ABC daytime in 1963-64

[thomas_meighan]

When I purchased Wesley Hyatt's "The Encyclopedia of Daytime Television" 13 years ago I immediately found it a valuable resource for reconstructing the networks' daytime schedules and seeing how timeslots and timeslot changes affected the success of various game shows. I've continued to consult it since then, but my own research using the New York Times TV schedules has uncovered a number of omissions.

Examples: Beat the Clock moved up to 12:30 in November 1960 and spent its last couple of months there before being replaced by Number Please, but the timeslot change isn't noted in the Encyclopedia. Likewise, TPIR and Double Dare swapped timeslots on March 7, 1977, but you won't find that information in the book. And so on.

Although there's an appendix listing the primetime shows repeated as network daytime strips over the years, we aren't given specific dates or slots for them, which is understandable for space-saving purposes but which also leaves a bit of a hole. I've been searching the Times' database to determine which repeats aired when and have usually been successful, although it can be hard to tell whether repeats are network or syndicated. Here's (what I believe is) the ABC daytime schedule for April 1 through August 30, 1963:

11:30 Seven Keys
12:00 Tennessee Ernie Ford
12:30 Father Knows Best [R]
01:00 General Hospital
01:30 [local]
02:00 Day in Court
02:30 Jane Wyman Theatre [R]
03:00 Queen for a Day
03:30 Who Do You Trust?
04:00 American Bandstand
04:30 Discovery '63

Can anyone confirm whether the December Bride and Jane Wyman repeats were in fact aired on the network level? The Wyman shows probably were because they disappeared on 9/9, replaced by TPIR. December Bride I'm less sure of; after TPIR moved to ABC on 9/9, December Bride moved to 2, bumping Day in Court to 2:30. Sometime in the fall of 1963 WABC began airing Les Crane's talk show in the 1:30 to 2:30 slot and displayed Spring Byington, network repeat or no.

Does anyone know more?

[Jimmy Owen]

December Bride was not on ABC's schedule. Before going into local syndication, it was on the CBS daytime schedule.  Jane Wyman was on the ABC schedule.  One book that is more helpful regarding approximate dates of network daytime reruns is Brooks & Marsh.

[thomas_meighan]

Thanks Jimmy, I've edited my original post to reflect your information. Figuring out ABC's schedules can be a little tricky because they changed their daily start-times rather frequently (and as a result, added or subtracted half-hours from their un-programmed mid-day block). I believe that September 27, 1965 (the day that Ben Casey repeats were added) may have been the first time they programmed an unbroken block from 11 AM to 5 PM.