Highlights 1950s-70s
Remembering “The Club”
From Bruce Bordett “The Club” began on channel 44 as “Club 44.” I think it was around 1977-80. Studio A was converted into a bar/club where each Friday night we would tape four, half-hour, back to back, “live” 30 minute segments. These featured local bands and musical acts, cooking segments, political editorials from Barney Frank,…
Read MoreBruce Bordett: The Place I Wanted To Be
From Bruce Bordett Sometime my senior year in college I decided that WGBH was the place I wanted to be. I started in the mailroom in 1971 and made it onto the crew about a year later. This I learned later was the time-honored path for many who had gone before me to find job…
Read MoreRecollections of a WGBH-FM Volunteer (1951-52)
From Russ Butler A small announcement in The Boston Globe caught my attention. It was 1951, and I was a 17-year old junior in a Boston high school and fascinated with radio broadcasting. The one column-inch notice read that a new FM radio station would begin broadcasting from studios in Symphony Hall. Next day, I…
Read MoreWGBH Pioneers: Michael Ambrosino – Part 1 (1998)
Michael Ambrosino — the creator of NOVA — describes his early years at WGBH, an era of live and live-on-tape TV productions at the 84 Massachusetts Avenue studio in Cambridge.
Read MoreWGBH Pioneers: Michael Ambrosino – Part 2 (1998)
Michael Ambrosino — the creator of NOVA — describes his early years at WGBH, an era of live and live-on-tape TV productions at the 84 Massachusetts Avenue studio in Cambridge.
Read MoreBuilding a Network: EEN (1961-64)
WGBH: The Early Years Skating Around the Rink (1956-60) Building a Network: EEN (1961-64) Going Public (1964-70) From Michael Ambrosino Ed: This is the second of three excerpts from Michael Ambrosino’s autobiography. In the first part, Skating Around the Rink, he described the early years at WGBH, an era of live and live-on-tape TV productions…
Read MoreSkating Around the Rink (1956-60)
In this, the first of three excerpts, Michael describes the early years at WGBH, an era of live and live-on-tape TV productions at the 84 Massachusetts Avenue studio in Cambridge.
Read MoreGoing Public (1964-1970)
From Michael Ambrosino: I’ve never considered myself an intellectual; my memory and thought processes are just not good enough for true intellectual work. I do, however, have an insatiable curiosity and enjoy the world of ideas.
Read MoreIn a World All Its Own (1955)
From John Nadeau — 3/2007 When we did simulcasts on radio and TV, my station break announcement sounded like this: “This is the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council…WGBH-FM at 89.7 megacycles and WGBH-TV, channel 2, in Boston.” I joined the staff of WGBH-FM-TV in 1955. The two stations identified themselves as “noncommercial and educational” because…
Read MoreSic transit gloria (1959)
From Vic Washkevich WGBH was to launch a new (live, of course) science show, and was looking for an opening that was a bit more dramatic than a 35mm slide of Madame Curie. It was decided that we would place a globe over a pan of water (you can’t make this stuff up, folks) and…
Read MoreWGBH Timeline (1946-1978)
From “The first 24 years: A somewhat random compendium of milestones along the way.”
Read MoreCrew Training Tape – Transcript (1962)
From Don Hallock This tape was shot in the temporary studio at the Boston Museum of Science. It was intended as an in-house training tool, primarily for new BU student interns. It puroprted to be a catalog of many of the most frequently perpetrated production errors portrayed in comic relief. Response at the April reunion…
Read MoreThe Secrets of Simulcasting (1970s)
From Joe Pugliesi WGBH in the old days must have been a marvelous place. I came in 1974 at the tail end of those glory days as a master control engineer (picture attached), hired by Fran Abramowicz (circa 1962-1977). I had watched your work as an adolescent and marveled at the production quality, frequently saying…
Read MoreThe Frank Lloyd Wright Lecture (1960)
From Don Hallock — 2000 In about 1960, world famous (and infamously irascible) architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, gave one of his rare lectures at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. The proceedings were televised live by WGBH and fed down the line to a national audience on NET as well. Recently completed, the Kresge building, which had been…
Read MoreGilded Folk and Motorcycles (1960s)
From Steve Gilford In the mid-Sixties, we produced a show called "Folk Music, USA". The "we" is corporate-speak. I think the real producer was Fred Barzyk. In any case, I was stage manager. I enjoyed working that show more than any other during my time at GBH. Traditional music was, and is, a big part…
Read MoreTony Saletan’s What’s New Specials (1960s)
When Don rolled tape and I cued him, the “miller” walked right up to the camera lens — imagining somehow that it worked like a microphone — and said his line. All we got was a mouth full of gums. He didn’t have any teeth!
Read MoreScience Experiments Gone Wrong (1957)
From Peter Hollander It must have been in 1957 that we did a science series hosted by Mary Lela Grimes. It was in the wonderful days of live TV and Mary Leila had gotten the world’s leading expert on the behavior of bats to appear on her show. He was either from Harvard or…
Read MoreRat Alley Reminiscence (1959)
From Paul Noble Now, here’s a really choice photo, from Brooks Leffler. It’s the entrance to Fred Barzyk’s and Tom McGrath’s dreadful little hovel in "Rat Alley," 1959. It was literally in a back alley which ran from Massachusetts Avenue out behind the Zebra Lounge. The hundreds of resident rats were the size of house…
Read MoreFundraising and payola (1960)
From Paul Noble [We made] a fund-raising spot, done with a Cambridge taxi, in December 1960, in the days before auctions and pledge weeks. It was taped in front of 84 Massachusetts Avenue, facing MIT. I know the…spot [was] part of a campaign we did after the first group with celebs a year earlier. My…
Read MoreThe BU Scholars program (1957-58)
From Vic Washkevich From on high The Boston Symphony Orchestra was one of the highlights of WGBH programming back in 1957–58. Hey, anything was better than Words, the one-camera show on which I earned my credit as a director. If you recall, symphony rehearsal performances were open to the public. We shot that show with…
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