Television Comes to Callahan County

Back when I was growing up on the Callahan County side of Scranton, Texas in the 1940s and 1950s, radio was the primary mass medium for most of that time. Local-service television did not arrive until 1953, and many farm families there did not immediately purchase TV sets because the small-screen, black-and-white receivers were expensive.

The Federal Communications Commission began licensing TV stations after the end of World War II. However, because of unanticipated problems of interference and scarcity of frequency assignments, the FCC halted the authorization of new stations with the Freeze of 1948. (Scroll FCC history page for more details.) At the start of the freeze, Dallas-Fort Worth, too far away for reliable service in Scranton, had television stations. Smaller markets like Abilene, 45 miles to the west of Scranton and the heart of the Big Country market, did not.

The first folks to have a television set in our area were our neighbors, the Battles. Ray Battle was a successful farmer and rancher. His wife Lillian was a school teacher. In addition to their two incomes, they also owned land with producing oil wells, thus the Battles had the funds to invest in the then-expensive medium of television before we had a local station. They had a huge, stacked-array TV antenna on a tall tower pointed east toward Dallas-Fort Worth. Occasionally, I was invited to their home to watch a snowy, barely-recognizable picture of some forgettable sitcom.

Soon after the Battles had acquired their TV set, my Uncle Woodrow Sawyers purchased and had installed television for my Grandmother Allen, a widow living in Scranton. This included a black and white receiver in the house and a tall antenna outside. Grandmother’s system also had a rotor machine that turned the antenna on the pole. But she got only that snowy picture, too, until Abilene finally got a TV station.

The freeze on construction of new stations ended in 1952, and in 1953 the Big Country acquired its first television station, KRBC-TV, Channel 9 in Abilene. Within a year, the children of our neighbor across the road, Porter Ledbetter, installed a television set at that home for Mr. Ledbetter and Eunice Hembree, his sister-in-law, who lived there and took care of him. I spent a lot of time at their house, doing little errands and just visiting, so this was another early access to TV for me. I was there watching the Army-McCarthy hearings and remember attorney Joseph Welch addressing the nation’s leading demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy with his “Have you no shame?” speech. I also remember Eunice being enthralled by the afternoon soap operas.

The Ewings were another early adopter of television in Scranton soon after Channel 9 went on the air. He was the school superintendent, and she was a school teacher in the Scranton school system. They often invited our family over on Tuesday nights to watch Milton Berle or on Saturday nights to watch “Ringside with the Wrestlers.”

As a little kid, I was elated one weekend when my dad’s cousin from Fort Worth, Bill Blalock, arrived in his pickup with an antenna rig and a television receiver. Bill had refurbished a TV set taken as a trade-in at his TV-appliance store. He also wanted to test a newer, higher-sensitivity antenna system to determine if it could be sold in nearby Cisco as a method for receiving better signals from Dallas-Fort Worth. (Remember, this was before cable television.) The antenna experiment didn’t work out, but we got to keep the TV, a console model mounted in nicely-finished wood with a huge 12-inch loudspeaker below the rounded screen.

Television programming was interesting then in this one-station market. KRBC-TV had its pick of programming from the four networks: ABC, CBS, Dumont and NBC. Because the AT&T longlines cable system did not extend westward from Dallas-Fort Worth, the Abilene station initially got its network programming on a “bicycle network,” kinescope films which were shown on one station, then sent to the next station on the route for use the following week. An unusual prime time show from the Dumont Network was “Life Is Worth Living,” a 30-minute talk by Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen in front of a chalkboard. There was lots of live local programming, including a daily cooking show, country music and gospel music programs featuring local entertainers, and “Reel Music,” a weekly nighttime broadcast with a local host introducing songs performed on film. KRBC staff members often served in multiple functions. Pat Kettlehut, an engineer, was also the ventriloquist for Kalvin Keewee, the Birthday Bird on a daily kids program. KRBC radio disc jockeys Dub Bowlus and Larry Fitzgerald presented the local television news and sports at night.

Perhaps within a year or so, the AT&T’s TV transmission system had been extended to Abilene, and Channel 9 became a primary NBC affiliate. That added hours to the station’s broadcast day with live shows like “Today,” “Home” and “Ernie Kovaks” on weekday mornings and “Tonight” on weeknights. There was college football on Saturdays, but that first year of live network transmission was different on Sunday afternoons. No sports. Instead, Allistair Cooke, a BBC broadcaster assigned to the United States, hosted an arts program called “Omnibus,” and “Today” host Dave Garroway presided over a 90-minute “Wide, Wide World,” exploring cities around the United States with live television. There were also Sunday afternoons featuring performances of the plays of William Shakespeare.

The Sunday afternoons during the next football season were different. The Cleveland Browns had established a network, and KRBC, Abilene carried Cleveland Browns football every week. That lasted only one season, however. The next year it was NFL football.

By this time there was a second television station broadcasting in the Big Country, or at least in part of it. KPAR-TV, Channel 12, Sweetwater, 42 miles west of Abilene, signed on the air January 30, 1956. During its flawed “freeze” study, the FCC, mistakenly assigned no more VHF channels to Abilene, only UHF channels. The problem was no sets were being sold with UHF tuners. So, the nearest available VHF channel in Sweetwater was used for the new station. The folks in Abilene could receive a good signal from KPAR-TV. But for those of us far to the east of Abilene, it was like trying to watch Dallas-Fort Worth stations – snowy pictures.

Channel 12 was part of the West Texas Television Network based in Lubbock. Other stations were in Big Spring and Clovis, New Mexico. Most of the local news, sports and weather programming originated at the home station, KDUB-TV, Lubbock. The other stations had an on-air announcer who would present a limited amount information related to the city of license in that broadcast of the West Texas network. This network had a very innovative presentation of the weather, a forerunner to what became known as “weather in motion.” The weather map was on a table top, angled to give the camera a better shot. The presenter placed folded cards with graphics on the map as the weather was explained. Special lighting caused the graphics on the cards to appear to move – sunrays shining down, rain falling, lightening striking, etc.

KPAR was an affiliate of CBS, which, during baseball season, carried New York Yankees baseball whenever the Yankees were at home on Saturday afternoon. Back then I was a fan of Yankee pinstripes, and I watched those snowy broadcasts with Dizzy Dean murdering the English language (“…slud into second base”) and Pee Wee Reese whenever I could. My parents didn’t like to watch Channel 12 because the signal was so poor, so we seldom viewed the CBS prime time lineup. I did discover the Blake Edwards-produced drama “Mr. Lucky” on CBS. But my mother forbade me from watching because it was “about gambling.” She didn’t understand I was drawn to it because of the cool music produced by Henry Mancini. (Mancini also did the music for an Edwards program on NBC, Peter Gunn, which we did watch.

My intense interest in news and public affairs had already been seeded when network radio was king of the mass media, and that persisted with the transition to television. I watched every TV news and interview program I could. Although my career goals continued to be targeted at radio journalism, I became a big fan of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, beginning with their coverage of the political conventions in the summer 1956 and then the nightly “Huntley-Brinkley Report,” launched in the fall of 1956.

The over-the-air television service in Scranton these days is much different. Channel 12 moved its transmitter to a ridge halfway between Sweetwater and Abilene, now providing a decent signal in the eastern section of the Big Country. There are now four full-power stations, giving the area ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC programming and other options on their sub-channels. That’s more options, but one could argue the content is no better than in the days of the snowy pictures.