A great gift idea in 1949
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:
If you're thinking about Motorola these days, it's probably in connection with wireless services, including the new "Droid" phone.
Mr. Monday-Morning Nostalgia Fix hasn't seen a Droid phone yet, but it's apparently a formidable competitor to Apple's iPhones. Sold through Verizon Wireless stores, the Motorola Droid runs the new "Android" operating system developed by Google and a quarter-million were sold during it's first week on the market.
Even at prices of almost $600 (without a contract --- it's under $200 with a contract), Droid phones sound like hot gifts for Christmas on this "Cyber Monday."
Exactly 60 years ago, Motorola was selling a different kind of gadget as a hot gift. It also cost about $600 (actually, $575). Like a Droid phone, it offered streaming video and audio, and the screen wasn't much bigger. (more)
Tomorrow: Television!
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:Here's an interesting artifact, courtesy of the fine folks at Internet Archive. "Tomorrow: Television!" is an instructional film from 1945, produced for returning GIs and designed to tell them about job opportunities in the fascinating new world of "television."
At about 1:30 into the film, look for some behind-the-scenes action --- complete with 1939-vintage equipment --- at General Electric's experimental station in Schenectady, N.Y., WRGB.
RCA's legendary chieftain, David Sarnoff, shows up about seven minutes into the film to read stiffly off of cue cards for 30 seconds.
The producers also include Gilbert Seldes, a producer from RCA's rival CBS, who reports that the radio network has 62 people employed to create four hours of television per week, but they could easily employ "seven times" that number.
Seldes, whose 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts was adapted into a 1957 CBS anthology series, later helped found the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Remember, you men with radio and radar training are only a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the industry's needs, and for you "WACs, WAVEs and SPARS," there will be costume designing and makeup jobs.
Faces on the Radio, 1940
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:
(Above: "Sportscaster Joseph George Tucker, 31, Canadian born, a fixture at WWSW, here looks up from his script. Tucker is a good hockey announcer, began 1500 Club." From the Pittsburgh Bulletin-Index, Nov. 14, 1940.)
. . .
"To the listening public, a radio announcer --- known only by the radio time he keeps --- is a kind of glamorous person whose voice is heard often and whose face is seen seldom," reported the Pittsburgh Bulletin-Index magazine on Nov. 14, 1940, in a photo spread called "Men Behind the Mikes."
And it indeed was "men" behind the mikes, because few women were then employed as "announcers."
They weren't "disc jockeys," either --- not by a long shot. Although the concept of a "disc jockey" playing recorded music had emerged five years earlier at New York's WNEW, where Martin Block's "Make-Believe Ballroom" had become a surprise hit, most respectable radio stations tried to avoid playing recording music. Instead, they picked up live concerts or employed their own musicians.
Pittsburgh's five radio stations were no different, generally paying their announcers not to spin platters, but to read news, time and weather checks and introduce both local and networked programs: "This is WCAE, Pittsburgh. The time now is 11:30."
What a sweet gig, right? Not according to the Bulletin-Index. (more)
Tape of a 20-year-old tiff
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:(If the above video fails to load, visit the DailyMotion website.)
. . .
Mr. Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix is feeling old.
He spent part of his recent summer hiatus sorting videotapes. On one of the cassettes was a recording of "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House," the classic 1948 movie starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, which he had taped off of the Saturday late movie on KDKA-TV (2).
Mr. MMNF quickly skimmed through the commercial breaks, thinking, "Well, this isn't very old --- it was only taped in 1989."
. . .
Suddenly, it dawned on Mr. MMNF that 1989 is old. Today's college juniors weren't even born when Mr. MMNF was setting the timer on the VCR to catch this flick.
After he finished sobbing, Mr. MMNF sat down for another look --- and realized that this tape had several elements that qualify it as "nostalgia." (more)
Root, root, root for the broadcast team
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:
Above: Pioneering sportscaster Graham McNamee interviews hall-of-fame Babe Ruth sometime during the slugger's tenure with the Yankees. (NBC photo)
. . .
Mr. Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix has been getting nostalgic again for the days when Pittsburgh had a professional baseball team.
But since this isn't Pittsburgh Baseball Online, he decided he'd showcase some prominent baseball broadcasters of the past instead.
These photos, by the way, are borrowed from a long-out-of-print book called The Trouble Is Not in Your Set, an entertaining (if disjointed) collection of anecdotes by the late Mary Ann Kelly, a writer and advertising executive from Cincinnati's WLW radio and TV. (more)
Your radio career, 75 years ago
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:
Mr. Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix recently ran across a fascinating little book called "Making a Living in Radio."
With all of the recent budget cuts, that title can probably be filed now in the "fiction" department of the Carnegie Library. (Rimshot.) (Thanks, make sure to tip your waitress.)
Written in 1934 by Zeh Bouck, an engineer and contributor to Radio News magazine, the book was published by McGraw-Hill and aimed at out-of-work men who were casting about for a career during the Depression.
. . .
After admitting that the job market of the early 1930s was bleak, Bouck reminds his readers that "hundreds of thousands of unemployed today ... (will be) making a living in radio in the next decade or two."
Radio "has suffered its figurative ups and downs," he writes, "but no one can doubt the solidity" of its future growth. (more)
Happy birthday, Mr. Allen, wherever you are
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:When Mr. Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix was just a little shaver, knee-high to a Zenith 27-inch color console, I discovered a show on WQED-TV (13) that I didn't know of anyone else watching --- I don't think my parents watched it, anyway --- and I thought it was just about the most wonderful thing in the world.
The show, "Dave Allen at Large," didn't have any elaborate sets or special effects. All it had was a dapper-looking Irishman, sitting on a stool with a glass of whiskey and telling stories, taking occasional breaks for sketch comedy. Usually there was a theme linking the stories with the sketches, but not always.
. . .
The host was calm, suave, droll --- imagine an Irish Dean Martin, and you'll have something almost, but not quite, like the impression he gave. For one thing, he was much more dismissive of authority than Dean Martin ever appeared to be.
It wasn't until years later that someone pointed out that he was missing part of one of his fingers; I never noticed that. I was too busy watching him. To a small, impressionable child, this what was being an adult --- a man of the world --- was about.
. . .
Dave Allen would have been 73 today. I can thank him for opening my eyes to the wider world in general, and sketch comedy and British humor (or should I say "humour"?) in particular. (more)
Bob-a-loo your Westinghouse Laundromat
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:Via Mark Evanier's News From Me:
It's a never-broadcast promotional film for Desilu Studios, from back in the days when Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball owned half the television industry. Westinghouse was one of their biggest sponsors so Desi and Lucy starred in this tour of their operation that was designed to show appliance dealers how Westinghouse was going to be selling washing machines like crazy. I think this was done in early 1958 and it runs a little less than half an hour. It's been posted to YouTube in three parts and they should play, one after the other, in the window I've embedded below.
The last time we saw Stanley
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:
With the city about to host its first Stanley Cup parade in 17 years, Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix suddenly got all nostalgic for 1992.
We got out our big chunky glasses, stone-washed jeans and flannel shirts, which come to think of it, is the way we dress anyway.
We also were going to mousse our hair up in spikes, or was that the 1980s? Never mind, we don't have enough hair left to mousse.
But even with our bad fashion sense aside, June 1992 wasn't that long ago, was it?
. . .
It seems like only yesterday: George Bush was president, and in local broadcasting, Mike Lange was doing Penguins games, WDVE-FM (102.5) and KDKA (1020) were battling for the number 1 and number 2 positions among 12-and-up listeners (the rocker passed the talker for the first time in the fall of 1991) and the city's CBS, ABC and NBC affiliates were on KDKA-TV, WTAE-TV and WPXI-TV, just as they still are today.
Ah, but the devil's in the details.
Seventeen years ago this week, 970 AM was still simulcasting WWSW-FM (94.5), which was proudly billing itself as an oldies station and was the number one station among listeners 25-54.
Jim Quinn and "Banana Don" Jefferson were doing mornings at the original B-94 (93.7, which still had its WBZZ-FM call letters), while Cris Winter was the recently appointed music director at 'DVE.
. . .
Oh, and remember when 102.5 and 94.5 were owned by separate companies --- not to mention 105.9 and 104.7?
Yes, when it comes to changes in the local media landscape since 1992, it's hard to overstate the impact of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 --- so-called "deregulation" --- which allowed companies to own more than one FM and one AM station in a market for the first time. (more)
Hugo Gernsback's future imperfect
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:
Previously on Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix ... We perused the March 1938 issue of Radio-Craft magazine, which celebrated "50 Years of Radio," or more specifically, 50 years since the first experiments in transmitting and measuring electromagnetic waves.
March 1938 seems like a primitive era in radio from our perspective. The first regularly scheduled FM radio broadcasts (from Edwin Armstrong's W2XMN in Alpine, N.J.) were still a month away, while commercial U.S. television broadcasting wouldn't begin until 1939.
Still, for anyone who had grown up without radio in any form, it must have been exciting to look back. In less than two generations, after all, radio had gone from spark-gap transmitters and crystal sets to national networks and high-fidelity consoles.
It was only natural for the radio professionals of 1938 to wax nostalgic. Muses Radio-Craft Research Editor Robert Eichberg:
Remember when it was hard to tell speech from music, and static might have been mistaken for either, so faithful was reproduction? Ah, my ancient ones, those were the "good old days"! ...(more)
Radio has become respectable. Sets are complete units, with self-contained speakers ... but is the radio listener of today as happy as the fan of yesteryear?
I doubt it, for though programs have improved along with equipment, the old thrill is largely gone. No more does one wonder, every time the set is switched on, whether it will actually work!
Brain broken, flagger ahead
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:
Due to circumstances beyond our control, the Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix will appear on Monday evening this week, except in Australia, where it will appear on Tuesday morning, and thus will be known as the "G'Day Fair-Dinkum Tuesday Morning Nostalgia Fix."
Your patience is appreciated, and if you're in Australia, remember there is no not drinking at the University of Woolloomooloo after lights out.
Nostalgic for nostalgia
Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix:
Two weeks ago, Mr. Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix went to the nation's largest radio hobby convention, Hamvention in Dayton, Ohio.
Besides eating too many hot dogs, buying too much rusty old junk, and generally acting like a geek, he also picked up a reprint of the March 1938 issue of Radio-Craft magazine, celebrating "50 Years of Radio."
. . .
"Fifty years of radio?" MMNF can hear you saying. "But radio began in 1920, when as every schoolchild knows, KDKA began operations in East Pittsburgh!"
True enough, Mr. or Ms. Strawman that MMNF made up just for this example. You could also have linked the beginning of radio to Reginald Fessenden's 1906 experiments. (more)