Creation

Programming schedule for Channel 7's first day on the air.

This is a programming schedule for the first day that Channel Seven was on the air. It was a Saturday October 9, 1948. The schedule included a warm-up sports broadcast in preparation for the Notre-Dame vs. Michigan State game which began at 2:45, followed by a feature film, and then the formal opening ceremonies from the Detroit Institute of Arts, handily across the street from the new TV station.

Television was all live in those very early days. Videotape had not yet been invented. Film was the primary tool. But it had to be developed, which took time. ABC was so new and poor in those days that it offered no more than three hours a day of programming, none of it much good. So, the three ABC stations that did exist in 1948 -- New York, Detroit and Chicago -- were left to produce their own programs, none of which survived since live programs weren't recorded yet.

The very first face viewers saw and voice they heard over Channel 7 was one of those men from radio. He was a Lone Ranger radio veteran and well-known announcer to Detroit listeners: Dick Osgood. He would go on to host several television shows over the years and also do Channel Seven's movie reviews.

Osgood, in recalling that first day, spoke of how they sandwiched him on a settee between Paul Whiteman, a big guy who had his own orchestra and was the new station's musical director and actress Frances Langford. In attendance were Michigan Governor Kim Sigler, Detroit Mayor Van Antwerp, the owner of ABC, Edward Noble, and his new general manager for the station James Riddell. They gave speeches, and the program then switched into a variety show from the DIA featuring the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, Langford and a group called the Hartmann Dancers. The broadcast day ended with another football game from Briggs Stadium.

At this time, ABC was only a few years old. It had been purchased in an FCC fire sale from an NBC Chicago entrepreneur named Edward Noble, better known back then as the inventor of Lifesavers candy. He renamed it American Broadcasting Company. After the war, Noble started adding television to his radio stations, believing there was a future in the new medium. Detroit was his third television operation after New York and Chicago. It was grafted onto WXYZ radio which had been a cash cow for the struggling ABC Radio Network, partly because it had developed unique programming that was recorded in its studios each week in Detroit, put on disks and sold to stations all across the country through something called Mutual Broadcasting Company. Many of the people who made those programs would soon find their way across the hall to infant Channel Seven.

The shows included Green Hornet-Challenge of The Yukon which later became Sgt. Preston and the most famous, The Lone Ranger which began in Detroit as a radio show in the 1930s, long before it departed for Hollywood in 1953 to make famous Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels.

By 1948, Detroiters already knew what the Lone Ranger, Tonto and the gang looked like because WXYZ Radio regularly took the entire cast, in costume, on tour to theaters, parks, and bandstands as a publicity gimmick. To Detroit, the Lone Ranger was Brace Beemer, who lived in Clarkston, and Tonto was a portly, balding somewhat sour-faced man named John Todd who looked like your local banker. There really was a horse named Silver for the show, but in the studio, Silver and all the other horses were three guys dubbed The Rangers who pounded toilet plungers into a gravel box over which hung WXYZ microphones. One of the most recognizable words in popular culture in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was Keemosabee, Tonto's name for the Lone Ranger. It was actually the name of a boy's camp -- Kee-Mo-Sah-Bee -- near Cheboygan that Jim Jewell, one of the creators and writers of The Lone Ranger, had attended.

Overseeing this crew of 27 engineers, directors and writers who first threw the switches and put the station on the air was James Riddell, general manager, who had joined the station as a mail room clerk in 1921. Riddel's first move was to appoint a young genius named John Pival to head production. Dick Osgood hired Pival right out of the Coast Guard at the end of the war because he knew how to work wire recorders and the station needed somebody to go cover the Tigers in winter training in Florida. Pival would become the key in developing Channel Seven and making it nationally known for new ideas in technology and programming. Within a few years, WXYZ would become a petri dish for television, One of the new production chief's early moves was to raid WXYZ radio for a record announcer named Fred Wolf. Wolf was best known to East-Side Detroiters as Wacky Wigloo. People would drive to work down Jefferson each morning and would pass the WXYZ studio near Van Dyke and would honk at Wolf as he did his show from a glass booth. Fred Wolf soon became one of Detroit's best known sports announcers, particularly for a weekly wrestling show that Pival dreamed up, broadcast right from the station's studios.

Television wrestling shows were created in Detroit at WXYZ, which set the tone for today's wrestling programs. Before long, Wolf was doing a bowling show, hosted boxing matches and a co-hosted the US Gold Cup boat races.

The morning show was another Pival creation. In 1949, two months after the station went on the air, Pival brought another popular WXYZ disc jockey named Johnny Slagle over to television and paired him with a tall blonde named Pat Tobin. The Pat and Johnny show was born and became Detroit's first serious TV hit. The Pat and Johnny Show lasted until 1951, when it was canceled. But it was the first morning talk show in the country, a model for NBC's Today show which went on the air the following year, Good Morning America and others. In Detroit, Pat & Johnny would be followed in years to come by the likes of Bob Hynes, Dennis Wholley, John Kelly and Marilyn Turner's Kelly & Co.

Before Channel 7 actually went on the air, Pival knew he would need a show that would appeal to women, potentially a huge audience during the daytime. Most women were at home with children and keeping house in the 1940s. The first Monday, viewers were introduced to the Kitchen of Charm. Pival had again raided the radio station for a women who had a show instructing women in the proper way of entertainment and running the house. Edyth Fern Melrose was called the Lady of Charm. Edyth was known by Dick Osgood as shrewd. The Charm Kitchen quickly moved out and became House of Charm, which became a staple and grew into House of Charm watched by thousands of women for the next two decades.

It was discovered that Melrose was making more money than the president of ABC, because she was getting paid for endorsing products on the air. There was no such thing as an ethics policy in 1948. All this was new and acceptable then. It became her form of commerce, effectively. If she wanted a particular drape, she would plug it; furniture, she would plug that. She got all the items free and was paid. In fact, she built a beautiful house on the waterfront in St. Clair Shores, paid for by all the suppliers of brick, concrete, lumber, carpets. She even had them build a studio in the house from which she broadcast her show until it went off the air in the early 1960s.

For the men in the audience, Pival stuck to sports. Wrestling, Boxing with Wolf and Football with Don Wattrick, the all-purpose sports announcer. But he created several firsts in those early days. Pival introduced the first broadcasts of the US Gold Cup Races on the Detroit River, today called Thunderfest. He brought in a lovable, rather dull, portly and balding world traveler named George Pierrot to host a travel show called World Adventure News which was the one thing that did not particularly interest Pival. It was clumsy, slow and not controllable. Still, Channel Seven did cover major events in much the manner it would cover sports.

The funeral of Henry Ford's widow, Clara, presented a challenge and became what may have been one of the first news events covered live and remote. It was a huge event in the city. Woodward was jammed. But they produced what may have been the first remote news shots on TV. It so happened that the funeral was across the street from the Macabees at St. Paul's Cathedral. They set up cameras with long lenses on the upper floors and sent announcers to the street to describe who was arriving and what was going on.

The only audience that Channel Seven still hadn't fully covered by 1950 was children. That year, Pival, trying to create an evening show for adults, moved WXYZ radio's musical director Phil Brestoff over to do a television show with his wife and singer, Dee Parker who had once been a vocalist in Jimmy Dorsey's band. The Brestoff show was soon canceled, but Pival saw an opportunity to use Parker, with her big flashy eyes and perky looks in a kid's show. He remade her into Auntie Dee, host of children's variety show. Sarah Thomas appeared with her brother as a dance team on Auntie Dee.

But Channel Seven's biggest coup was yet to come. It came in the form of a young comedian from Cleveland named Morton Supman, nicknamed "Soupy."


This section includes information obtained from interviews with the following individuals: Dick Osgood, Jim Burgin, Tim Kiska, Neal Shine, Hal Dushane, Dick Debruiser, Lyle Rees, Marv Welch, Johnny Ginger and Sarah Thomas.