Results tagged “NBC”

July 31, 1949, the Bridgeport Sunday Herald:

Little did they know.

I watched Ozzie and Harriet as a very young child, but I didn't like it. Even at that age, I sensed that nothing was actually happening on the show, nothing of note, anyway. Ozzie was always just there, not particularly amusing, obsessed with Tutti-Fruitti ice cream. Harriet was just there, too. David and Ricky were sullen teens. It wasn't frenetic like Lucy, or peppered with catchphrases and witty asides like Dobie Gillis. It didn't have a Barney Fife or a Buddy and Sally or even a Mel Cooley. It just sat there, dusty and slow.

In retrospect, I was... right, I'd say. Never liked it much, and time hasn't changed that.

This article wasn't about the very beginning of the show; that was a few years earlier, and it had runs on NBC and CBS radio. This was for the start of the radio version's final few years on ABC. The TV show started in 1952, and the rest you know.

Enjoy the ennui:

October 8, 1973, and an ad appears in the Fredericksburg, VA Free Lance-Star:

69? What?

No, it wasn't anything rude or suggestive. (Well, maybe suggestive) The ad heralded the launch of Fredericksburg's very own TV station, WHFV-TV, channel 69, cable 11, at 6 pm that day. It was an NBC affiliate, a redundancy, considering that Fredericksburg, not far down I-95 from Washington, gets a perfectly adequate signal over the air and on cable from NBC's own WRC-TV in D.C. No matter, Fredericksburg, a city just far enough away to be a small market of its own, had its own TV station.

But not for long. On May 29, 1975, the station shut down. The article about the closing in the Free Lance-Star noted that the station had experienced "10 months of mounting bills and dwindling hopes." GM Ray McInturff pulled the plug at 5 pm that day -- 4:57:45, to be exact -- amid slim hopes that another company, Release the World for Christ Inc., would take the station over (although he said that the new company had indicated to him that they weren't taking over after all). WHFV was $200,000 in the red at the end, having cut staff and pushed all of its operations to one end of the building in an attempt to rent out the other end. And the staff said it hasn't been paid for the last three weeks of work. The end was a filmed travelogue followed by a taped message from Program Director Monty Smith.

Strangely enough, the paper did carry the program listings for channel 69 that evening, programming that never aired. NBC Nightly News at 6:30, local news at 7, "Country Place" at 7:30, NBC's prime-time lineup ("Sunshine," "The Bob Crane Show," the network movie ("Terror on the 40th Floor"), news at 11, and "The Tonight Show") after that.

One of the owners of the station was Jerry Wade Leonard, who, coincidentally, died on February 8th of this year.

Hey, how cool is this ad from the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, circa 1963?:

Those were the days of the horror movie hosts and KCPX-TV, the ABC affiliate in Salt Lake City, had "FIreman Frank," a kiddie show host who doubled as the off-screen voice of "Nightmare Theater." On this occasion, the scheduled feature was the classic "Mothra." But I'm pretty sure it never aired.

I love this one, too, from the old WIIC-TV Pittsburgh (now WPXI, still an NBC affiliate):

What a lineup! Liberace AND Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali in his youth, both on Jack Paar! You absolutely would have made time to see that one... but I don't think it aired.

Meanwhile, on a rival station:

The ABC lineup that night was a waning "77 Sunset Strip," "Burke's Law" before the Bond craze swept him up, "The Farmer's Daughter" with the late Inger Stevens, and boxing, followed by a late night showing of "Sayonara." You might have been tempted to watch, but those shows didn't actually make it to the air that night.

And here's a cool 1963-style ad for a radio station:

KBEE Modesto, with the call of the annual Big Game between Cal and Stanford. That game was not played as scheduled that Saturday. The Niners-Packers game was played, amidst controversy over whether the game should have been played at all.

Why these shows didn't air can be explained by the fact that these ads are all from the same day.

November 22, 1963.

The nation had other things on its mind.