The Olden Days Of Television

I have had the opportunity to watch the television industry grow from nothing to what it has become today. I do not always find that these changes have improved the business. Here are some of the things that I was able to experience in my early watching.
I was born and lived my first years in Chicago, Il. I was able to see the Today show when it started and actually had Dave Garoway as host, along with a chimp that was used as humor. It started in a storefront so that people could watch and in a small way be on TV. Gee they have gone back to that format. The local Chicago studios actually produced a number of programs for the networks. The first time that I saw myself on TV was in front of a local store. They had a remote truck that was set-up to broadcast and to let people see how they looked on television. This was a copy of the earlier BBC system that had been a hit in pre WWII. When television started yes it was actually in the late 1930’s in London and it consisted of nightly live programs from different locations where the public could watch themselves and usually listen to a small classical group perform. If you can see a copy of The Times of London for 1937 you can read the TV schedule and read about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his trip to Europe to prevent WWII. Television was in the most part a live production business with all of the heart attack producing adrenaline. We moved to Fresno, CA. and actually had a TV set but no broadcasting in the area. When the first station went on the air we had to get a converter box so that our VHF set could get those higher UHF channels and we could watch the stations that the FCC had moved so that Fresno would not be a mixed market. KMJ TV, NBC was the first to go on the air and was owned by the same people who had KMJ radio and The Fresno Bee. I later did work for them and maybe will tell about that period of time later. They were an established media monster in California even at that time. The TV section was usually just on the edge of what was going on and not always first with innovation. Live remotes were never considered. They used film for the news all the time I was watching and actually did see them start to process color film for inclusion on air. One of my friends was asked to take a movie camera on a People to People trip to Europe and failed because the never showed him how to use the camera or what the lighting settings should be. He did this for KJEO the ABC affiliate and they did that in color because this was one of the first stations in the nation to do live color. The first program that KMJ promoted in color was John Wayne movie “The High and the Mighty.” Color was big when it started even when newspapers started to sparingly use color on the front page it took a week to prepare for each Sunday color picture. These were the days that made what we watch today and most of us do not know where it all started.