At last, three TV stations had set up shop in Spokane. Ages later, it seemed, my dad shelled out for a TV set. I believed that everyone on the city had to have a set first.
What did we watch? We would look at anything that the stations would broadcast. Many times, it was just a test pattern showing a plains Indian and some bar patterns. This was useful for fiddling with linearity and contrast adjustments. Studios in New York or Los Angles produced programs, often in front of a studio audience. These were filmed by aiming a movie camera at a TV monitor. They shipped these so-called kinescope recordings to local stations such as our three Spokane studios. There was no nationwide network connected to Spokane in those earliest days.
The kinescope recordings included half-hour shows such as Life with Lucy, It’s Time for Beanie, Buck Jones, and The Jack Benny Show. The better selections are still available on TV Land or on DVD. I once watched a forgettable kiddie’s science fiction show called Johnny Jupiter and Reject The Robot. I cannot name the actor that played Johnny Jupiter, but just last week, I saw him play a ferryboat operator in Rooster Cogburn and a used horse salesman in the sequel, True Grit. Those are 1970 vintage John Wayne westerns on DVD.
The local programming was memorable. Some of it was excellent. It’s remarkable to recall that local stations produced new, live 15-minute programs five times a week. The lineup included Cliff Carl with Curly, Dale Starkey, and Mr. Engineer.
I appeared on one Mr. Engineer segment. I’ll never forget being in the old KHQ channel six studio on Moran Prairie with Mr. Puffer Belly and Mr. Engineer. If the building wasn’t a Quonset hut, it was a close knock-off. Whenever I said something, the boom mike twisted toward me, which unnerved me. My sister was popular with her friends for 15 minutes because her brother was a short-lived TV star. I remember an announcer speaking from a glass booth. They ran a commercial – another kinescope recording. It began, “Get on the Hills Brothers Coffee-go-round, the finest coffee the brothers have found, …” I cannot remember the ending, but I’ll bet Wyatt Newman knows it.
It wasn’t too long before Spokane hooked into the live feed of the NBC, ABC, and CBS television networks. By 1956, we were used to seeing live TV that originated in New York and Los Angles. The run-up to the connection included slides during station breaks that said, “The Live Line is Coming.” The picture showed a coaxial cable. Neat word: “coaxial.” That was the first time I heard it. Our initial network connection was actually a fancy shielded hard-wire. After our stations connected to the live line, programming sometimes stopped. We would hear a voice say “One moment please.” If the programming didn’t reappear, the voice would say something apologetic as the black picture became a slide that showed a broken coaxial cable. The caption would say, “Live line interrupted”.
The live line brought us a few years of unprecedented live nationwide programming, along with interesting goofs and glitches. We’ll discuss this next month.
(Continued in March)
- Ed Mauget