Fifty Years of Public Broadcasting:
Celebrating the Anniversary of Penn State Public
Broadcasting
By
David L. Phillips and Gary Miller
NOTE: The following is the script for a talk presented by
David Phillips and Gary Miller in February 2015 at the
Central Pennsylvania Torch Club.
GARY: Introduction
This
year—on March 1, in fact—WPSU-TV is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary of
providing public and educational television to viewers here in Central
Pennsylvania and, through, its productions, across the state and, in some
cases, the nation. Both Dave
Phillips and I were involved in the station’s work during its first twenty
years—Dave as a director of operations and the station’s second general
manager. We’d like to talk tonight
about those early years and where public broadcasting is today.
Penn
State has had a long history with educational media and public
broadcasting. Very early on—in the
1920s—Penn State experimented with broadcasting courses over the radio. But it was at the Nittany Lion Inn back
in 1953 that the federal government announced its decision to set aside
bandwidth to support noncommercial educational television stations. That same
year, WDFM went on the air as a nonprofit student-operated FM radio station. As
early as the 1940s, Dr. Ray Carpenter had begun to research educational uses of
film. In the 1950s, he
received a Ford Foundation grant to test the use of television to alleviate
high-enrolling classes. They set
up an on-campus television network that connected 24 classrooms with one-way
video and two—way audio. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s—when the GI Bill and
the early Baby Boom generation were crowding its classrooms, Penn State also
used television on campus to capture important course lectures and to
distribute popular courses. Dr.
Kenneth Nelson taught Accounting 101 through this system for many years. The Colleges of Engineering and
Business routinely recorded
lectures from courses in the TV studio. Students could then view these in the library or as part of
their class sessions. The
University Division of Instructional Services grew up around these uses of
media.
In
1963, the federal government passed the Educational Facilities Act, which
stimulated funding of new educational television stations. During that time, the emphasis was on
education; many stations focused on delivering videotaped lessons to K-12
classrooms. In Nebraska, this
involved broadcasting from an airplane to increase geographic coverage.
In
1964, Penn State received a construction permit for what was then called
WPSX-TV—which would become the nation’s 101st public television
station.
DAVE: The Early
history of WPSX
Gary mentioned Ray Carpenter, who was
one of several people instrumental in getting WPSX started. Others included Les Greenhill and
Arthur Hungerford. But the person
who is most identified with the founding of WPSX is Marlowe Froke. Marlowe came to Penn State in 1959
after having served as a news director for the Armed Forces Radio and
Television service, as news director at KWAT-AM in Watertown, South Dakota, and
news director at WGN radio and TV in Chicago. He taught television news at the University of Illinois
before coming here as associate professor of journalism. In 1964, he was named the first
Director of Broadcasting for WPSX-TV and devoted the rest of his long career to
the development of educational and public media at Penn State.
Gary
also mentioned the construction permit for WPSX and makes getting a
construction permit sound simple. It usually is, only in this case, it was
anything but.
In
the late 1950s, The FCC’s initial educational television allocation was for UHF
channel 45. In the cities, that would work fine but in rural Pennsylvania the
reach of UHF would encompass very few people.
The
largest area would be covered by a low-frequency VHF channel — channels 2
through 7 would be best. The limiting factor would be the required separation
between stations to avoid what is referred to as co-channel interference. For
our purposes, that would be approximately 120 air miles. So the engineers
started measuring. Starting with Channel 2, they didn’t have far to go. They found Channel 3 stations in
Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Syracuse. They drew their 120-mile circles and
–lo, and behold – they found a one-mile triangle on Penfield Mountain near
Clearfield, Pennsylvania. Penn State requested allocation of Channel 3 and was
granted permission to operate a remote studio. Which answers the perennial
question of why Clearfield is identified as the station’s location.
To
digress for a moment: the other perennial question is why wasn’t it called WPSU
in the first place. The answer is that a small junior college in northern
Virginia already had those call letters and didn’t relinquish them until long
after Gary and I were gone.
Operating
under a conditional license, the station finally went on the air on March 1,
1965. It operated initially only in the daytime, offering classroom
supplementary materials to schools, which had banded together as the Allegheny
Educational Broadcasting Council with the purpose of selecting and paying for
the broadcast materials.
On
June 7, 1965, the evening schedule began. Remember – there were no live
networks at that time. Programs were distributed by mail on film or the
primitive version of videotape then available.
Finally,
on June 17, 1965, WPSX-TV received its full license to broadcast as the 101st
educational television station.
At
that time, staffing was less than minimal. Everybody did a little of everything
to keep on the air. There was no studio. Programs originated on film or
videotape from our remote truck, which could operate two live cameras if the
opportunity presented itself.
Offices
were in Wagner Building, which we shared with the ROTC and University
Press. Wagner Annex was under
construction. It was basically an addition to the Wagner ROTC Armory. It would
house a studio and control room.
WPSX
had an advantage of a rich source of programming utilizing Penn State’s faculty
and staff. The first live program was actually a continuation of a program
– Farm, Home, and Garden –
originated by Agricultural Extension and distributed via microwave to
Channel 10 in Altoona. Later, a segment of that program featuring Penn State
meteorologists was split off into its own 15-minute program called The State of the Weather/ Shape of the World.
It continues today as Weather/World.
Our
production resources at that time were minimal. We had two bulky
black-and-white TV cameras, which required a crew of at least six people to
operate. Or we had black-and-while film cameras, which required one person (or
two, if we added audio). We also were fortunate to have a real, live
documentarian on staff. His name was P. J. O’Connell. P. J. had a real gift for
single camera, cinema verite style
production – very intimate looks into the lives of people in central
Pennsylvania. Over the years, he
and his team produced several series and specials that documented life in rural
and small town central Pennsylvania communities. Some examples:
· NOTES ON AN AMERICAN BUSINESS—a documentary series
about a smelting company in Mifflin County that, while PJ was filming, was
working through a decision to relocate the company in the South.
· THE SPIRIT OF PUNXSUTAWNEY—which took a close look at a small
town newspaper—The Spirit—and its relationship to the community.
· A TALE OF RELIANCE AND HOPE, the story of two
Philipsburg area volunteer fire companies.
· THE LAST PROUD DAYS OF ELSIE WOOSTER, which followed an
elderly Central Pennsylvania woman as she prepared for her final journey.
· VISITING WITH DARLENE, a series of observational
documentaries that followed a poor Appalachian family in Blair County—who PJ
re-visited a decade later.
Unfortunately, P..J. retired some years ago and was killed
in a bicycle accident in Colorado.
I am happy to report that
P.J.’s documentaries are still available through Media Sales at Penn State.
GARY: Engaging
the Community
From
the outset, WPSX-TV was committed to building bridges between the university
and the communities that we served.
An early mission was to use Channel 3 to extend televised lessons to
K-12 classrooms. It was a
partnership that involved the University, school districts throughout the area,
and the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Before the station even went on the air, Marlowe Froke met
with the superintendents of the many school districts in the 29-country viewing
area. They created a nonprofit organization—the Allegheny Educational Broadcast
Council—AEBC—that was the liaison between the station and the schools. Participating schools paid an annual
membership fee that supported AEBC staff.
Every spring, representatives of the member schools met to review
available programs and to match them with curricular needs across the K-12
curriculum. WPSX then acquired the
programs, with PDE funding, and broadcast them during the school year.
Working
with the AEBC and the PDE—and Penn State faculty—we also produced programs for
K-12 teachers and students. One
example is Investigative Science for Elementary Education—a series of
science demonstrations for grades1-3 developed with Dr. Paul Welliver of the
College of Education. Another
popular series was What’s in the News, a weekly current events series
that eventually was broadcast nationally and helped students understand current
events. The series was hosted
originally by Stu Chamberlain, who went on to a career with ABC Radio in New
York. Today, many people remember
Katie O’Toole’s long-standing role as host when the series went national.
We
also worked with faculty across the university to produce a wide range of
instructional programs for adults, many in cooperation with the Cooperative
Extension Service or various Penn State Colleges. Topics were wide-ranging: Beginning to Sew, Parenting, woodcarving, fly
fishing, etc. Several college credit
“tele-courses” were also developed, including Principles of Accounting, Business Logistics, and a collection of
courses in the inter-disciplinary Science, Technology, and Society curriculum
on topics like behavior modification, limits to resources, and bio-ethics. These STS courses were part of a collaborative
among faculty at Penn State, Temple University and the University of
Pittsburgh.
In
the mid-1970s, the station joined a statewide Community Service project, broadcasting
programs about community issues with supporting materials and, in some cases,
organizing community meetings around those issues throughout the viewing
area. Examples include: Small Town Repair Kit, FoodSense, To
Age is Human, and a series of national specials on major diseases. These projects often involved community
organizations around the viewing area and local Penn State campuses, which
organized local community meetings. We also arranged for Penn State faculty to travel to
libraries around the viewing area to give lectures on programs of historical
and literary interest, which helped not only to generate audiences for the
shows but to create new demand for related books in local libraries.
DAVE: Connections: Statewide, Regional, and National
Networks
I mentioned earlier that in 1965 there were no “live”
networks. Each station was its own fiefdom and served its area as best it could
under its educational license. But even then, many station managers recognized
the value – even the necessity – for co-operative programming and co-operative
planning for growth beyond the confines of an “educational” designation.
The
early distribution of programs was facilitated by the Educational Radio and
Television Center, later National Educational Television Center or NET. Stations that
produced program series would offer them to the other station and NET would
organize copying and delivery, very much the way it worked for years in
educational radio.
One
of the early efforts to be more pro-active in planning and producing programs
was EEN – the Eastern Educational Television Network. It included a mix of
stations from small ones like State College to ambitious and well-funded
stations in places like Boston, New York, Washington, DC, and Chicago. They saw
the wisdom of pooling resources to improve quality – and it would be best, of
course, if that pooling was done at their stations.
In
1967, the public television movement was gaining traction, which also provided
the basis for a different kind of network in Pennsylvania. WPSX and WITF-TV in
Hershey established microwave interconnection that allowed us to extend the
reach of our local shows, while demonstrating the power of a more networked
system. This helped to create a
rationale for the creation of the Pennsylvania Public Television Network. PPTN was a co-operative of the seven
stations in the Commonwealth. Although it talked a good game about public
affairs programming that would expose citizens to the working of government,
etc., it s two main goals were to (1) provide a live interconnection of the
station, and (2) – most importantly – provide subsidies to all seven stations to
ease their fund-raising needs. This
strategy worked well for more than 15 years until state budget concerns and the
stations’ successes ended the largess.
As
I said, the public television movement was moving ahead nationally and became a
reality in 1967 with the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
although it wasn’t until two years later, in 1969, that PBS was created to
manage the programming on the new public television interconnection. Although
early proponents envisioned CPB and PBS as clones of Britain’s BBC, which is
funded by a tax on TV sets, Congress had other ideas and has kept tight reign
on government funds going into the system. There are periodic attempts by
legislators to eliminate funding for CPB and PBS, saying the public should fund
“public” broadcasting, but viewers of signature programs like “Sesame Street”
have prevailed to this point.
GARY: New Delivery Environments: Satellite and Cable TV
In
the mid-1970s, WPSX joined an experiment called the Appalachian Educational
Satellite Project (AESP). Funded
by the Appalachian Regional Commission, AESP used an experimental
communications satellite to deliver teacher education courses, nursing courses,
and other professional education and training resources to the otherwise
isolated communities up and down the Appalachian chain. Then, in 1978, the first
information revolution happened when PBS shifted to satellite to deliver its
national program service. Not only
could every station receive programs from the network, but stations could also
uplink programs to the network.
Having a national satellite network stimulated several important
innovations. For instance, in 1980
university-owned stations created the National University Teleconference
Network, which allowed us to share live television seminars with other
universities—essentially offering national conferences. The first national satellite conference
from WPSX gave faculty in Nuclear Engineering the opportunity to share with
their colleagues around the country video from the damaged Three Mile Island
nuclear reactor. PBS used the
system to create the PBS Adult Learning Service, which made video-based credit
courses available to stations—and local colleges and universities-- nationally.
Then, Walter Annenberg gave the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting $150 million to fund the creation of
postsecondary video courses rooted in national-quality television series on a
wide range of topics. The
CPB/Annenberg Project—supported by PBS Adult Learning Service— brought many
colleges and universities around the country into a new era of extending access
to education for adult, part-time learners.
Around
the same time, cable television was maturing. For cable television operators, satellite meant that they
could capture and re-distribute signals well beyond their local area. In Pennsylvania, a group of cable
operators worked with WPSX and others at Penn State to create PENNARAMA, which
was envisioned as a statewide educational delivery system. WPSX managed the service, which
essentially meant programming a second 24-hour channel that offered credit
courses and other educational programs.
DAVE: Today’s
Public Media Environment: Multiple
Channels
Back
then, programming a second channel was a big deal. In today’s digital world,
three or more channels are the norm.
WPSU-TV,
for example, has its main channel with sufficient bandwidth to provide
high-definition television. It also has two sub-channels: one is called Create,
and provides a mix of arts and crafts and cooking programs that have been a
mainstay of programming since the days of Julia Child and Bob Ross, the guy who
paints “happy little trees” with spatulas. The second channel – The World
– features public affairs,
science, and general interest programming.
Likewise,
WPSU-FM has its main channel and two sub-channels on HD FM, giving the
community access not only to classical music, but also jazz and news radio.
At
the same time, the new technology provides PBS with the means to by-pass the
stations by creating their own cable channels such as PBS Sprout, which is a
network of children’s programming, and PBS Online, an internet based channel
that includes access to past programs such as Masterpiece Theatre, Nova, and
Live at Lincoln Center. PBS also has an online repository of
programs that meet K-12 education goals and that can be downloaded by classroom
teachers.
GARY: Public TV
Today
Over
the past half century, public broadcasting has seen many changes. Certainly, it has had to adjust to
incredible changes in technology—from the early days of black and white
television programs recorded on two-inch-wide videotape to microwave and
satellite delivery and, most recently, the Internet.
But
a lot has stayed the same. It was
created at the beginning of the Information Revolution, stimulated in part by
the government’s response to the Cold War—the Sputnik challenge to improve
American education, especially in science. It operates today in a media-rich Information Society, where
education is again becoming an important societal issue as “STEM”—science,
technology, engineering, and math—skills have emerged as essential skills to
helping our communities maintain their competitive edge in an increasingly
global economy.
What
hasn’t changed is the importance of the “public” in public broadcasting—what is
now probably better-called “public media.” These things tend to work in cycles, and we’ve gone
from a period of high public investment through federal and state budgets to
public investment by individuals who use public media’s resources and
foundations and businesses that grant funds for specific programs. Today, we are again seeing government
interest in using public media for education.
What
has remained the same, though, is a commitment to engaging and working with
local communities.
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