TV Stations Must Save Their
Film and Tape Archives

While it’s not possible to save everything, stations should at least digitize and preserve a representative sample – or considering donating their archives if they can’t.

By Mary M. Collins

In the early 2000s, a college student working in a library at the University of Maryland pulled on headphones and carefully slipped an acetate transcription record from its protective sleeve. Despite its designation, the record was made of glass with a lacquer coating; it was typical for radio station pre-recordings from the 1930s through the 1940s.

The student marveled again that the disc remained unbroken and relatively well preserved despite having been retrieved from a dumpster by a radio station engineer and then stored in his home until after his death in 1998.

What she heard on that disc amazed her. It was the 1938 recording of a professional female jazz band that had been played on Cincinnati radio station WLW. Imagine her surprise – the conventional wisdom was that female jazz performers weren’t really recognized until after World War II took the male musicians to fight for their country. But here was proof that a female jazz group was featured a full three years before the United States entered the war.

That student, Laura Schnitker, ended up using this discovery as part of her doctoral research. She later became the curator for the mass media and culture special collection at the University of Maryland.

I thought about this story when I read Hank Price’s recent column about surviving consolidation. It’s not just people that hit the cutting block under new management. Consider what would have been lost if WLW broadcast engineer Edwin B. Dooley had not had the foresight to rescue the materials his station management had decided to discard.

The special collections website for the University of Maryland (UMD) includes a section titled “How to Preserve Broadcast History.” One of the links is to a page with the question, “Why save broadcast history?,” which includes the following observation (italics added):

Few radio and television stations have ever attempted to preserve their own histories, whether because the materials were too cumbersome to manage ... or because the ephemeral nature of broadcasting has led to the widespread assumption that once a program has aired, its moment of relevance has passed. This is never more true than when station ownership changes hands, and surviving records get tossed into dumpsters to make room for new management and new formats.

Consider, for example, the story of the DuMont Television Network, which launched in August 1946 and closed 10 years later in August 1956. I originally learned about it in a piece called “The Great Wipeout of Television History” in British pop culture blog The Sundae.

The complete saga of this early American television manufacturer and television network includes double-dealing and overt FCC favoritism that rivals anything we are seeing today. (You can find a version of the story in the Wikipedia entry dedicated to the DuMont Television Network.)

What is not in dispute is that DuMont owned and operated three television stations at a time when the FCC capped network ownership at five stations. The company also had affiliation agreements with stations across the country.

In 1939, Paramount Pictures acquired a 40% stake in Allen B. DuMont Laboratories, the parent company of the DuMont network. Soon after its investment in DuMont, Paramount started two television stations – in Los Angeles and Chicago – despite an agreement not to operate stations independently of DuMont. At the time, Paramount’s representative on the DuMont board denied that agreement. Later, when DuMont sought to acquire two more stations, the FCC ruled that Paramount had a controlling interest in DuMont and thus the network had reached the five-station ownership cap. The network stopped broadcasting in 1956 when stockholders, reportedly led by Paramount, took control of the company and split it into two segments – manufacturing and broadcasting.

In its heyday, the Dumont Television Network produced and broadcast many groundbreaking programs and series. The Sundae piece says, “They aired what is considered the first TV sitcom—Mary Kay and Johnny—and America’s first TV soap opera, Faraway Hill.” Other firsts included Jackie Gleason sketches which were the basis for The Honeymooners along with some of the earliest programs to be hosted by women and minorities.

What’s important here is that the majority of DuMont’s programming was transferred to kinescope because it allowed the company to provide content to West Coast affiliates and others outside the area served by its network technology.

It seems that, while some kinescopes were melted down to access their silver content, the majority of the DuMont archive survived into the 1970s. It was then, according to March 6, 1996, testimony of Edie Adams (widow of TV writer Ernie Kovacs) to a Hearing Before the Panel of the Library of Congress, during a negotiation with a potential new network owner, that the “stored kinescopes and two-inch videotapes” were “dumped … in the Upper New York Bay.”

According to Adams, this allowed the company that was going to buy the network to avoid “the expense of storing them in a temperature-controlled facility, take care of the copyright renewal, et cetera.” What a waste of interesting and potentially valuable content.

Clearly, it’s not possible for broadcasters to save everything. The thought itself is overwhelming. At the same time, stations owe it to themselves and to history to save and digitize representative samples of local content. This will not only help future generations understand how issues developed, copyrighted local content can become a revenue center for the station.

If stations simply cannot preserve their archives, I encourage them to explore donating them. The UMD website for special collections webpage “How to Preserve Broadcast History” offers suggestions for potential recipients including archival repositories, museums and private collectors and consultants. 

As I’ve disclosed before, I am the volunteer treasurer for the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation (LABF). LABF provides a major portion of the annual support for the Broadcasting Special Collection at UMD. To do this, the Foundation produces the annual Giants of Broadcasting & Electronic Arts Awards Luncheon, this year scheduled for Nov. 12 at Gotham Hall New York City. It promises to be an exciting event with honorees including David Muir; Lynn Beall; Rick Dees; John R. Feore, Jr.; Dick Ferguson; Lesley Visser and Gary Sandy.

Interestingly, Sandy was recently interviewed in conjunction with being named a “Giant.” At one point, the interviewer observed that in “WKRP in Cincinnati,” Sandy as Program Director Andy Travis and the others were able to showcase the human side of radio. That led Sandy to comment on the episode that took on the tragedy of 1979 The Who concert with unassigned seats, known as festival seating. In the rush to claim places before the concert began, 11 people died and others were injured.

What struck me was that he said the producers of the program reached out to the CBS affiliate in Cincinnati – at the time Scripps-owned WCPO. One of the producers’ requests was for footage of the candlelight vigil held for victims, which the station management denied because they wanted to be sensitive to their community. I sure hope that the station, which continues to be owned by Scripps, still has that footage in their archives.