T.H.A.T.
(Television History and Trivia)from
www.hologlobepress.com
by
Victor Edward Swanson,
Publisher
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Special Important Announcement
I now have a document at the website for The Hologlobe Press entitled A COVID-19 Document that Shows the Rottenness of the CDC, Many in the Medical Community, Many in the Media, and All the Democrats, such as Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, and Joseph Biden, and the document can be reached by using this COVID-19 link.
- - - T.H.A.T., Edition No. 223 - - -
Let me see. Detroit News Now (of WKBD-TV) showed up on Monday, July 23, 2022, offering up a seven-day-a-week bunch of fluff and even nonsense, such as the segment called "Hope Now." NBC-TV began to offer NBC News Daily (a one-hour weekday newscast of sorts) on Monday, September 12, 2022, and it looks like a socialistic-based product working to offer up scare stuff for young people and even show how bad the country is supposed to be (without saying it directly). WJBK-TV, Channel 2, introduced The Noon on Monday, September 26, 2022, another news-talk hour of fluff each weekday. Meanwhile, there is already enough news-talk television stuff for people in the Detroit area--and I am only covering broadcast television here. For example, there is already the to-be-avoided Lx (on Channel 18.2) and Newsy (on Channel 31.7), and, of course, the big television stations in Detroit have hours and hours a day of news-talk stuff, beginning at 4:00 a.m., and newscasts are even repeated late at night. And now, WWJ-TV, which is controlled by the people who own WKBD-TV, will soon have a newscast thing. It is ever-expanding nonsense in "The Pseudo Information Age and the Age of Ignorance" (a set of words that I have used for quite a few years). At least you have another edition of Television History and Trivia that blow ups crap news and crap reporting.
By the way, "Sportsnews Highlights" now exists on Channel 3.10 broadcast, having shown up as a replacement for REV'N on October 31, 2022.
Today, usually only a few people who were so-called stars on Detroit television in the early years get mentioned, and some of those are Soupy Sales, Rita Bell, Bill Kennedy, Milky the Clown, Johnny Ginger, Dee Parker, Lord Athol Layton, Johnny Slagle, Edythe Fern Melrose, and Captain Jolly, and, today, I am covering one of the first stars--a forgotten person to many local Detroit-area so-called historians, and that person is Betty Schudel or Betty Rypsam. Betty was born on March 8, 1927, and her given name was Betty Rypsam, and she was the daughter of, for example, Fred Rypsam, who was an artist and commercial artist in the Detroit area and was involved in Detroit-area-based yacht racing, as Betty Rypsam was for a number of years, especially in her late teens. In around 1933, Betty Rypsam began to get involved in performing with marionettes and even making marionettes, and her father helped her with, for example, making set things. At least in the late 1930s and 1940s, she did marionette shows at such places as churches and YMCA places, and she was associated with Iva Jo Rabold at least for a while in that period; for example, in January 1942, Betty Rypsam and Iva Jo Rabold were working together, and that was when they had a troupe of about 30 marionettes. Oh, on Saturday, April 27, 1940, Betty Rypsam and Iva Jo Rabold performed The Queen and Her Bags of Gold at the St. Clair Community Center, and on December 13, 1943, Betty Rypsam and Iva Jo Rabold performed a show called Christmas Marionettes at St. Mark's Methodist Church. Betty Rypsam and Iva Jo Rabold gained a good reputation for putting on marionette shows. I have to report here that, in 1947, Iva Jo Rabold married a guy named Pete Cole, and it looks as if that event in 1947 would sort of break up the team of Betty Rypsam and Iva Jo Rabold, but I am not sure, but I cannot find evidence of the two gals working together in, in essence, the late 1940s. It seems Betty Rypsam was good enough at presenting marionette shows that the operators of the new WXYZ-TV in 1948 felt Betty Rypsam should have a regular weekly television series, and I report that it seems Betty Rypsam had a good collection of marionettes and a number of presentations in her repertoire already, and she was yet making marionettes in the basement of a house at 5730 Lakepointe Avenue in Detroit [Note: A house no longer exists at 5730 Lakepointe Avenue in Detroit--it is another one of those places in Detroit that can be called a bare spot (though it does have a big tree).]. On Saturday October 16, 1948 (which was one week after the station had made a debut), Betty Rypsam began to have a regular weekly series on WXYZ-TV, and it aired for 30 minutes beginning at 6:30 p.m. each Saturday, and it was called Grimm's Fairy Tales, and, in January 1949, the show was shifted to Mondays at 7:30 p.m. (for 30 minutes each time) and began to be called Famous Fairly Tales. The last show was presented on Monday, September 19, 1949, at 7:00 p.m., and the last presentation was The Tortoise and the Hare; in April 1949, the show had been shifted to 7:00 p.m. on Mondays. Two other presentations that I have been able to find so far were Jorinda and Jorindel (of May 2, 1949) and Peasant's Wise Daughter (of September 12, 1949). By the way, a well-known puppet or marionette on Detroit-area television in 1948 and 1949--particularly on WWJ-TV, Channel 4--was Willy Dooit (on Let's See Willy Dooit). It seems very likely to me that at least some shows from Betty Rypsam were repeated over the history of the series. There is little evidence that, between 1950 and 2012, Betty Rypsam did many stage-like shows, but one reason for that could be her time was busy with other things starting in 1955 when she got married, but she did some stage-like shows. I do report that on June 23, 1951, Betty Rypsam (Betty Schudel) performed with her "Television Puppets" at the Grosse Pointe "War Memorial Center Carnival" (Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan), an event that would become known as the first annual such event. Incidentally, I came across information that showed that, in about 1974, Betty Schudel, while living in Grosse Pointe Farms, got involved in selling Tupperware, and she seemed to do well with Tupperware, and, for example, in the late 1970s and in the 1980s, she was even considered a "Tupperware manager." On April 19, 2012, Betty Schudel died in Naples, Florida. And that is a little history story about one of the first television stars of Detroit-area television. Oh, I did see a black-and-white photograph of some of Betty Rypsam's marionettes, and they were good!
Hey, my story is not finished. A person has to understand that Betty Rypsam's was one of the first stars of Detroit-television history, though it was really her marionettes that were the stars, but her voice was important for marionettes. In October 1948, WXYZ-TV had few locally made programs on the the air--it was a hand full of shows really. Many programs that the station aired, such as Stand By For Crime, The Skip Farrell Show, What Do You Think?, Dollars and Sense, Stump the Author, Super Circus, The Jack Owens Show, and ABC Players, were Chicago-based shows, and, basically, the station aired programs from late afternoon to late evening six days of the week, and there was nothing on Thursdays. The station aired entertainment films (movies) and documentary-type films, and it had The Sports Parade (a weekly local sports show with Don Wattrick). The main live local shows in October 1948 for WXYZ-TV were World Adventure Series (with George Pierrot), Woods and Waters (with Jack Van Coevering), The Gay Deceivers, and a couple others. That first series from Betty Rypsam (which had two names) lasted about one-year, and that can be considered a big deal for the late 1940s and the early days of television in Detroit, and I can argue the show might be called a show for children today, but I say that it was not only for children but also for adults.
I have this extra information to pass along. I came across an article that noted that Betty Rypsam just came off doing a 13-week television series, and the article with the information was published in August 1950, so I started a tracking job. I was able to find a series called Billy the Kid, and using the process of elimination and knowing what other shows were and came from, I came to the conclusion that Betty Rypsam could have been the guiding force behind Billy the Kid, though I could find nothing about the series in articles beyond the air dates (from television listings) [Note: I and any other person cannot do a word search of The Detroit News, which might have some information about the series.]. The series was aired on weekdays on WXYZ-TV, and it first showed up on Monday, March 27, 1950, airing at 5:00 p.m. and airing for 15 minutes, and the show began airing regularly at 5:30 p.m. starting on Monday, May 1, 1950, and the last show for the series was on Friday, June 23, 1950. Billy the Kid, if it was the series headed by Betty Rypsam, was probably a show featuring marionettes, and I can argue well having marionettes on television at stations around the country was having an ending as a heyday about then, and there was not much of a heyday to begin with it seems, but puppet shows would have a heyday for some twenty years more, especially in the Detroit, such as through 12 O'Clock Comics and Jingles in Boofland and Oopsy! The Clown [When I was a little boy in very late 1959 or very early 1960, I had two hand puppets, which my parents had bought for me, tied to Jingles in Boofland, and the puppets may have been offered through a milk company of the Detroit area, and it seems to me now that the puppets, one of which was Jingles, had rubber heads and cotton cloth bodies.]. The daily show with Billy may have been a western-themed show, or it may have simply been about a little boy or featured a little boy.
The story about Betty Rypsam or Betty Schudel now concludes--for now--with this paragraph. While doing research about Betty Rypsam in August 2022, I came across an email address for a Ms. Libby Schudel (whom I guessed was Betty Schudel's daughter). I sent email to Libby Schudel on August 31, 2022. On September 7, 2022 (at 23:33), I got an email from Libby Schudel, and it noted--"Hello and thank you for contacting me. it was called famous fairy tales and none of the shows were taped they were all done live. if you want to talk about it just let me know. I have a lot of marionette heads that she used, however most of the outfits rotted as they were cotton or various fibers. Some are intact but not in great shape.". Also I got another email on the same day (at 23:35) from her--"Oh, and yes I am Betty s daughter Libby and I will look to see if I have any of the scrapbooks but I think my sister took them when my mother died in 2012.". I wrote again on September 9, 2022, and on September 21, 2022, and a subject of both emails was that dealing with Billy the Kid, and I sent a rough draft of this story about Betty Rypsam.In the previous edition of Television History and Trivia, and I offered up a report on the nude-gal event involving Soupy Sales at WXYZ-TV (Detroit, Michigan) at some time between March 1, 1956, and October 10, 1958, and the nude-gal event involving Soupy Sales at KABC-TV (Los Angeles, California) between March 13, 1961, and February 1962, and I said that I was going to pass along some information about Kinescope history to you in this edition, and I now do. In 1956, videotape began to get commercial use in the country, starting out at CBS-TV, particularly the news department, and the use of videotape and videotape machines then expanded to television stations. The two companies that were really working to get videotape machines in television stations were Ampex and RCA, and, really, Ampex was leading the way. I will say that 1958 was the time during which the use of videotape was being done in earnest at television stations. In April 1958, Ampex already had machines in five television stations operated by Westinghouse--WBZ-TV (Boston, Massachusetts), KPIX-TV (San Francisco, California), KYW-TV (Cleveland, Ohio), KDKA-TV (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), and WJZ-TV (Baltimore, Maryland), and KDKA-TV first used (in remote work) a videotape machine--an Ampex VR-1000--to cover the arrival of the Pittsburgh Pirates at the local airport in about May 1958. The first two television series that were videotaped by KABC-TV were Stars of Jazz (which was hosted by Bobby Troup) and Traffic Court, and that happened in 1958, and that meant that KABC-TV had at least two machines in 1958--one to do the remote productions for the two television series and one at the station to play back recorded tapes and record programs. In the late summer of 1958, Bing Crosby (who was a famous singer) was one of the owners of KCOP-TV, Los Angeles, and that was when that station got at least one videotape machine. In the late 1950s, stations quickly adopted videotape machines so that they could make commercials and play back commercials (locally made and nationally made). By the way, in relation to the Michigan, Ampex machines were already in use at WJBK-TV (Detroit, Michigan) and WJRT-TV (Flint, Michigan) in February 1959, and on September 16, 1959, CKLW-TV, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, aired a special at 10:30 p.m. called Happy Birthday to CKLW that, for one, showed off the new tape machine at the television station. In the early 1960s, television stations acquired more videotape machines; for example, in about March 1961, WFAA-TV, which now had a new building, now had five Ampex videotape machines, and the station also had a remote "cruiser" (like a mobile home for doing remotes) that had two videotape machines). But in the 1960s, videotape cameras had yet to replace film cameras for on-the-street reporting teams (such as a reporter and cameraman and maybe a support staff, such as a driver). What I show in this document is that KABC-TV probably had several videotape machines in the early sixties--some at the station and some for remote work. I noted in the previous edition of Television History and Trivia that Steve Binder hinted that the naked-gal event at KABC-TV involving The Soupy Sales Show (circa 1961) was recorded with a kinescope machine, and I note here that, if the event showing the nude gal was kinescoped, it was kinescoped because the crew could not record it on videotape at the station since a vacant videotape machine was not available at the time. Since I have mentioned "kinescope" in this paragraph, I have to pass along a bit of information about kinescope. Kinescope got started in the late 1940s--and a kinescope machine was, in essence, a television monitor and a film camera, and the film camera produced a film recording of what was being put on the television monitor, such as a presentation of a live television show in New York City. Experimenting with color kinescope was taking place in the late 1940s, but history about it will be left out here, since the color standard for television broadcasting in the country was not adopted till 1953. After the color standard was adopted, color kinescope came about, but, today, good luck seeing a color kinescope recording (film)--in the 1950s, many shows were not broadcast in color and few shows got kinescoped. [Note: That makes me think of the crap that some people are trying to sell today that hints people were sort of racist against Anna May Wong years ago by throwing out all the kinescope material of The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (in which she starred), though no such kinescope material ever existed as I show in Television History and Trivia #217, which can be reached through this T.H.A.T. #217 link.] I am not done. On September 16, 1949, KECA-TV went on the air, and on February 1, 1954, it became KABC-TV, a name that yet exists. In November 1949, KECA-TV was getting ready to put two newly bought kinescope units into use--the first for the station--and each cost about $30,000.00, and each was made up of three main parts--(1) a monitor (an RCA kinescope tube), (2) a John Maurer sound recorder, and (3) a John Wall film camera. Maybe, one of those was used to record the nude-gal incident at KABC-TV, or maybe both were used, and the station could have acquired other units between November 1949 and 1962 or updated the two original units over time.
[Note: I have never found evidence that a Detroit-area television station had a kinescope machine, but the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan) did begin using kinescope equipment in the fall of 1954 to make educational programs for television stations all over the country, though the university continued to do live programs, as it had been doing for about four years, for, for example, a few stations in Michigan.]Announcement for the novice again (reworked in March 2019): To get useful television-delivered news or Internet-delivered news, try Breitbart News Network (the history of which goes back to 2007), WorldNetDaily.com, Newsmax TV (which was started up in 2014), CNS News (which is on the Internet and which was launched on June 16, 1998), and One America News Network (a.k.a. OAN), since the entities do not blindly support Barack Obama-type people (communists, socialists, progressives, liberals, and Shariaists), as do CNN, MSNBC, NBC-TV, CBS-TV, and ABC-TV (Note: To learn about bad journalism, you might tune in to CNN, MSNBC, NBC-TV, CBS-TV, and ABC-TV from time to time to see how they differ from the better places mentioned). I note that the Fox News Channel is evolving into a rotten channel, becoming like those that I have put down in this paragraph. If you are unclear of my intentions, I say in different words that you should boycott CNN, MSNBC, NBC-TV, CBS-TV, and ABC-TV and even now much of what is on the Fox News Channel and hope they lose more ratings and advertising revenues, since they are expendable, and it is time for you to find the guts to be mean and heartless and cancel them--since they are hurting you. In 2019, "The Drudge Report" was sold, and it should be treated as suspect for now. [Note: Everyone in the Democratic Party in the country is rotten, and the Republican Party establishment has shown itself to be socialistic and communistic within the last few years, and only a few of the rotten people tied to the Republican Party are U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie.]
[Note: Here is an example of Chris Christie's rottenness. On Sunday, February 6, 2022, Chris Christie was a guest on This Week with George Stephanopoulos (of ABC-TV), which had Martha Raddatz as the host, and Christ Christie pushed out crap. For example, Chris Christie said--"...And let's face it. Let's call it what it is. January 6 was a riot that was incited by Donald Trump...an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and the Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words last week--overturn the election. And he's trying to do a cleanup on aisle one here...." and "...He actually told the truth by accident. He wanted the election to be overturned....". That is bullshit!]I report that commercial television was started up in Detroit in June 1947, and it began with WWJ-TV, Channel 4. In the early days of television, there was a lot of diversity. For example, in the first year of commercial television, WWJ-TV broadcast remotes and movies and sports games and even stage productions. On Sunday, November 23, 1947, about seventy-five years ago in relation to the publication date of this document, WWJ-TV broadcast a show called Apple of His Eye. The broadcast was a live event. I have to give a little history about the stage play. On February 5, 1946, the first stage version of the production began to run on Broadway (New York City, New York), being presented at the Biltmore [Note: Years ago, I lived on a street in Inkster, Michigan, called Biltmore.]; the production had already been run off-Broadway, where it seems it had gotten fairly good reviews. The cast of Apple of His Eye was headed by actor Walter Huston, a well-known performer around the country (having been in movies), and two of the other actors (whom I am well familiar with) were Tom Ewell and Arthur Hunnicutt. Arthur Hunnicutt played for years gruff-looking cowboys and such in movies and television shows; that is, Arthur Hunnicutt is an actor who helps prove most actors get typecast, and that includes Anna May Wong (whom I have talked about in two recent editions of Television History and Trivia, which make my case that Anna May Wong was not discriminated against by Hollywood during her time in Hollywood, as a bunch of current-day Asian-type actresses try to sell the American people on today, such as Michelle Krusiec). Variety the entertainment trade magazine had a review of Apple of His Eye in the edition for February 13, 1947 (page 52), and the reviewer pushed out the idea that the stage production was not good, and, in fact, the reviewer said that the production "...makes for dull, slow theatre....". The review noted that it seemed the production was "...overly touted out of town....". Maybe, the reason the production did not play well on Broadway and did play okay out of town was that the production was a rural-type story presented as a romantic comedy. The production did get taken to other cities, such as Detroit in late February 1947, and, then, Walter Huston was still tied to the production. It seemed the play was liked enough in the Detroit area that the Catholic Theater (of the Detroit area) decided to perform the play in late 1947. Hold it! Here is some more background information. The Catholic Theater, to which I refer, was formed in 1940, and the first play that the entity did was Ladies of the Jury, and that happened in May 1940 at the Detroit Institute of Arts (or the Arts Institute). The next production from the Catholic Theater was The First Legion, which was performed in December 1940, and over the next seven years or so, the Catholic Theater did such plays as Passion Play, The Eve of St. Mark, The Royal Family, Storm, The Far-Off Hills, The Silver Cord, Barter, Ladies in Waiting, Career Angel, and Vicki. The first production for the eighth season of the theater group was Apple of His Eye. Even though the production received a not-so-good review from Variety, the production was put on at the Detroit Institute of Arts by the Catholic Theater (an acting troupe or group) on Thursday, October 9, 1947, Friday, October 10, 1947, and Saturday, October 11, 1947. By the way, the Detroit Institute of Arts was not the only place used by the Catholic Theater between May 1940 and October 1947. The production of October 1947 had William Ronayne playing the part that had been played by Walter Houston on Broadway and such--Sam Stove. Also in the local production were Robert Reilly, Wallace Hedengren, Kay Flood, William Stewart, and Joy Schaefer. None of the actors were familiar to me when I found information about who was in the production, and, today, almost all seemed to have done little in the theater world of the Detroit area. I did find that William Ronayne did stage acting in the Detroit area from at least from 1924 to 1947. [Again, that shows up my point that Anna May Wong did well in the acting profession, given how most actors never achieve the fame that they hoped for in the acting business, and, also, in later years, Anna May Wong had lost that innocence and happy look of the 1920s, maybe because of her partying, and I could argue well that the same change sort of happened to Michelle Krusiec, who always looks like a model in photographs and almost always looks angry and stern, as did Anna May Wong as a rule in the 1940s and 1950s.] There is a tie in between the stage production done in Detroit with Walter Huston and the stage production done in Detroit with William Ronayne--both stage presentations used the same single set (the latter using the set that had been used by the Walter Huston presentation in Detroit). On Sunday, November 23, 1947, the Catholic Theater group once more performed Apple of His Eye, and it was televised by WWJ-TV, and, so far, I have no information about where it was staged and who actually took part in the television presentation, which was broadcast starting at 3:00 p.m.. It seems very likely the people who had appeared in the play at the Detroit Institute of Arts in October 1947 took part in the production on Channel 4. Since Channel 4 had remote television equipment (such as in at least two vehicles acting as a group), it is possible the play was given at the Detroit Institute of Arts, but maybe it was held somewhere else, such as at the studio location for Channel 4. The presentation of Apple of His Eye can be called a "special," a type of thing that almost never gets broadcast by Channel 4.1 today (even though Channel 4.1 does do the Ford Fireworks and America's Thanksgiving Parade each year). For the record, I report that Apple of His Eye was written by Kenyon Nicholson and Charles Robinson. And that is a look at local television in Detroit about 75 years ago.
Announcement: Recently, I have added some new documents to the collection of my documents at the website for The Hologlobe Press. One of the documents is entitled A Document that Dispels Myths and Nonsense of Science-Fiction Books, Movies, and Television Shows (A Logic Puzzle), which can be reached through this Myths link. Another document is And So You Think You're Going to the Moon, Mars, or the Stars..., which can be reached by using this Moon link. And yet another of the documents is entitled And the Stupid Women Shall Lead--and Lead Every Good Individual into Shit, Driven on by Communism, Feminism, and Defective Female Beliefs and Little-Girl Thinking, which can be reached through this Stupid Women link. And here are other documents--A Review of What Television Controlled by Socialists and Communists Worked to Sell as Truth in Relation to the U.S. President Donald J. Trump Impeachment (at Impeachment) and T.H.A.T. Special Edition--The First Helicopter-based Traffic Reporters on Radio for the Detroit area of Michigan (at Helicopter Traffic).
Hey, did your favorite television newscast present the ideas that exist in this paragraph? Oprah Winfrey has been a nationally known media person since at least the 1980s, and she is a supporter of the Democratic Party, which is a communistic and socialistic party--a party of enslavism for the many. In truth, I report that Oprah Winfrey is a black piece of crap. On November 3, 2022, Oprah Winfrey reported publicly that, if she lived in Pennsylvania, she would have already voted for John Fetterman to be a U.S. Senator. John Fetterman is a Democratic, who supports, for example, letting a lot of criminals out of jail, and, of course, he is a supporter of communistic ideas, and he looks like a freak and looks like a thug, and he acts like a thug, and his freaky ideas for the country have nothing to do with a stroke that he had a short while ago. Although Fetterman is a rotten man, as history shows, Oprah Winfrey supports the man, and that shows off the rotten nature of Oprah Winfrey!
On Friday, November 4, 2022, I caught the credits for a new television series on NBC-TV that is called Lopez vs Lopez. The program--the first episode of the series--ran for a half-hour, beginning at 8:00 p.m.. The program was just another presentation of a jackass gutter family with snipping and put downs, especially between the father character (played by George Lopez) and his former wife, who is the mother to the other regular main titled character (who was played by Mayan Lopez). George Lopez looked like a slob, as did Mayan Lopez. Over the years, people--such as socialists and liberals--have complained about Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best and other old-time family-based series for being unrealistic, having a family unit that is, generally speaking, nice and not gutter like, and it is not as if such types of families did not exist in the 1950s or so. Today, most children, especially blacks, grow up in single-parent households, and that is crap. Why does such crap have to show up on television all the time, too? Skip Lopez vs Lopez, given it is just more gutter crap.
In the previous edition of Television History and Trivia, I talked about Ms. Erotic News Gal (Glenda Lewis) of the Detroit area, particularly WXYZ-TV, Channel 7.1, and in this edition, I talk about Carolyn Clifford of WXYZ-TV. On Saturday, October 8, 2022, at about 3:58 p.m., I caught a promo featuring Carolyn Clifford, and the promo was promoting newscasts and news shows of WXYZ-TV. The ad was another one of those ads that show up the nonsense of the news operations in Detroit. You might remember that I recently showed up the nonsense of the new daily news programs offered up by WKBD-TV, and, for instance, they offer up "hope" news segments, and that is crap. To me, the advertisement from Carolyn Clifford came off as emotional crap, and, to me, the news people at WXYZ-TV are more interested in getting in the community and hearing from the people and feeling their pain than in reporting facts and news. The emotional-type theme has been around for a number of years (and I covered the theme quite a while ago in relation to Carmen Harlan of WDIV-TV). Yes, the promo was emotional crap! It was the type that seems to always originate from female reporters. And while speaking about WXYZ-TV, I report that I was about to catch and record the closing credits for a recently new episode of Station 19 (an ABC-TV program), and, on that day, the station broke in with a useless live report about the capturing of a barricaded gunman in Dearborn. Since the guy was finally arrested (as the report went), the story really had no immediate usefulness for people, since it affected, basically, no one--it is not as if the story was about a shooting taking place somewhere right at the moment. Carolyn Clifford and Dave LewAllen (who anchored the special report) got to look so serious and so concerned, but they came off a college kids in a television class at Wayne State University, and it was a show of fluff.
Hey, it is time for Looking at the Movies, which presents a movie every edition of Television History and Trivia that I hope you will look at, such as on YouTube. This time, I am presenting a movie that was aired late at night as part of group of movies shown till morning on Channel 62, WGPR-TV. By the way, in the 1953-1954 television season, Channel 7 presented Movies 'til 3 A.M., and for the 1966-1967 season, Channel 2 offered viewers Movies 'til Dawn. In February 1977, Channel 62 was showing movies on many days of the week from 12:15 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.. The movies for the morning of Wednesday, February 2, 1977, were "Spook Town", "Lady and the Death House", and Flesh and Blood. When I was working to choose a movie for this edition of Television History and Trivia, I did not know what "Spook Town" was, but the title made me think of a Bowery Boys movie and an East Side Kids movie. I called up the movie on YouTube, and I found "Spook Town" was a B-grade cowboy-themed movie featuring Dave "Tex" O'Brien, Jim Newill, and Guy Wilkerson as Texas Rangers of about 1880. Big parts of the story are a ghost town and a strong box. That is all that I will say about the movie, which is a short movie, lasting about an hour, which is a commonplace length for B-type movies. Instead of watching the late-night talk-comedy shows, which are crap, tune into "Spook Town" some day soon, and maybe--just maybe--you might see a cowpie in the cowboy movie (but I did not see one).
On October 24, 2022, in the morning, I finally ran across information that was plugging the special called Going 4 It: The inside story of the rise of WDIV, which was touted by people as going to tell the history of WWJ-TV/WDIV-TV. A video production--a trailer--was available for people to see about the special, but I avoided seeing it based on my coming across an article called "'Going 4 It': Watch the trailer for new documentary on history, rise of WDIV - WDIV ClickOnDetroit" [Stamant, Willis J. "'Going 4 It': Watch the trailer for new documentary on history, rise of WDIV - WDIV ClickOnDetroit." cityofdetroitnews.com, 24 October 2022.]. The article was mostly a letter-like thing by Eli Zaret, who years ago had been a sportscaster at WDIV-TV. The entire piece covering stuff from Willis J. Stamant and Eli Zaret looked like a political piece, which really did not suggest the upcoming special was going to be a real history piece. The second sentence of Eli Zaret's material was--"The late 60s until the early 80s was a tough stretch for WWJ-TV, Detroit's first station and just the 10th in the country. WWJ-TV was owned by the Detroit News parent company from 1947 until it yielded ownership to the Post-Newsweek corporation in 1978.". Actually, in essence, the Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) sort of forced The Detroit News to give up ownership on WWJ-TV, so The Detroit News and Post-Newsweek did a station swap; well, before the swap would take place, it looked as if the FCC was going to adopt new rules limiting what types of media outlets a company or entity could own in the same market, and it looked as if The Detroit News would have to give up ownership in WWJ-TV, and after the swap took place, no change in rules took place. The material from Eli Zaret seemed to be more concerned with showing how WDIV-TV got to be a big deal in Detroit (following a drought period) than about giving the history of the station. Eli Zaret's sixth paragraph was--"As it turned out, [our] uncovering the station's history was a formidable challenge. Video tape didn't come into use until about 1980, so the first 30-plus years of the station's history existed solely in hundreds of film reels that had been stored at Wayne State's Walter Reuther Library....". The idea about "videotape" from Eli Zaret is defective, as I show in an earlier section of this document. Now, I do have to report that video cameras for remote news coverage did not really take off in the country till the 1970s; for example, in the 1960s, it had been commonplace for a reporter on the streets to be accompanied by a film cameraman for recorded pieces or stories. I have yet to find evidence that WWJ-TV, Channel 4, ever had a kinescope machine, which in 1949 cost about $30,000.00 (and then there was additional costs as a machine was used, such as for film stock to be used over the months and years). Since WDIV-TV did not have a kinescope machine in the 1940s and early 1950s at least, live programs could not be recorded. Paragraph nine from Eli Zaret was--"We uncovered rare footage of WWJ-TV icons like Milky the Clown, George Pierrot, Mort Neff and comical weatherman Sonny Eliot. From the video age [videotape age], we compiled footage of latter-day station stars, like Count Scary and Sparky Anderson and explain why the 'Go 4 it' campaign became so wildly successful.". I care not why the "Go 4 It" campaign became successful! See--Eli Zaret was more concerned with the ratings game and being a star. The material from Eli Zaret hinted that images of the people who always get mentioned in relation to Channel 4 history would probably get covered, and I thought that such persons as Paul Gilbert and Larry Kent (a.k.a. Larry Kent Nixon) would not be remembered. Now I have to jump over to material that Willis J. Stamant had on the page, and it was--"...Hello! My name is Willis, and I'm a Journalist. Throughout my life, I have worked in various roles within journalism, including reporting, editing, writing, photography [photographing], and videography [videographing]. I believe journalism plays an essential role in our society. As a Journalist, I strive to be a positive, proactive, and positive influence in all of the communities I've lived in and in all I plan to live in.". The material from Willis J. Stamant is flap-doodle crap. By the way, "Journalist" should not be capitalized (and you can see I made suggestions to improve structural balance). A person's being a good journalist is not about being "positive, proactive, and a positive influence...". A good journalist tells facts about the world so that people can add the data to their minds, which can be used to diagnose what the world really is. Today, so many so-called journalists pass along emotional crap and fluff that really does not help people understand what the world or life is, and many so-called journalists seem to be bent of shading the truth to pass along the ways of socialism and communism in the country. [Note: Willis J. Stamant's stuff comes off as girlie stuff.] Based on the material from Eli Zaret and Willis J. Stamant, such as the television history errors, I (at the time that this paragraph was written (on October 24, 2022)) do not have great expectations about the television special about WWJ-TV/WDIV-TV. The next edition of Television History and Trivia will have a review of the special, which was a very poor presentation.
Okay, hold it! Later in the day on October 24, 2022, I went on YouTube, and I found the promotional video for Go 4 It: The inside story of the rise of WDIV. Basically, it gave no hint about the history of WWJ-TV from 1947 to 1978. The promo looked more like a self-congratulation thing in retrospect for people at WDIV-TV in the news department in the 1980s and 1990s, covering, for example, Mort Crim and Carmen Harlan. Yes, it was a rah-rah piece for the "Go 4 It" idea mostly. The video was a rather flat presentation. By the way, where is WDIV-TV now? I watch 4.1 (WDIV-TV) almost never; it watch 4.3 (MeTV) regularly.
Remember: The Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan was a television show that was produced across the pond and shown on CBS-TV in the late 1960s, and I urge you to find The Prisoner on DVD, maybe from a library, and watch it, and you should show it--all the episodes--to teenagers, or buy it as a present for teenagers.
Stay well!Vic
P.S.: You are urged to see my document entitled One of "The Rules of Man"--A Rule About Health Care that No Politician May Supersede with Law, which can be reached through this Rule1 link. I have deduced that all the Democrats and most Republicans support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 and have no intention of killing it, though it should be killed for violating, for one, "The Rules of Man." For example, Republicans Jeb Bush and Chris Christie support the rotten law, and that is one reason that I define them as stupid men and not men who are good enough--in this day and age--to be the U.S. President. I note that the "mandate"--which forces everyone to buy government-approved health-care insurance--violates one of "The Rules of Man," and it is a rule that is attacked in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Anyone who supports the "mandate" is not a good enough person or a smart enough person to be the U.S. president--the mandate is "enslavism," and the "mandate" allows government people--who are often usually bad people, as history shows--decide what health care a person can get, and that is bad.
copyright c. 2022
Date published: November 10, 2022
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