KRSC TV – Big plans for first week

December 19, 1946 / Permission to operate Seattle’s first television station has been granted Radio Station KRSC, it was learned today.
Robert Priebe, general manager of the Radio Sales Corporation, owner of the station, said he received a telegram today from the company’s attorneys in Washington DC, that the Federal Communications Commission had approved KRSCs application. The permit will allow the station to broadcast with a visual power of 1895 kW and an aural power of 9.79 kW.
Priebe said that due to difficulties in obtaining equipment costing about $250,000 television broadcast probably will not begin until next fall at the earliest.
KRSC will begin operating Seattle’s first frequency-modulated broadcasting station about January 15, using the call letters KRSC FM. It will transmit on 93.5 mega cycles.
The station will continue to broadcast on its present frequency of 1150 kc, since there are only about 3000 FM receivers in Seattle, Priebe said.
The FM station is being installed at Queen Anne Hill, on 3rd Ave. North and Galer Street, one of the highest points in Seattle. The company hopes to construct a new building when Civilian Production Administration regulations are relaxed, Priebe said.
Station KEVR also has been granted permission to broadcast with FM, but delays in obtaining equipment are postponing actual operation until July, said Bartley Sims, manager.
Stations KOMO and KIRO have received conditional permits to operate FM stations. Certain construction technicalities have to be surmounted and approved by the FCC, however, before they may begin broadcasting.

KRSC-TV Seattle, due to start operation on Thanksgiving Day [1948] as the city’s first video station, has evolved a formula for programming which it hopes will keep its operation costs “within reason,” P. K. Leberman, owner of KRSC and its new TV associate, told BROADCASTING last week. At the outset, Mr. Leberman said, KRSC-TV will limit its live programming to remote pickups of sports and other events of local interest.The balance of its broadcasts will be film, kinescopic recordings of the most popular CBS, NBC and DuMont programs with Eastern audiences and a group of films from Frederic W. Ziv Co., including 41 feature pictures and 35 Westerns. KRSC-TV will operate a five day, Wednesday-through-Sunday, schedule. It will sign on at 5:15 p.m. with 45 minutes of CBS Lucky Pup half-hour puppet show, a Western serial and a cartoon. From 6 to 7, the dinner hour, KRSC-TV will be off the air, returning at 7 with the evening schedule for adult members of the family. Evening schedule will start with a quarter-hour of news, ten minutes of the INS Telepix service which will be sponsored across the board by Frederick & Nelson, Seattle department store, and five minutes of local news and photos supplied by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Kinescopic recordings of eastern network programs will occupy the next hour or so, with sports or feature movies concluding the evening. KRSC-TV has an arrangement with the U. of Washington to broadcast its basketball games this winter and will also cover the local hockey matches. Where local sports are not available it will use video recordings of the DuMont boxing and wrestling shows in the East. During the first week on the air — instead of a solid hour of entertainment, 15- or 20-minute programs would be seperated by ten minutes of test patterns to give the dealers a chance to sell sets to live prospects and to clear their showrooms of non-buying lookers. Frederick & Nelson has also cooperated in the advance promotion by letting KRSC-TV telecast fashion shows from the store’s tea room on Nov. 9 and 10, picking up the shows on 14 receivers throughout the store and in its main window. On Nov. 19 the station staged a variety show in the Chamber of Commerce auditorium for leading business men who could watch both the show on the stage and its reception on sets throughout the hall. A feature of the station’s firstweek programs will be a 20-minute film of highlights of the Notre Dame-Washington U. game to be played at South Bend, Ind., Nov. 27. Paramount Pictures will film the game and fly the condensation to Seattle for broadcast early the following week, with Admiral Radio Corp. as sponsor. Admiral will also hold a meeting of its Seattle dealers that night to watch the program.
Excerpt from Broadcasting Magazine 1948

Visited 26 times, 1 visit(s) today

Author: Jason Remington

Creator, Admin, & Editor of QZVX, former broadcaster at KTOY FM/Tacoma, KVAC/Forks , KDFL/Sumner, KTTX & KWHI FM/Brenham (TX), KONP/Port Angeles, KBAM/Longview, KJUN/Puyallup, KRPM FM/Tacoma, KAMT/Tacoma, KASY/Auburn, KBRD FM/Tacoma, KTAC/Tacoma, KMTT FM/Tacoma, and KOOL FM/Phoenix. -- Airchecks
Please review our COMMENT GUIDELINES before posting a comment.

6 thoughts on “KRSC TV – Big plans for first week

  1. mikec says:
    July 14, 2016 4:30 pm at
    yeah well I have my new television set to channel 5 & I can’t see anything so I called a technician & he’s up on the roof right now installing a bunch of metal apparently called a ‘TV antenna’

    Technician: “ok ready, adjust your ‘fine tuning’ knob & you should see something”
    me: “Nothing! All I see is static…try turning it to the right a little bit….There I can see something but it’s pretty faint…it looks like a Swinomish tribesman doing target practice…turn it a little more….a little bit more….no, now you’ve lost it…turn it back a bit….THERE I can see it clearly now, tighten down the bolts…it IS a local tribesman doing target practice!”
    Technician: “that’s called a ‘test pattern’…now here’s your invoice” 🙁

    pugetsound says:
    July 15, 2016 8:24 pm at
    Long before we discovered cable tv, or thought we even needed it, we enjoyed free, over-the-air television. In all it’s glorious static and fuzzy picture, blurriness and flipping. It was our greatest form of video entertainment. TV also had movies on almost all the channels at least once a day. Weekends were packed with movie choices and kid shows. Now, I have several hundred channels to choose from and here I sit, in front of this computer, with the TV off, air conditioner humming in the background. I don’t think we really want 300 choices. I think we were happier with the few choices we had on 5 TV channels.

    mikec says:
    July 16, 2016 3:29 pm at
    but these were 5 channels of QUALITY programming and sometimes it was tough in the pre-VCR days to decide on which show to watch. This decision was usually made by dads & moms. Other than news I watch approx 3-4 hours a week. My wife is the big TV consumer in our house. However, in spite of a 120-channel cable package, it’s pretty slim pickings and my wife spends less time with TV and more with her computer. It’s my hope to eventually cut the cable, use my UHF antenna head to view a few local channels and the rest of our viewing will get done online. Personally, I find Youtube 1000 times more entertaining than TV which is where I spend the bulk of my viewing

    pugetsound says:
    July 16, 2016 6:41 pm at
    Long live YouTube! I see it as a major player in video given the right moves. YouTube already provides a ton of free full-length movies as well as a pay option for newer features.

  2. I remember test pattern fondly in 1948 when it would disappear for five hours and miraculously real motion pictures would bounce off the TV screen. First program was a puppet show—Pin Head and Fudini. Two days a week test pattern was on 24/7.

    In the early days KRSC TV had contests where children who were artistically gifted could win brand new bicycles for their drawings. I never won, but Jim Valley, (Later with Paul Revere and the Raiders) was an artist superstar and he won a bike!

  3. Test Pattern disappeared at five in the afternoon (1948 TV) and we children got to watch Pinhead and Fodini. Five hours later at 10 pm test pattern came back to haunt the screen for the next 19 hours. Two days a week test pattern was on 24-7.

    KRSC gave away free bicycles in the early days for kids who had real artistic talent. I never won one, but Jim Valley (later with Paul Revere and The Raiders) was an artist superstar and he won a bike!

  4. Thanks for the great memories! It’s been over seven decades ago and as a child, in Seattle’s Madison Park neighborhood, on Thanksgiving Day 1948, my father drove me to Harry Handlin’s furniture Store on Madison Street and I was mesmerized by the ten inch black and white TV screen with pictures of a live sporting event on KRSC TV Channel 5!

    That day my father of blessed memory purchased a Hoffman EZ Vision television for our home!

Leave a Reply to kjrol Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.