|
Post by Mike Griffin on Nov 5, 2005 14:05:21 GMT -5
Bob Terry and the Pirates on channel 32?
|
|
|
Post by bruiser on Nov 5, 2005 15:57:41 GMT -5
Speaking of old commercials, anyone remember the Louisville Motors promos? Louisville Motors was a Ford dealer located downtown on 5th St. Their GM did the commercials, and his catch phrase was "sit on hard chairs and save hard cash". They would also destroy some used cars in the ads. Always something from GM. I remember one where he took a tommy gun and shot up a Nova. He then looked at the camera and said something like: "At Louisville Motors, we blow the competition away".
Speaking of WDRB, Jerry Jarrett told me that when he reopened Louisville for pro wrestling, he knew he had to get local tv in order to be successful. He said he went down to WDRB, and sat in the lobby for several hours until Elmer walked out, and he collared him. At first Elmer didn't want to talk to him, but the receptionist told him Jerry had been sitting out there for hours, and Elmer finally listened. Jerry got the tv deal, and it lasted for quite a while.
|
|
|
Post by Max on Nov 5, 2005 17:37:11 GMT -5
Bruiser, I know here awhile back there was a debate, but was it ever settled which station Lance Russell hosted wrestling for, WDRB or WAVE? It was always "from the Gardens" in his deep voice.
|
|
|
Post by Ben Pflederer on Nov 5, 2005 18:36:42 GMT -5
I know this has nothing to do with television programming. Does anyone remember WAKY's "Open Transmission Line"? I remember working on it seasonal. It was sort of a bear to maintain with the direction requirements.
|
|
|
Post by bruiser on Nov 5, 2005 19:49:00 GMT -5
Lance actually hosted tv wrestling for a Memphis station. After it became too expensive to produce a local wrestling show in each major city Jarrett promoted in, Jerry kept the Memphis show, and it was sent around the circuit. The Memphis show was a live 90 minute show in Memphis. The rest of the circuit got a version especially edited for their market. Lance was never the announcer for the Louisville show. No one I've talked to can remember who did the announcing. Sometimes when a new angle/feud was going to start in Louisville, Lance and a camera crew would show up and tape the show. I think most of the stuff from the Gardens was taped and Lance did the voice over in Memphis. IIRC, Memphis wrestling moved from WDRB to WLKY, then ended up it's run at WAVE. BTW, when matches were taped at WDRB, the faces used Presto's dressing room. I think the heels used some kind of maintenance area for their locker room.
What I would have liked to have seen was "The Jerry Lawler Show". Yep, he had a show in Memphis. It was said to be very entertaining. It seems like Jerry would sit in one room while his "enemies" would sit in another and trade insults. Lawler apparently would show clips of various matches and crack jokes.
|
|
|
Post by Travis on Nov 7, 2005 4:38:41 GMT -5
Ben, What is this about WAKY's "open transmission line?" Inquiring minds want to know at 4:40 AM.
|
|
|
Post by mikegriffin on Jan 31, 2006 23:41:05 GMT -5
This thread got off into PBS kids shows. Wow...
Anyone remember that Erni's "Rubber Duckie" from Sesame Street got a little play on WAKY and WKLO??? Sad but true...
I recall Chris Lundy talking about watching Sesame Street with his little girl. I thought you were supposed to turn the TV on and leave the kid, not watch that stuff too.
|
|
|
Post by Travis on Feb 1, 2006 1:35:24 GMT -5
Chris Lundy referred to his daughter as Lay-Lay. I don't know what her actual name is or if I spelled Lay-Lay correctly. I just spelled it the way he said it. I have written elsewhere on this board of having heard Chris with his daughter, either on one of his shows or during a WAKY Christmas special. Not sure which. I never met Chris Lundy, but can remember when he did the super housewife shift (now the office shift) from 10 AM to 1 PM on WAKY. I had a bad habit of cutting classes and hiding with a transistor radio, complete with ear-piece, within Gottschalk Jr. High (now Iroquois Middle School). "We learned more from a three-minute record, baby then we ever learned in school."--- Bruce Springsteen (No Surrender)
|
|
|
Post by GilHerbigJr on Feb 1, 2006 16:21:07 GMT -5
Hi Mike...I remember Ernie's Rubber Duckie...I did kind of like it, to tell you the truth and Travis, I was also going to Gottschalk Jr High (Iroquois Middle) at the time it was playing
|
|
|
Post by Scott Cason on Feb 3, 2006 15:09:09 GMT -5
>>This was another element that played from video tape. The two guys who ran master control were busy.
Kids now a days just don't know how lucky they have it. Commercials are run from computers. Program elements from video cassette tapes. I worked as an engineer at WALB in Albany Georgia. Engineers had to fill in when master control switchers were absent. We had a lone remaining RCA film island, mostly used for trouble slides. And we had one lone remaining quad machine. I found it facinating when the old timers told me how master control used to be ran.
|
|
|
Post by Ben Pflederer on Feb 3, 2006 17:25:37 GMT -5
SCason, was that a film island with 2 TK27 projectors and a multiplexer? Was the slide projector a TK15? Just trying to joggle those TV memories.
|
|
|
Post by mikegriffin on Feb 3, 2006 17:59:55 GMT -5
I liked Chris Lundy a lot and I hope more examples of him show up on the site -- I think there only two or three short snippits. He did call his daughter Lay-Lay and it probably says something for him that he watched Sesame Street with her.
Glad that someone remembers "Rubber Duckie" playing on WAKY. Goes to illustrate what 'Top 40' meant. Not rock, or soul, or country, but a cross-section of the best music going. I hated "Rubber Duckie" but the 'Top 40' format exposed me to a lot more variety of music than I can get from a single station today, I heard a lot of stuff I wouldn't have bothered with -- stuff that if I didn't like it then -- I like now or can look back fondly on.
Wow, we got into TV station automation on this thread too. Hello scason -- you'd probably have to look pretty far and wide in 2006 to find that lone film island or that quad machine. Even playing programs back on video cassettes is becomming a thing of the past. TV automation is becomming more like radio. Everything comes off a server, all run by computers, all automated. There is still a lot of operations happening at individual stations but like radio as ownership consolidates so is the operations. Already a number of stations are consolidting operations within a city or a region. I visited one station in Oklahoma that was being run out of Virginia. They had their local news gathering and spot playback but except for the news it was all switched remotely. Some of the smaller markets are even having parts of the news done in another city.
So automation has begun and is pretty far along for TV. 20 years ago a person could drift from town to town, up and down the dial, going from radio station to radio station or TV station to TV station and catch a job, have a little fun. These weren't always the best jobs, but many were pretty good --certainly better than Walmart -- and the people in them seemed to like the life. A lot of that is gone or going. It just struck me, outsourcing and automation. The outsourcing and automation for broadcast is being done within the US now, but someday might it go to Bangalor??? Hey those Bangalore folks make 1/10th of what we do -- it's good business to ship out these jobs. Just good business -- those CEO's need to make all those millions every year. To hell with the people.
Sorry for that tirade. I just listened again to Tom Dooley's last words on KHJ from the airchecks section of 79waky.com. It inspired me.
|
|
|
Post by mikegriffin on Feb 3, 2006 18:59:11 GMT -5
SCason, was that a film island with 2 TK27 projectors and a multiplexer? Was the slide projector a TK15? Just trying to joggle those TV memories. Hey Ben, you must have posted while I was composing. scason brought up stuff you just don't see anymore. Not only RCA telecine but 'RCA' as an equipment manufacuturer for broadcast. I think the company lost it's way when they gave up the 'RCA Meatball' for the new and stylish block letter RCA logo. Was that the late '60s? Now it's consumer division is owned by Thompson, a giant European Company. Course Nipper and his masters voice is still around a little bit. "RCA, the most trusted name in electronics." I still have an old radio with the meatball on it.
|
|
|
Post by Ben Pflederer on Feb 4, 2006 7:38:04 GMT -5
Hey Mike, I worked in TV 1973-1985. RCA was still around in some fashion to at least the mid-80's.
|
|
|
Post by bruiser on Feb 4, 2006 11:42:27 GMT -5
Jack Welch, then CEO of GE, thought buying RCA would be a good fit. So he convinced the BoD to go along with it, and GE took over RCA, along about 1980. This will be hard for some to believe, but when they started merging the tv and radio manufacturing and repair operations together, it was discovered that from a technical standpoint, RCA was years behind what GE was doing. This was especially true in the consumer products. The RCA services in Louisville were merged with the GE Consumer Service operation at 4421 Bishop Ln. Does that address seem familiar? That's where Clear Channel is now located. The GE techs were greatly surprised to find out that the newest tv's, radios, and other consumer electronics were antiques compared to what GE was producing, and the RCA techs had to take classes on how to troubleshoot and repair GE products. It didn't take long for Jack Welch to decide GE didn't need to be in this business. "Was not a good fit" he said. So it was sold off to Tompson, a large French company. After a few years, Tompson moved all manufacturing to Mexcio, where the quality turned to junk. If you buy a RCA or GE tv today, you are taking a big gamble. It is my opinion that GE should get out of the agreement that allows Tompson to use the name, as it is a liabilty on those products.
|
|
|
Post by mikegriffin on Feb 4, 2006 16:57:31 GMT -5
Ben, you are right. RCA had a large booth at NAB up til '88 or '89. As the years went on there was less and less to fill it. They partnered with Panasonic to produce the MI and MII cassette formats in the 80's. They were the first company with a CCD studio camera instead of vidicons or orthicons. They produced a Multi-cassette machine that held several hundred tapes for automating playback of commercals and programs. I think Channel 41 bought the CCD camera and the cart machine in the late 80's or early 90's. By that time the quality at RCA was bad. They were making some dumb decisions and ran the business into the ground.
Cart machines destroied two companies in broadcast. Both RCA and Ampex put so much into the development and sales were slow because it took so much to get them right. This eventually sapped both companies.
Sarnoff labs (RCA's high tech labs) still has an offering at NAB and have been involved in the hi def formats.
I just think RCA started making a series of bad decisions starting when they dropped the Meatball.
|
|
|
Post by bpflederer on Feb 4, 2006 17:06:15 GMT -5
Mike, the ACR-25, by Ampex was "RCA" backwards. You had to keep your hands free from the carasollel
|
|
|
Post by mikegriffin on Feb 4, 2006 19:17:56 GMT -5
I never caught that about ACR being RCA backwards. The ACR-25 was quite a machine. Light sensors, rotary encoders, pneumatic's, and a ton of logic gates.
For anyone who has never seen one it stood over 6' high was maybe 6' long and 3 or 4' deep. It would hold 25 commercials and sequence them. Now a box 10" or so high that fits into a regular rack holds thousands of commercials and some programs too. The new box can play out multiple program channels while recording from multiple inputs.
The ACR-25 could play one channel, or it could record.
The new box might cost 50 to 100-thousand dollars today. It requires an automation system to run it that might cost another 100-thousand and be able to fully run three or four channels. The ACR-25 cost 250 thousand dollars in 1975 and only played commercials. Operators had to keep it fed. Typically 25 carts might cover an hour, or several hours during a network feed.
Sounds like some of the steps along the road to radio automation
|
|
|
Post by Scott Cason on Feb 6, 2006 13:23:39 GMT -5
>SCason, was that a film island with 2 TK27 projectors and a multiplexer?
yes it was. And when I was there, the film projectors and slide projectors all worked. We also had an Ampex quad machine, which I sometimes used to record Meet the Press depending on how much local programming we had in any given morning. WALB also had an ACR-25 at one time. I was able to see pictures of it. Of course, by the time I had arrived, the ACR had been replaced by an Asacka automation system for spot playback. I was told you NEVER wore any jewlery or long sleeves when working with the ACR, lest you were snatched into the machine yourself. It didn't care what it grabbed, but it was pulling something in that machine when it was time. When I left WALB, the ACR was still out back in the storage shed.
Channel 10 was an RCA turnkey plant. When the new master control and taperoom was built, everything was RCA. The transmitters were RCA, TT30FL and a TT20BL. They were replaced by a solid state Larcan while I was there. And other equipment had worked it way into the system like Sony 3/4" tape machines. Ampex 1" reel to reels, Grass Valley 1600 master control and production switchers and Ikegami studio cameras.
RCA's problem was that the Japanese companies were kicking their butts when it came to technology like Sony and Ikegami. There were also smaller companies, like Grass Valley, who were doing things that the RCA guys had not even dreamed of. The transmitter line ended with the G line in the mid 80's. At WMAZ in Macon, we had an NEC TV transmitter that never gave us any problems. It replaced an RCA FL transmitter in the late 80's when the RCA transmitter got to expensive to maintain. RCA had gotten too big, too spread out, and lost market share to better built, cheaper equipment.
The last project I worked on at TNN was installing a hard drive automation system. The plan was to move TNN and (eventually) CMT off of videotape and onto hard drive automation. With TNN being sold just a year later, they never fully compleated the move to automation.
|
|
|
Post by mikegriffin on Feb 6, 2006 22:49:56 GMT -5
I have never been to a station that owned an Asaka machine. Some of them were quite interesting to watch.
Whose server was going into TNN? GVG Profiles?
|
|
|
Post by Marcia "Sunny" Gibbs on May 15, 2007 2:30:29 GMT -5
Regarding the post about Sun TV and Mad Man Mac - not quite right. The description of the character and the wacky (ouch) ad campaign were right, but the rest is not correct. Mad Man Mac was my father, Max Rosenberg. He owned and operated the store (there were only 4 - all in Louisville) until he turned it over to my husband and I in 1980. Sun TV was in business a total of 38 years. There were never any franchises - ever. The business closed in the late '80s because of the influx of the big box TV and appliance stores like Circuit City. At its best Sun TV was still a mom and pop company and we just couldn't compete. It was quite a place in its hay day, but like many other businesses it was pushed aside for bigger and better.
|
|
|
Post by mikegriffin on May 15, 2007 19:15:05 GMT -5
Sun TV and Burger Queen Commercials were pervasive on channel 41. It might be that the station wouldn't have made it without them. Mac wanted to give the TV's away but MrsG1997's mom wouldn't let him.
I worked at channel 41 in 1971 when it came on the air and again in 1977-79. It was an accepted fact (whether true or not) that Queenie Bee (let's follow Queenie Bee it's Burger Queen for me!) was Mad Man Mac's daughter, is this for real true, or not?
Thanks Mad Man, Thanks Queenie Bee.
|
|
|
Post by Max on May 15, 2007 21:06:04 GMT -5
...and I'm having a cup of coffee from my Burger Queen mug...really! I got it on eBay! Like Travis says, nevermind!
|
|
|
Post by Travis on May 16, 2007 0:12:30 GMT -5
MrsG1997 keeps late hours. I just happened to be looking in on the board when she became a registered member around 3:30 AM. Hopefully, she will return again during the wee hours of the morning and answer the question that has plagued all mankind since the early 1970s. Was Queenie Bee the daughter of Mad Man Mac?
Inquiring minds want to know.
"and... well... alright, just nevermind"
—- Burt "Weird Beard" Markert (WAKY 1966-1971)
|
|
|
Post by 1240WINN on May 16, 2007 10:05:54 GMT -5
My understanding is that the person who portrayed Queenie Bee was Bill (Presto) Dopp's daughter.
|
|
|
Post by mikegriffin on May 17, 2007 14:53:19 GMT -5
I don't think Honey Bunny would fit into that bee costume.
|
|
|
Post by Max on Dec 31, 2007 1:42:16 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by spookyblue on Apr 24, 2008 14:21:31 GMT -5
I made that logo image for an Independent 41 tribute site that has sort of fizzled. I still have the vector-based version of it, though. It took a couple of hours working off a very old TV Guide or something. Maybe I'll make T-shirts. Anyone interested? With respect to Fright Night, there is an image stuck in my brain that will haunt me my whole life. I was just a little kid in the '70s, so what I remember and what I really saw are probably very different. Anyway, it was a slide they used on the bumpers. The image was a man and his dog in a graveyard with a large tree behind him. The tree had eyes and its limbs looked like arms reaching out for him. The overall effect resembled the grim reaper. I had nightmares about that guy, and if there is every any way possible of locating a slide, copy, or third generation scrap of old ad fodder with this image, I would consider one of my life's goals complete. P.S. Nothing has ever beat Fright Night, though Sammy Terry will always hold a special place in my heart. Different show, different era, but dear. Spookyblue
|
|
|
Post by creeker on Jun 21, 2008 21:22:04 GMT -5
Does anyone remember the WAKY can collection contest? That was crazy out in Fern Creek.
|
|
|
Post by Travis on Jun 24, 2008 3:47:50 GMT -5
Attn: Creeker I remember the bottle & can drive all too well and wrote about it back in February of 2005. It seems to me that Fern Creek won the event in collecting the most bottles and cans, but it's been too many years and I'm just not sure. WAKY's Fourth Street studios actually occupied two suites (giving them the dual address of 554-558 South Fourth) and the basement ran the full length & width of both suites. Every single bottle & can that was collected during that drive was stored in that basement and it grew to be quite a sight before it was over. To my knowledge, no photos were ever taken before it was all removed. And that's where I come in. ---- Start Paste ---- Regarding the bottle & aluminum can drive: I was one of the volunteers who helped to remove that seemingly endless sea of bottles & cans from WAKY's basement. They covered the floors from corner to corner and were piled from 3 to 5 feet high, even higher in some areas, but it turned out that they were stacked on top of boxes & cabinets containing old forms, logs and whatever. I can clearly remember having to wade through them to get anything done. We were fortunate that a great deal of them were contained in bags, boxes & barrels, which aided us in getting them up the stairs and out the back doors, but many were not contained and we spent a great deal of time bagging them up. Also, I made the mistake of going to the studios wearing a white dress shirt (I have no idea why I wore it) and I'm sure that my fellow volunteers thought I was an idiot. The shirt was absolutely filthy and full of sweat by the time we finished and I got plenty of looks as I rode the bus home. By the way, Johnny Randolph rewarded us with free albums (about 3 to 5 each). Unfortunately, they were promo copies recorded by groups that NOBODY HAD EVER HEARD OF!! But, it really didn't matter. We had a lot of laughs getting those cans out of that basement. Nobody ever asked why I was wearing the shirt and I never offered any explanations. ---- End Paste ---- It's interesting to note that Tom Prestigiocomo was a fellow volunteer who helped remove the millions of cans & bottles from the basement of WAKY's Fourth Street studios that day. He would later go on to become a WAKY jock, himself. And if he's reading this he now knows the identity of the idiot who wore the white dress shirt.
|
|