BY JOHN KIESEWETTER | JKIESEWETTER@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Growing up in Price Hill in the 1940s, Bill Myers had heard a lot about
that magical electronic marvel called television.
Pictures coming through the air!
Finally in 1948 – three years after World War II ended – he saw images on
a
10-inch black-and-white TV screen in Faith’s Appliance Store window in
South Fairmont. WLWT-TV, the city’s first TV station, was on the air.
“TV had been promised for years, but put on hold for World War II. It was
euphoric,” says Myers, who was 14 at the time and went on to work at WLWT
for 30 years.
WLWT-TV celebrates its 60th anniversary this week, to mark becoming
NBC-TV’s second affiliate. The station also telecast the first Cincinnati
Reds Opening Day game and debuted the “Midwestern Hayride” country music
show 60 years ago this week.
As the infant sister to WLW-AM, “The Nation’s Station” – with three
orchestras and dozens of writers, producers and performers – Crosley
Broadcasting had the technology and resources to launch TV.
By the time WKRC-TV and WCPO-TV signed on more than a year later, WLWT-TV
had telecast many local firsts: a Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra concert;
variety shows; boxing; and University of Cincinnati football and
basketball.
It was vastly different from today, when cable or satellite provides
hundreds of color channels; local stations look alike with their
syndicated
shows and newscasts; and networks cover s****ts with a dozen cameras.
For that first UC football game, WLWT-TV had only two cameras to cover the
action – so they placed them on each side of the 50-yard line, recalls
Clyde Haehnle, 85, of Finneytown.
“When a guy started running down the field, and we switched to the other
camera, they’d all be running the other direction,” says Haehnle, who
started at Crosley as a UC co-op student in 1941. “Nobody thought about it
at the time. At halftime, we moved one camera to the other side of the
field.”
An estimated 12,500 TV sets were in use here by the start of 1949,
according to a Crosley Broadcasting press release that year. The number
jumped to 800,000 by the station’s 10th anniversary in 1958, when viewers
could see four stations (Channels 5, 9, 12 and 48).
By 1960, Cincinnati was called “Colortown USA,” because more color sets
had
been sold per capita here than any other market due to Channel 5’s large
investment in local color programming.
“TV just exploded onto the scene. Everyone wanted this box with pictures
in
it,” says Jack Gifford, 83, of Westwood, one of four WLW radio/TV writers
in 1950.
Many early shows were unscripted. WLWT-TV performers literally made it up
as they did talk, cooking, or children’s shows, says Rosemary Kelly Conrad
of Green Town****p.
“We never thought we were doing anything special. We didn’t look at
ourselves as pioneers. We just did what we were told,” says Conrad, who
worked at WLWT 1950-54 and 1966-78.
Conrad did everything from playing Princess Rosemary on the Saturday
morning “Toony the Cartoon Clown” show (Gifford was Toony) to starring as
the ditsy blonde in “Leave It To Kathy” by Rod Serling, who would later
create “The Twilight Zone.” Serling, hired after graduating from Antioch
College in 1950, worked at WLWT for two years.
“‘Leave It To Kathy’ was the only comedy he ever wrote, and it was
horrible,” Conrad recalls.
By the early 1950s, WLWT had three TV franchises to air for decades:
“Midwestern Hayride” (1948-72), Reds baseball (1948-1994) and Ruth Lyons’
live noon “50-50 Club” talk-variety show (1949-67), which became the “Bob
Braun Show” (1967-84).
Paul Dixon, from WCPO-AM and WCPO-TV, joined Channel 5 in 1955. His crazy
live morning show, which inspired the young David Letterman growing up in
Indianapolis, aired until Dixon’s death in 1974.
“We did more live local programming than all of the other stations put
together,” Haehnle says.
In 1951, “Hayride” was broadcast nationally by NBC as a summer replacement
series for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows.” Throughout most of the
1950s,
the country music show with singer Bonnie Lou and others aired summers on
NBC or ABC. Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton and other stars
sang on the show when it was syndicated in the late 1960s.
Lyons’ “50-50 Club” was so popular that fans waited three years for a
ticket. Until her retirement in 1967, the show was beamed to sister
Crosley
stations in Dayton, Columbus and Indianapolis, and also aired on
50,000-watt WLW-AM radio.
Her regional reach attracted the biggest entertainers: Sammy Davis Jr.,
Bob
Hope, Jerry Lewis, Lena Horne, Red Skelton, Bill Cosby, Count Basie, Sam
Cooke, Michael Landon, Lucille Ball, Henry Mancini and Roy Rogers, to name
a few.
“When Bob Hope came to Cincinnati, there was but one show he’d do – Ruth
Lyons,” says Jim Friedman, 53, of Wyoming, author of “Cincinnati
Television.”
WLWT’s Golden Age of TV continued through the 1960s – four hours of live
weekday shows, plus newscasts and sometimes a Reds game – while other
stations here started airing less expensive syndicated shows.
Channel 5’s success here spawned local shows on sister stations, most
notably Phil Donahue on Dayton’s old WLWD-TV (Channel 2) in 1967.
Eventually Multimedia, which owned WLWT-TV from 1976 to 1995, launched
national shows with Sally Jessy Raphael (after subbing here for Braun) and
anchorman Jerry Springer.
By the time “Braun” was cancelled in 1984 – ending a 35-year noon
tradition
– the TV business had changed radically. Local news became the profit
center and received most of the stations’ resources – as it does today.
“The viewers had no idea how many people it took to put on a live TV show.
You had to have three or four camera operators, a control room, a director
and producers, a sales staff, musicians and singers, a publicity staff and
client services for the advertisers,” says Myers, 73, of Anderson
Town****p,
a Channel 5 personality personality from 1952-82.
Channel 5 today promotes itself as “Where The News Comes First.” All local
promotion is aimed at increasing the audiences for newscasts, which mostly
have been in third place since Springer quit anchoring 15 years ago.
So Channel 5’s 60th anniversary will be marked by special features and
interviews in all newscasts this week – and not with a local special.
“Historical stories will air in ‘News 5’ morning and evening newscasts
starting Monday,” says Richard Dyer, Channel 5 president and general
manager. People can see some old WLWT programs streamed on the station’s
Web site, wlwt.com, and on youtube.com, he says.
Haehnle thinks of those classic shows – and the first days of TV – when he
flips through his 100-plus cable channels at home.
“There was so much concern at the time TV began,” Haehnle says. “They
didn’t think there would be enough programming to fill all day long.”
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