The early career of broadcast journalist Mike Wallace (1918 – 2012) are discussed at length in this six page magazine article from the late Fifties.
We were amused to read that in one of his earliest forays into broadcasting he played a character in a radio soap opera.
Read about the early career of Hugh Downs This article is illustrated with a single television image of the Hollywood actress Ilona Massey exposing her highly charming decolletage for all the world to see. The image alone can be credited for having launched a dozen Congressional hearings concerning the matter as to what is a television programmers singular understanding of public decency? Yet this short column only discusses one hearing, the one that took place in the Summer of 1952 in which Elizabeth Smart of the Women's Christian Temperance Union spoke frankly about the "alleged amusement" that the networks were providing. Another temperance group in attendance complained that the actors on beer commercials should not appear as if they were enjoying themselves... The British Broadcasting Corporation announced that they were capable of transmitting television programming as early as 1935:
"The British engineers plan to begin with a single broadcasting tower, capable of transmitting television images to receiving sets within a radius of about thirty miles...British engineers are not the first to try television broadcasting. A station has been operating regularly in Berlin for several months." Written in response to the loud cries generated by those would-be pioneering couch-potatoes, this article presents a lengthy list of all the technical difficulties the young television broadcasting industry had to deal with in 1937.
"First to have commercial television, it is agreed, will be New York City, then Philadelphia. In both of these cities transmitting-stations already exist. Advancement to other urban centers will be slower. Chicago, for example will have commercial television only after it has been made to pay in New York and Philadelphia. As each city's television enterprises become self-supporting, installation will be begun in a new center." "It isn't a sports show; it's entertainment for the same kind of people who listen to Jack Benny"
- thus said the sportscaster Bill Stern (1907 – 1971) - who is remembered in our age as the announcer to broadcast the nation's first remote sports broadcast and the first telecast of a baseball game.
Those heady days of early T.V. broadcasting: "Television was about ready for immediate commercialization when Pearl Harbor forced the industry to mark time, but engineers agree that the war has hastened electronic developments to a point that could not have been expected for 15 years under normal circumstances." |