A Bit of OTA Nostalgia

[Geo35]

Another great old show on CHCH was "Party Game"...the game of charades with Bill Walker, Jack Duffy, Dinah Christie and Billy Van. I thought that these guys were so cool and clever when I was a kid. They used to solve the charades so quickly before I even got my bearings into figuring out what was going on.. ..a great classic show!

[987654321]

As a kid growing up in Oakville, we had 6 stations, 6 & 9 Toronto, 11 Hamilton and 2,4 & 7 Buffalo. On rare occasions we could get Rochester. .....

BTW, I remember when Ch 9, CFTO first started operation.

We were the first to have tv in or neighbourhood on Hamilton mountain. The antenna was on a long pole with a stick to turn it. We got 2,4,7 Buffalo + CBLT. In the summer we got 3 Syracuse and KYW ch 3 Cleveland by using the "manual rotor" along with ch 5 Rochester.

In those days ch 2 was NBC, 4 CBS and 7 DuMont. The DuMont network operated from 1946 to 1956. Buffalo even had a couple of short lived UHF stations Ch 59 and WBUF Ch 17. Few UHF channel viewers though as tvs did not have UHF tuners builtin then.

After DuMont failed, Ch 17 WBUF closed down and became Ch 7 WKBW joining the newly formed ABC network. NBC took over Ch 17, and WGR became the first area independent station. NBC's experiment soon failed and WGR returned as NBC affiliate. Ch 17 later became WNED PBS.

[sailmaker]

@987654321: Interesting you mention living on Hamilton mountain. I worked at west plant Westinghouse in the employees' service dept. repairing b/w televisions, some as big as 24 inches !!

Some senior W managers lived on or near Aberdeen Ave just under the mountain. Even CHCH was hard to get because the transmitter was up on mountain at Stoney Creek hill (#20?). Money being no object they chose Owen Boris who was still a student at McMaster U. Owen used to drop in to pick the brains of some of the smarter-than-me techies. He set up a small CATV operation on top of mountain and fed signal down to his "customers" below. Some years later he set up Mountain Cable TV (now SHAW) and "the rest is history" as the saying goes.

[Dave Loudin]

US TV stations used to put up a dedicated slide for identification along with a voiceover. Now, most official IDs are simply text shown during the introduction of a program. No need to waste the 10 to 30 seconds on a static image when a program promotion or advertisement could be shown.

@re-nelson, Texas used to be in the W- prefix zone at the dawn of commercial broadcasting. This practice was the result of callsign policies adopted for ship- and shore-based point-to-point stations: ships in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean got K calls while shore stations along those coasts got W calls. In the west, Pacific ships got W calls and Shore stations got K calls.

To complete the thread hijack, the above trivia and SO MUCH MORE about the start of broadcasting is available at Thomas H. White's site.

[cableredneck]

I grew up in Southern Ontario in the 70s and 80s within reach of the Buffalo channels. We got 16 channels in total. I remember when the second PBS channel (Ch 23) and Channel 49 (MYTV Buffalo) started to broadcast. That brought the total to 16. Channel 3 out of Barrie (now CTV two) came in, but with really grainy reception. We still watched it, though. The other channels varied from clear to grainy. Our antenna had a rotor, so we could aim it in different directions (Toronto or Buffalo).

[JamesK]

^^^^
Back in the '80s, I used to watch WNEQ, the 2nd PBS channel. It wasn't carried on Rogers, so I bought a small set top UHF antenna, which I placed on my window sill. My 14th floor apartment was located near Hurontario and Lakeshore, in Mississauga, with a great view towards Buffalo. I got better reception on that antenna, than I had on cable.

[arrow201]

Originally Posted by HDTV101

Anyone born in the 60's in the GTA will remember Rocketship 7

http://www.youtube.com/embed/kZU0SksrjmI

RS7 was the #1 show for me when i was a kid (http://www.rocketship7.com/ )
with Dave Thomas (goes by Dave Roberts and retired a few years ago as a weatherman
in Philadelphia), after that was "Dialing For Dollars"
WBEN (CBS) had Captain Kangeroo, CFTO Uncle Bobby. At lunch time i'd run home to
watch the Flintstones, other local shows i remember was "Definition" and "The Trouble with Tracy" ....after school was back to WKBW for Commander Tom ...the good ol days...

[JamesK]

^^^^
I used to watch Roger Ramjet back when I was a kid. It was also on WKBW IIRC.

[sailmaker]

Back in the mid 1950's working on repairing b/w Westinghouse TV's we had to rely on the Indian head test pattern because WBEN did not start broadcasting until 4PM. Later it came on around noon with "Meet the Millers" a husband and wife yakkity yak show. Talk about Mr. Milktoast, he was the poster boy for coming across as henpecked.

Then Kate Smith had an afternoon show of show business stuff. One day the guest was the Tex Beneke big band (Glenn Miller) and Kate asked who the lovely vocalist was. Tex said she was Edie Gorme who later married Steve Lawrence. She is my age, 80 and counting. Steve shared singing duties with a young Andy Williams on the original Tonight Show with Steve Allen, long before Jack Paar or Johnnie Carson.

One other show around 4pm or so that we could use to set up the TV's was a show out of Philadelphia (actually King of Prussia, a suburb). The host was a twenty-something kid named Dick Clark. But who remembers that show, right? The show had just gone national and we still suffered thru a local carpet store commercial meant for the Philly area only obviously.
Like it was only yesterday.

[reidw]

Originally Posted by JamesK

^^^^
I used to watch Roger Ramjet back when I was a kid. It was also on WKBW IIRC.

Roger Ramjet. Probably one of the most sophisticated cartoon programs ever made.