid’s programming, the cartoon Winky Dink and Me was
unusually innovative. You could send in for a sheet of plastic which covered the
screen of your TV and a wax crayon, then trace along with the host on the screen
as he drew a door to let Winky Dink escape from the burning house.
Interactive TV! Beany and Cecil introduced the beany cap, which came with a
plastic tube for launching tiny cardboard airplanes from atop your head.
Captains were very big; in addition to the local Captain Penny, there
were Captain Kangaroo, Captain Video (another local product) with its cardboard
spaceship sets and Tobor, the evil robot, and Captain Midnight flying his rocket
plane to adventure. Buster Brown
with his stories of elephants in India and the sinister Froggy (Pop your magic
twanger!) is another one lots of
people remember fondly.
Quiz shows became immensely popular with What’s My
Line (John Daley), I’ve Got a Secret (Garry Moore)
and a hundred others.
An odd contest program was Queen for a Day, where women vied with each
other to be seen as the least fortunate person on
earth, thereby earning the right to be Queen and
some other prizes.
In a slightly seedier vein was Groucho Marx in You
Bet Your Life, where contestants were sometimes
unmarried couples! and Groucho hit on all the
attractive women (watch out for the duck).
Much of the programming and the commercials were live in the
50s, so mistakes were made and no one, including the performers, really knew
what was going to happen. Some of
the hilarity that ensued will never be duplicated with the videotaping and fear
of lawsuits we have today.
The last local product I
want to mention came in the 60s, and changed late night horror movies forever.
Ernie Anderson, frequent “surprise” visitor in the Carol Burnett Show
audience, was given a shot at producing a night time movie show on WJW that
would appeal to teenagers. Using new special effects equipment in the local studio, the
character of Ghoulardi was born. The
movies were very bad (and, therefore, cheap to acquire) and the budget was low,
but Anderson and his crew hit just the right mix of humor and sight gags to turn
the films into an asset by mercilessly lampooning them.
When the hunters were on the trail of the vicious t-rex, who would be
seen at the end of the line but the host, attired in pith helmet and armed with
pop gun, projected into the film and exhorting the actors to watch out, all to
no avail (chomp!). His use of hip slang and jibes against other air
personalities (particularly serious news analyst Dorothy Fuldheim) broke up the
fans. Splicing old bits of odds and
ends together, they created their own short feature film, Bridge on the River
Kwaiahoga. They insinuated that all
of the inhabitants of Parma were polka-crazed and made them the butt of endless
jokes. Hey, if you don’t like it,
COOL IT!
I was reminded of this show recently during one of my runs on
our local railroad museum train as I asked riders where they were from.
Encountering a couple from Shaker Heights and Parma, I asked if they were
around when Ghoulardi was on TV. The
woman laughed, and told me that her mother had been chairman of the local
committee to drive him off the air!
-
Courtesy of Bruce Semelsberger
TELEVISION
- how it looked ...
An unretouched
picture showing BBC hostess Elizabeth Cowell,
taken from the television screen in July
1939.
Commercials
Sometimes an ad campaign can become
more famous than the product that it sells.
-
Case in point, the Burma Shave road signs of
the 1950s. Many of the red signs had one sentence written on
each sign, so it was kind of a game to read on road trips. One
of the best ones reads, "These signs we gladly dedicate
To the men who've had no date of late
- Burma Shave".
Media &
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