Fresno Television - Its Start

I spent most of my young years in the Fresno, CA area and gained my early understanding of television from watching the Fresno market. Actually I started watching television in Chicago and can remember watching “Kukla Fran and Olie” when they were puppets and not the latter cartoon version of the program. Some time I will go into more details of this era but today I am in a mood to talk about Fresno television. When we first moved to Fresno there was no television and we just stared at a blank screen. When they finally turned on the transmitter it was the Fresno Bee’s KMJ- TV channel 24 and it was a NBC affiliate. . Early in broadcasting the FCC changed all of the middle sized and small markets to either VHF (channels 2 – 13) or UHF (upper channels). Well Fresno became UHF and that lead to KFRE (CBS) needing to change transmitters so that it could go to channel 30. Well they started a month long campaign on air an in all the other media to get people aware of their new location the dial. They needed a new tower for the UHF transmitter. On the way up the mountain unfortunately the truck did not make one of the tight turns on the very narrow road. That sent the load off of the truck and totaled out the tower. It not only cost them much time but a lot of money and really messed up their publicity campaign.
Because this area was a test market many products were first given away to local residents to see if they would come into stores to buy more. KMJ actually broadcast the movie “The High and The Mighty” in color and in wide screen as a major event to start a new film package. It was so ahead of time that when the newspaper wanted to print a color picture on the front page in was a week long process to prepare for the Sunday picture. Live color TV was started by KJEO channel 47 (ABC) it actually had the ability to do live color and I do not remember much about what they broadcast but they included some live country and western music. Some of the local TV that went on to better markets include Webster Webfoot that actually started on a local station out of Visalia that was always on the edge and I remember them having a live auction to make enough money to try to stay on the air. It was not a PBS station and in fact valley public television is very recent and is in the building that was KMJ-TV. I will go into more detail latter about my time at KMJ-TV. KMJ radio was an early NBC affiliate and was on the Bee side of the street. Those buildings are now a museum and a historic building. Look at the local listings now and you will see how different it all has become. When they went to color news at KMJ-TV it took equipment that filled one room and then it was film that took forever to process and then edit before it could be aired.
It was a simpler time and many things that we now take for granted took much time to prepare and they were all learning as they did it.