Flickr Set: Old WGAL-TV Game Show Newspaper Ads

[tvmitch]

Thought you all might enjoy this...I'll just paste in the bit I wrote on the front page of this Flickr set to explain.

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Up on the murky, dark third floor of the old WGAL-TV building, there are some old-time TV treasures to be had.

This Flickr set is a group of clippings from local newspapers that promote WGAL, the dominant TV station in the Harrisburg-York-Lancaster-Lebanon TV market, an NBC affiliate. Someone from the station would cut each ad out of the paper and paste it in this scrapbook binder, with a note about what paper(s) the ad ran in. There is a whole box of these binders on the third floor - I'm just "scratching the surface" with these pictures.

Game show fan that I am, most of these are game show listings, but I managed to snag a shot or two of the very early days of Carson's Tonight Show. These are rough camera phone pictures; if demand warrants, I may do more detailed pictures in the future.

A quick disclaimer: I am not claiming ownership to any images in this set - they are merely here for the enjoyment of anyone who might stop by.

Enjoy!
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Here's the link: Flickr

If I gauge that there's enough interest, I might try to take the time to get better photos/scans of these - it's kind of sad that all these books are piled up in an old dark corner of our third floor, when a lot of people would enjoy seeing them. Mind you, there are about a dozen of these heavy scrapbooks with about 18 months of ads in each.

EDIT: to clarify text from Flickr, corrected link

[Tim L]

Great stuff Mitch:
     In all the time ive done my own blog and posted schedules to other places, I have seen relatively few game show ads..I might try to find some to post in the next few weeks..

Edit:
     It turns out I have a flickr account through Yahoo That I have never used.  As a test, I put up an old KYW-TV 3 "Barnaby" ad from December, 1960..Advertising the King Features made for TV Popeyes..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16285322@N02/2431386156/

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'mitchgroff\' post=\'184531\' date=\'Apr 21 2008, 09:32 AM\']it's kind of sad that all these books are piled up in an old dark corner of our third floor, when a lot of people would enjoy seeing them. [/quote]
No, it's kind of wonderful that those old books exist and nobody decided to throw the things out.    My guess is that very few stations in smaller markets have anything like that kind of historical reference.

Newspaper Archive lets you search for items by keywords, and then save the pages as pdf files, but there are two problems with that.  One is that it's a pay site, and the other is that advertisements are harder to nail down because the keyword search is less successful.  Still, when you find something, it's always a treat.

[tvmitch]

[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'184536\' date=\'Apr 21 2008, 11:50 AM\']
[quote name=\'mitchgroff\' post=\'184531\' date=\'Apr 21 2008, 09:32 AM\']it's kind of sad that all these books are piled up in an old dark corner of our third floor, when a lot of people would enjoy seeing them. [/quote]
No, it's kind of wonderful that those old books exist and nobody decided to throw the things out.  
[/quote]
Matt, I'm glad you said that, because I hadn't thought about the fact that they might get thrown out. I will definitely check with the station to make sure. It's that time of year when they are working on cleaning out a bunch of old equipment, and I'd be crushed if they were tossed.

That, and the shelves of old Cosby Show and Kate & Allie promo reels, too.

/don't think I haven't checked every square inch of the building for old game show tapes/reels, either...got nothin

[DjohnsonCB]

Some of those ads mention shows from NBC and CBS on the same station.  I presume WGAL-8 was in one of those markets that had to wait to get a second or third affiliate until well after everyone owned a TV with UHF built in.

[tvwxman]

[quote name=\'mitchgroff\' post=\'184537\' date=\'Apr 21 2008, 11:54 AM\']
/don't think I haven't checked every square inch of the building for old game show tapes/reels, either...got nothin
[/quote]
Which is a shame, because in my local TV travels, I can personally vouch that WGAL was one of the few stations that truly understood the term "Broadcast House"...and if you were going to pick a station that you thought would have a real sense of it's history (and maybe some game show history, at that), you couldn't do much better than TV8.

My current station 'had' a rich history of television....then they moved into a new building 25 years ago, and threw all of it out. 'That's' showbiz, everyone.

[tvmitch]

[quote name=\'DjohnsonCB\' post=\'184538\' date=\'Apr 21 2008, 12:07 PM\']
Some of those ads mention shows from NBC and CBS on the same station.  I presume WGAL-8 was in one of those markets that had to wait to get a second or third affiliate until well after everyone owned a TV with UHF built in.
[/quote]
Warning: television geekery ahead.

It wasn't until 1961 when our entire hyphenated market was able to receive a good, solid CBS affililate - in fact, it came in the form of three stations that served different areas of our market: WLYH for Lancaster and Lebanon (now the CW affiliate), WHP for Harrisburg and points north and west, and WSBA in York, now our Fox affiliate. Each of these stations were not satellites of each other: they were owned by different companies and had their own distinct lineup aside from network programming, but called themselves "The Keystone Network." In the early '80s, WSBA flipped calls to WPMT and became an indie, then a Fox affiliate in 1986. WLYH was a CBS affiliate through the mid-90s. At one time, Lancaster cable systems programmed an amazing 4 CBS affiliates - WLYH, WHP, WCAU (Philadelphia), and WBAL (Baltimore).

So to answer your question/statement there, yes, WGAL programmed the strongest-performing programs across all three networks for most of the '50s. If you lived in Lancaster, you watched WGAL, and that's how it goes today as well.

To this day, at my house in Lancaster, I cannot receive WHP (or WHTM, the ABC affiliate) with a fair-quality antenna...it's easier to pull in KYW or WJZ.

[DrBear]

(from the Flickr page) There are many ads from the early '60s that segment the evening news out into precise time blocks, 5 or 10 minutes at a time.

That was the style until the mid-60s. Each segment was parceled out so it could be separately sold, and each had its exact title. None of this "News 6 at 5" stuff.

At WBAY in Green Bay, it was the Standard News Reporter (sponsored by guess-which oil company), followed at 6:15 by "How's The Weather" and at 6:20 p.m. by "Sports Headlines" each with a different sponsor. And at 10:15, the weather segment was called "The Weatherman."

Meanwhile over at the NBC station, the two in-show interruptions to the Today Show for morning news were "Morning Report" at 7:25 a.m. and "Paperland Today" at 8:25 a.m.

It wasn't until about 1966-67 that stations went to a unified newscast, although if you look at most of them, the format is still the same - for a half-hour local newscast, news for the first 15-20 minutes, weather for about five, then sports. Only difference is that they come back to the news anchors for a closer (the waterskiing squirrel) or that a station might do a "weather first" promo spot.

And don't get me started on the fact that one of the stations had a weatherman who used the name "Bruce Barometer" and wrote his forecasts on the side of a white VW bug...

(methinks Uncle Ray is getting a bit too nostalgic for his youth...)

[uncamark]

In Rockford, the closest market to Northern Illinois University, WTVO, the NBC affiliate, was still doing 15 news-5 weather-10 sports until 1977.  All of the shows had the slides for an opening--news had a teletype SFX, weather had pizzicato strings, sports had a march theme and it sounded like they had been using those stock music pieces from the day WTVO went on the air in 1954.  At least they Chroma-Keyed graphics behind the anchor.  When they got a Chyron in 1976, they did do new openings ("NEWS" changing colors and "WTVO 17 News With Bruce Richardson" crawling in) and a new stock music theme for the news, but nothing much changed.

When the new owners of the CBS affiliate WIFR (nee WCEE) took over in 1977, they brought in Frank Magid and Magid brought in the "Action News" title, the "Classical Gas" bridge theme music (and the "Where You Belong" jingle package), the flashy opening and the news team exchanging badinage, WTVO finally ended the 15-5-10 news format (although you still didn't see the anchor team together on camera) and Rockford TV finally entered the 1970s.

[Tim L]

Standard Oil did different "reports" depending on  the market.  From 1951-63 WXEL/WJW-8 Cleveland, WKBN-27 Youngstown and WSPD-13 (WTVG) Toledo had the "Sohio Reporter" nightly from 11-11:10 PM..The Anchor, Warren Guthrie was known to memorize his newscasts word for word..Doug Adair started at Channel 8 doing "City Camera",a local newscast. at 11:10 from 1959-Through most of the 1960's.  Adair then joined WKYC-TV 3 for a numbers of years..