Television Life, March 15, 1953
KPTV Moves Transmitting Equipment

Thanks to the advance engineering design and layout work of the engineering staff at KPTV, it is now broadcasting from its downtown studio facilities. Directly after sign-off time on Sunday, March 1, and until sign-on time Monday, March 2, the engineers of the KPTV staff moved the transmitting equipment from the building on Council Crest to the newly renovated control room in the studio headquarters at 735 SW 20th Place.

The men worked through the night so that there would be no loss of air time. Several van loads of equipment were transferred in the station's first real step toward getting in the downtown studio location.

Construction work of the studios is continuing, with all indications that "live" programs will be originating from then within a month or two.

At approximately 3 a.m. two policemen appeared on the scene, investigating the report that there was a moving van at the television station, and checking the possibility that KPTV was now taking television away from Portland as suddenly as it brought it to the city

Portland Business Journal, June 28, 1996
Former KPTV studios being converted to office space

Developer Peter Hoffman has designs on the former KPTV (Channel 12) studios.

Hoffman, owner of PBH Inc., a home and commercial development company, bought the KPTV Building, 735 S.W. 20th Place, in late May, said Don Drake, the Melvin Mark Brokerage Co. agent who negotiated the deal. Hoffman has started converting the former television studio into office space for design firms such as architects, interior designers and engineers. The project is named Design Center Portland.

KPTV operator Oregon Television Inc. sold the building and two parking lots to Hoffman for $900,000, Drake said.

In March, KPTV moved its offices east of the Willamette River to 211 S.E. Car-uthers St.

The 38,000-square-foot building can be divided into spaces of 2,000 to 10,000 square feet, said Rich Ford, whose R.C. Ford Co. is marketing the center for Hoffman. He said the open, airy space, which will rent for $10 to $12 per square foot per year, should appeal to lots of small businesses looking for reasonably priced quarters close to downtown. Besides architects, likely tenants include graphic designers, advertising agencies and film and video producers. Some space will be occupied by wholesale showrooms for interior decorators and home furnishings suppliers, he added.

Designs by Vallaster & Corl Architects call for gutting, then renovating the building, located across from Civic Stadium, Ford said. The building will receive a new stucco exterior, awnings and two improved entrances, one on Southwest 20th Place and one on Southwest 21st Avenue. Parking will be available for most tenants, and the building will be ready for occupancy this fall.

Ford said leases will be signed soon for about one-third of the building's space.

The Oregonian, Sunday, September 22, 2002
Portland TV Turns 50: The Irresistible Glow

KPTV, the city's first station, reflects change both in the industry and American culture  "And so, let us now witness the inauguration of television in Portland..."  It happened at exactly 4:30 p.m. on September 20, 1952.  Most Portlanders knew it was coming. For weeks, some could talk of little else.

And so 50 years ago, the mayor, the City Council and the rest of the power elite watched it together at the Benson Hotel downtown. Meanwhile, shoppers filled the new Television Headquarters showroom on the sixth floor of Meier & Frank, while onlookers overflowed electronics and hardware stores, peering through the windows. Of the lucky few who were equipped to watch at home, many crammed their living rooms with all the family, friends and neighbors they could possibly squeeze in.  Then, at the appointed moment, all those screens flickered, and a station logo took shape in the darkness.  "Ladies and gentlemen," came the voice of Herbert Mayer, the New York industrialist who had, at long last, brought television to Portland. "Good afternoon."  Sound and pictures! News and information! World-class entertainment! And you could see it all, in vividly bluish black-and-white, in the proverbial comfort of your own living room!  "The historic moment has arrived," Mayer sang. Even now, it doesn't seem like an overstatement.  The glowing box of fun changed the way Americans learned about the world. But it did more than that. Within a few years of KPTV's first transmission, after TV culture sank its roots into the bedrock of Oregon and the country, the new medium began to change the world it brought us. It transformed everything from residential architecture to language patterns to family relationships and the governance of the nation.  Other stations would come to Portland in the next few years. KOIN (6) hit the air a year later, followed a year after that by the short-lived KLOR (12), KGW (8) in 1956 and KATU (2) in 1961. KPDX (49) joined the party in 1983. Together, they filled the local airwaves with the boundless variety of news and entertainment to which modern viewers have grown accustomed.  Along the way, Americans became closet extroverts: eagerly diving into the lives and travails of others, but only through the front of their TVs, from the soft confines of their living room sofas.  None of which surprises historian Jim Cullen. "The history of popular culture is the history of privatization," he says. "Movies took culture into a dark room; TV brought it into private homes. And now the Internet individualizes the process even more."  Meanwhile, the TV business itself has changed, moving from a highly regulated industry owned by a legion of mostly small to midsize corporations, to a realm of massive, multinational corporations governed by a fraying set of rules that are rarely enforced, even where they still exist.  In this, KPTV finds itself once again leading the way. Recently purchased by Meredith Broadcasting, a vast Iowa-based communications concern that already owned KPDX (49), KPTV is now half of what the TV industry calls a "duopoly," a cost-effective setup that allows a single company to run two stations as if they were one, with a common management, headquarters and revenue-focused mission.  To Cullen, KPTV's journey from newfound civic treasure to cog in a conglomerate may actually illustrate a larger, even more surprising story in the larger tale:  "The age of TV is ending."

When Lenox R. Lohr, president of NBC, visited Portland in February 1937, he didn't think the TV age was ever going to begin.  "Sound broadcasting will continue to be popular," the executive declared, citing reasons that ranged from the demographic to the technical.  More than anything, Lohr couldn't wrap his mind around the physical demands imposed by audiovisual entertainment. As he pointed out, you could listen to the radio and still do a million other things: cook, clean, shave, play tiddlywinks, whatever. TV, on the other hand, would pin people down.  "It will require your absolute, undivided attention!" Lohr scoffed.  Lohr, as it turns out, was no Amazing Kreskin.  But then, Kreskin's no Philo T. Farnsworth.  Farnsworth, the inventor of the television, was only 14 when the sight of a freshly plowed grain field inspired him to think about the possibility of transmitting pictures on radio waves. This is genius stuff, somewhere off on the fault line between visionary and I-see-dead-people. But it took Farnsworth only seven years to get from that Idaho wheat field to broadcasting the first-ever visual image in 1927. He was 21 at the time and on the verge of an extremely long and unpleasant battle with RCA's president, David Sarnoff, who would have preferred if one of his staff inventors had come up with the TV, and so he said one of them had.  That's a whole other story, however, and what matters here is that only 20 months after the skeptical Mr. Lohr's visit to Portland, an experimental video setup called the Farnsworth Mobile Television Unit drew throngs of excited Portlanders to Meier & Frank's eighth-floor auditorium.  There, they were entranced by the sight of local entertainers -- who in actual fact were in the same room behind a heavy curtain -- cavorting on a rudimentary, 30-image-a-second black-and-white screen. The thrill of turning live entertainment into blurry TV may seem elusive to us in the 21st century. But it was such a kick back then that a story in The Oregonian the next morning reported how taken the crowd was by the video appearance of one Manelouise MacPherson, a local teen who read "an amusing monologue about football."  Portlanders weren't the only Americans hungry for video entertainment. Within months, the Federal Communications Commission would license commercial stations in New York and Chicago. Philadelphia followed in 1941. World War II halted the advance of civilian technology for the next few years, but the peace and prosperity that arrived in 1945 -- along with a vast, war-honed industrial complex -- ushered television back into the national fast lane.  The first TV station in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle's KRSC, hit the air in November 1948. And though the tower on Seattle's Queen Anne Hill was nearly 200 miles away, some impatient Portlanders erected antennas in their back yards, hoping to capture the fragments of signal floating on the breeze.  In Astoria, an enterprising radio engineer named Ed Parsons not only put up an antenna, but also figured out how to transmit the resulting signal onto a coaxial cable, which he would feed into the homes of TV-owning neighbors willing to pay a small monthly fee. Parsons, in other words, was the world's first cable TV baron.  Meanwhile, Portland's aspiring broadcasters were jockeying for license approval from the FCC. The Oregonian -- then owner of KGW radio -- earned a license for a KGW-TV station in 1947, but returned it a year later in order to focus on its newspaper and radio businesses. (The Oregonian's parent company would eventually be part owner of KOIN, the city's second station, before selling its stake in the 1970s.) Other entrepreneurs tried to wrest their own piece of the local TV dial, but by the end of 1948, the FCC, realizing the 13-channel VHF spectrum would soon be overrun with video signals, put a freeze on licenses until science could figure out a way to expand the dial.  A process they expected to take a year instead took four. But by the spring of 1952, the FCC was back in the license-granting business. And in suburban New Rochelle, N.Y., Herbert Mayer -- the owner of an electronic equipment company called Empire Coil who had recently expanded into media by buying a TV station in Cleveland -- decided to stake his next claim to media baronhood in the Willamette Valley. 

In the summer of 1952, Mayer arrived in Portland to a hero's welcome. "Mr. TV!" is what The Oregonian called him, photographing the "dapper" businessman disembarking from an airplane in the company of Mrs. Mayer and four of their five children. A few weeks after KPTV started broadcasting, The Journal weighed in with a full-length profile, ("Portland's New Mayer") which lovingly described a "young, high-powered lawyer-industrialist-showman," who also happened to be "quick-witted and ruddy of face."  He was a canny fellow, too. Once the FCC lifted its freeze on new TV licenses, Mayer bypassed the scrum of entrepreneurs battling for Portland's VHF frequencies, focusing his application on the untrammeled UHF dial.  Sure, the new spectrum didn't have the power of the VHF band, and all but the newest TV sets would have to be equipped with adapters to draw its signal. But, as Mayer knew, being the first on the air in a TV-starved city could pay enormous dividends with advertisers and viewers alike. As one nameless RCA exec told Newsweek a week after KPTV's debut: "The first one gets the gravy. The second gets nothing."  Awarded his Portland license in July 1952, Mayer immediately bought an experimental UHF station built by RCA in Bridgeport, Conn., and had the whole shebang packed up and shipped west. Days later, he flew out himself to break ground at the Council Crest site where his 210-foot antenna tower would rise. The ceremony made headlines in both The Oregonian and The Journal, as did Mayer's prediction of a November on-air date. Still, the reports neglected to mention the part of Mayor Dorothy McCullough Lee's speech that unwittingly prompted the crowd's biggest response.  "She said: 'Television will be Portland's Thanksgiving turkey!' " recalls The Oregonian's radio and about-to-be TV columnist, Francis Murphy. "That was met with a moment of silence, then howls of laughter. And she couldn't figure out why!"  Another thing Lee didn't know was that Mayer, despite all pronouncements to the contrary, wanted KPTV to start broadcasting in September. He had already staked out a building on Southwest 20th Place for his studios and started hiring a staff. Bill Swing, a recent Reed College alum, was working as a junior manager with the Bonneville Power Administration when he asked Mayer to give him a job with KPTV's fledgling news department.  "I made a pest of myself and showed him I had the fever," says Swing, who would bracket a long media career with stints at KPTV, ultimately serving as its news director. "Besides, most of the experienced radio news guys didn't want to leave their jobs for such an experimental place."  Gene Phelps, a transmitter engineer who had worked at radio stations in Minneapolis, discovered exactly how experimental KPTV's setup was soon after he started his new job Sept. 10 -- less than two weeks before Mayer's target on-air date of Sept. 20.  "It was an ongoing training session," he says of his earliest days in the small, windowless structure beneath the tower on Council Crest. "No one had experienced this stuff before. You could say there was doubt we would make the deadline."  Amazingly, everything seemed to go according to plan. As the big day approached, Mayer sent out engraved invitations to an eight-hour bash that would begin with a reception and lunch at the Multnomah Hotel, continue with a bus trip to the transmitter building, then climax at a TV-equipped ballroom at the Benson Hotel, where the assembled VIPs would view the first hours of KPTV's existence while nibbling catered snacks.  Of course, you didn't have to be invited to Mayer's party to get caught up in the anticipation. Local appliance stores sold out their inventories of Philcos and RCAs, (most of which sold in the $300 to $500 range, around $2,000 to $3,400 today) and the California factory that made UHF adapters was already working around the clock to keep pace with the orders coming out of Oregon.  One man who could have used a bit less excitement that Saturday was KPTV engineer Phelps. Everything looked fine all morning and even when the VIPs came to tour the transmitter building, he recalls. But then, just as the partygoers were settling in at the Benson, disaster struck.  "Whammo!" he says. "It blew the bypass plate capacitator!"  Which is to say, no power. No picture. No TV. This would not be good at any time, but with less than an hour to go before the station was set to go live, it was disastrous. Or so it seemed until someone remembered that the RCA engineers Mayer had brought in from Connecticut to help get the station up and running had thought to bring a spare capacitator.  "We were shaking in our boots," Phelps says. "It was real touch-and-go."  Then 4:30 came, and all over the city the screens flickered to life.

Mayer's opening speech gave way to an 18-minute documentary about KPTV's transmitter titled, "Success Hill." Then the real fun started with NBC's "All Star Revue," a live music-and-comedy show hosted that week by Jimmy Durante, with guest stars Margaret Truman and Phil Harris.  An old-school vaudeville entertainer with a live band behind him, Durante hoofed, sang and cracked jokes about pretty girls, booze and the size of his nose. He also made plenty of cracks about the coming presidential contest between Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower, particularly when Truman -- the outgoing president's 28-year-old daughter -- was on the stage.  "This does not constitute an endorsement of any political party!" he mugged after giving Truman a welcoming kiss. She showed off her own political button: Durante for President.  All of this was probably lost on Republican vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon, whose weekend visit to Portland was all but eclipsed by the fanfare for KPTV. And maybe that was fine with the candidate, then neck-deep in charges that he had misused $18,000 worth of political contributions. On the verge of being booted from his spot on Eisenhower's ticket, Nixon took to his hotel room, where he apparently drafted a large part of the "Checkers" speech that would save his career -- and become the first political broadcast to be shown on KPTV three days later.  On Oct. 1, the day KPTV started regular programming, NBC broadcast a 15-minute feature called "Tribute to KPTV, Portland, Ore." The show -- set at the imposing execu-desk of NBC president Sarnoff (Philo Farnsworth's corporate nemesis) -- featured Paul Walker, the chairman of the FCC and Mayer's 14-year-old daughter, Sandra, who presented Sarnoff with a ceremonial scroll celebrating "all NBC has done for television."  Young Miss Mayer's hyperbole was just a warm-up for Sarnoff, who compared KPTV's journey into the UHF spectrum to Lewis and Clark's mapping of America's Western frontier.  "Few feats of exploration excel this in romantic interest," Sarnoff declared.  Still, TV's earliest years did project the wide-open feeling of a new horizon. Working regularly from his office at KPTV, Mayer controlled everything from programming to the placement of photographs in the hallway. Given no accepted model of how a TV station should be run, Mayer and his eager young staff re-invented their station from week to week.  Aside from the evenings, which they plugged with network shows, they filled KPTV's broadcast day with local shows that ranged from typical '50s fare (Heck Harper, the singing cowboy; the "High Time" afternoon dance show) to provincial (the "Stars of Tomorrow" talent show and the "Dogtails" missing pet show) to just plain odd (the Tarantula Ghoul skits before "Mystery Theater").  And while local news anchors mostly sat immobile, reading news stories to the camera or talking over silent (and usually day-old) footage shot in the field, they also had opportunities to stretch.  "I'd say, 'Let's put Eleanor Roosevelt on the air when she's in town!' and Mayer would say, 'Sure, OK,' " Swing recalls. "It was like a mom-and-pop operation. The owner was on the premises. He hired at least half of the people there. And when he sold (to George Storer in 1955, who sold soon after to the Chris Craft media company, which owned the station until the late '90s) that marked the end of the entrepreneurial era in Portland TV."  The price for Mayer's station? A then-astonishing $10 million.  But even as Mayer left the scene, and KPTV switched affiliations from NBC to ABC and then to independent status, it maintained a reputation for innovation and commercial success.  In the '50s, KPTV was the first in Oregon to broadcast in color (although it didn't provide regular color programming until 1964). Those jokey skits that led off the "House of Horror" movies in the '50s and '60s not only made local celebrities out of Milton and Tarantula Ghoul (portrayed by local actors John Hillsbury and Suzanne Waldron) but also invented a style of presentation that would soon be replicated around the country.  KPTV aired live regional sports events long before that became a national standard, and even when the station aired repeats of network shows, its strategy of scheduling them five days a week -- strip programming, as it is now known -- eventually became an industry standard.

Even from the beginning, TV could cater to every whim and appetite. Ed Sullivan had everything from rock 'n' roll to opera to plate-spinners. "Dragnet" established a cop show format that would be echoed and adapted over the years by "Adam 12," "Starsky and Hutch," "Hill Street Blues" and "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." Family sitcoms ranged from "I Love Lucy" to "The Brady Bunch" to "The Simpsons." "The Smothers Brothers," "MASH" and "The West Wing" blended in a social conscience, playing off the epic events -- wars, the assassinations of President Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- that now play as TV drama, complete with titles, specialized graphics and promo reels.  At the same time, Portland's stations defined their own corner of the broadcast world. According to Scot Roskelley, who wrote a thesis on the city's TV industry as a University of Portland graduate student in the mid- '80s, the stations followed distinct paths into the modern media marketplace.  KOIN, the city's second station, had been first plotted in the late 1940s by Chicago department store tycoon Marshall Field. But he lost enthusiasm during the FCC license freeze and sold his interest to an assistant, C. Howard Lane, who teamed up with local businessman Ted Gamble and Oregonian owner S.I. Newhouse (who would sell his interest in 1977) to take over KOIN radio and work on getting the TV license they scored in 1953.  On the air slightly more than a year after KPTV, CBS affiliate KOIN emphasized news coverage and made a splash with detailed reports on local weather -- a novelty in those days. Eager to cultivate a high-end, sophisticated audience, the station not only refused to accept local ads for laxatives and hemorrhoid medicine, but also employed a live orchestra to play an hour of music every weekday at noon.  Lane, who was repulsed by the notion of seeing laxative ads at the dinner table, loved owning one of the few orchestra-equipped local stations in the country.  "At the affiliate meetings, no one could believe we did this," he told Roskelley.  Portland's next station, KLOR, signed on as an ABC affiliate in March 1955. The only station to be owned locally (its owners included Jack Meier of Meier & Frank), its owners came up with the KLOR call letters hoping to position the station for the coming era of all-color broadcasting. But the station couldn't find a foothold in the local marketplace, and ABC abandoned the channel in 1956. KLOR went dark three years later, surrendering its VHF slot to KPTV.  KGW, which hit the air at the end of 1956, was far more successful. This was in large part thanks to its Seattle-based owner, Dorothy Bullitt, who invested loads of money in equipment and talent, including a news team whose core players, including future Gov. Tom McCall, anchor/news director Richard Ross, sports director Doug La Mear and weatherman Jack Capell, stayed together (except for McCall, who left to run for secretary of state) until 1975.  Bullitt also made her station a hub of progressive politics, hiring women and African Americans when integrated workplaces were still a rarity. She also encouraged the station to air political commentaries, including anti-war editorials that sparked controversy, and earned national coverage, in the late '60s.  Launched by the Seattle-based Fisher Communications group (the only original station owner left in Portland), KATU arrived in 1961 as one of the nation's then-few independent stations. Though the station -- which would eventually take the ABC affiliation from KPTV -- struggled to find a commercial niche, it hit its stride in the early '70s with a wide selection of local shows ranging from hard news ("Town Hall," hosted for years by local attorney Jack Faust) to feature-heavy chat shows including "AM Northwest," which still exists, "Two at Four" and "Faces and Places."  The next generation of stations, including KPDX (49) and KPXG (22), came into being years later, when the cable revolution had already transformed the landscape of the world KPTV and its immediate competitors defined. Surrounded on the cable by a hundred other broadcast options, the average local station is a flyspeck, a conduit to the network programming that attracts a smaller number of viewers each year.  A new media universe To adjust to the new landscape, and to make up for the once-dominant stations' loss of market share, the FCC has relaxed or eliminated a legion of laws that once governed industry in the public's air. No longer required to satisfy the needs of children, local interests or opposing voices, station owners are also free to collect stations, building chains that stretch from coast to coast.  KPTV, for example, is now a relatively small part of the Iowa-based Meredith Broadcasting's media machine. Operating out of KPDX's Beaverton complex, miles away from the downtown core that cradled it for five decades, KPTV has shed many longtime employees along with whatever affection they might have felt for their company's history and traditions.  KPTV's management doesn't even plan to have a party to mark the station's golden anniversary.  Calling from her office in Beaverton, Teresa Burgess, the executive Meredith Broadcasting installed this spring to run its Portland duopoly, said the switch in ownership (from short-term owner Fox Broadcasting) made it all but impossible to bang the drums about the station's 50th birthday.  "The focus had to be on promoting the (Fox/UPN) affiliation switch," she says. And even if that weren't going on, the modern-day dynamics of broadcasting just don't include an emphasis on civic milestones.  KPTV will air an hourlong anniversary show Sunday night, along with occasional historical vignettes that will pop up every so often until the end of the year. The station has renewed its emphasis on local news (although Meredith used a duopoly loophole in the FCC's local news requirements to ax KPDX's news team) but the sort of locally made, locally focused programs that Herb Mayer, Dorothy Bullitt and their contemporaries loved have gone the way of the bunny ears.  "The business model has shifted to where local programming is no longer cost-effective," Burgess explains.  The business model, represented by the numbers marching constantly across the lower edge of the TV screen on the cable news channels, have become the heartbeat not just of industry but of culture. And critics contend that society marches to that rhythm now, a collection of viewers with paper-thin patience and a sense of adventure that extends about as far as the upper reaches of the cable. Most often, they say, these viewers are satisfied to stay home and let the TV lay it all out for them.  Did TV do this, using its cathode rays like a kind of alien tractor beam? Or is this what the culture always yearned to become -- a nation of individuals both united and divided by a river of constant information? And it might keep right on happening, the river flowing through the Internet, into the computer, into the digital chips implanted behind everyone's left ear.  For now it's impossible to say. But it will surely become clear someday. And when it does, it will just as certainly end up on TV.  Peter Ames Carlin: 503-221-8562; petercarlin@news.oregonian.com

[Thanks to Bob Ballantyne for sending this article to Yesterday's KPTV]

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