Waiting For Channel 52 To Start

How can I forget 1971 when my mom was riding high in Tupperware as one of their top sales people. She showed me a catalog and told me I could pick out one thing that she would win for me. I chose this Motorola Cadet 12" black & white portable television. I never forgot the day she proudly brought it home and set it up in my bedroom.

I was intrigued by two round plastic dials. The top one was for the VHF stations (Channels 2-13) and a similar dial on the bottom was for the UHF stations. It's hard for today's young generation to imagine a time of remote-less TV's.

The first thing I did was fumble around with the UHF dial, and at 2:45 that afternoon found myself staring at KBSC Channel 52, Corona/Los Angeles. How could I miss that … after-all, a big bold 52 was slanted right before my eyes covering most of the screen with the call letters and cities of license underneath.

The station would sign on at 3 o'clock and then sign off at midnight. I think the first show that came on was "Speed Racer." It could have been "The Addams Family" or maybe even "Kimba, The White Lion." They had the same shows that ran all the time. "The Little Rascals," "The Three Stooges," "Giant Robot" and Jay Wards' "Uncle Waldo." Just when I got used to a show being on at a certain time, the schedule would change.

Every night, Elliot Mintz hosted an interview show called "Headshop." On Saturday nights, there was a pretty controversial show that aired at 10 0'clock called "The Lou Gordon Program." And 'Whoa Nelly!,' who could forget Dick Lane rinkside, hosting "The Roller Derby Game of the Week?"

In junior high, I remembered that you were considered to be part of the 'in' group if you watched this station. We all thought that we alone discovered it. I enjoyed watching the different kinds of shows on 52, particularly the talk shows. I would marvel at it. Later I thought that if I ever got serious about broadcasting, how I would love to be associated with a station that featured a stable of programs like these that everyone waited in anticipation for, regardless of what time the show came on.

I never would have thought that 35 years later my show would land on a station much like KBSC, and that covers Corona … the Inland Empire's KCAA 1050 AM. Over my 5-and-a-half years with KCAA, many personalities have come and gone, and have come back again, often in different time slots. Still it has been, like Channel 52, a grab bag of great shows; like "The Morning Show," "Marijuana: Compassion & Common Sense," "The Empire Talks Back," "The Bill Santoro Show," "Let's Go Shopping With Bev" and "Horace Winks' Dusty Discs;" and featuring well known personalities like Ed Schultz, Don Imus, Roseanne Barr, Fred Wallin, Alex Jones and Lou Dobbs.

With a schedule that changes frequently on KCAA, I've been one of the fortunate few that have kept his predictable 3-hour time every Saturday morning from 10am to 1pm since early 2006. It's a nice touch that upon my return on October 1st, KCAA is preempting its regular programming at 9:00am to sign off the station, in the same tradition of Channel 52. During that hour will be the same instrumental music which engineers played behind the logo cards at several Los Angeles TV stations back in the 60's and 70's, either before sign on or during the 'please stand by' moments of technical difficulties.

KABC Channel 7 featured a lot of Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass along with Sergio Mendes and Brasil'66. KTTV Channel 11 used a lot of Burt Bacharach plus some Baja Marimba Band. If you like those old A&M Records artists, tune in that day.

As for Channel 52, they played this same instrumental over and over before they signed on. I can't express my feelings for this song as well as an L.A. music guy named Reverend Dan who has his own page on blogspot called Music For Nimrods. Below I reprinted a blog piece of his special memories of Channel 52 which he wrote about almost four years ago.

At a time when so many images and bits of information come at us at lightning speed, try to imagine a day 40 years ago when people sat glued to their TV's and looked at the same thing while listening to the same happy music – in most cases for a whole hour – waiting to be surprised. KCAA brings you that same kind of wonderment. I'm glad to be part of their line-up. It's my hope that when my show returns, that you'll find it has been indeed worth the wait.

In case you're wondering, KCAA will run the station sign-on and the national anthem just before I crack the mike on October 1st. After that, I promise to stick around for awhile, and I hope you will too. With my show, you never know what's gonna be coming at you. Sort of like this UHF station I grew up with.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2007

That Happy Feeling

T'was a time when we only had seven television channels in the Los Angeles area. SEVEN! I also had to walk a mile to school barefoot in the snow during a blizzard and a solar eclipse, but that's a tale for another time. This time, I'm talking about UHF television, and a song that has been burned into my brain.

After-school television in the seventies was a pretty healthy scene, even with only seven channels. Starting at 3 pm every weekday afternoon, channels 5, 9, 11 and 13 would each attempt to woo the young viewer by showing a bounty of cartoons and 60's reruns. And for a while, it was enough. But then dad came home after a trip to Japan, with a portable television with a 7" screen. Unheard of at the time! We could carry it from room to room! And in addition to picking up the seven channels of Very High Frequency, it also picked up something called ULTRA HIGH FREQUENCY! UHF!

Back then, there wasn't a whole lot on UHF. There were endless stock market reports on channel 22, and channel 28 was where we could see the PBS programs. After that, you had to dial all the way up to channel 52 to get something else to see. And it was a goldmine.

Channel 52 was KBSC, and they only operated for half the day, starting around 3 pm in the afternoon. They played all the stuff the other channels had passed on. Three Stooges, The Little Rascals, Felix The Cat, Speed Racer, Kimba The White Lion … stuff like that. So not only did they play all these cool shows, they did it on this weird UHF channel that only a few people knew about.

The station went through a ritual every broadcast day.

At around 2 pm the station would put up the station logo–a big number 52 with call letters and cities of operation. For an entire hour, the station would show that logo card and play one song over and over and over again. We didn't know the name of the song, we just knew it as the "Waiting for channel 52 to start" music. And often is the time we would sit there and listen to the song over and over, waiting. I mean, who needs to see Magilla Gorilla and Squidly Diddly again when soon there would be Speed Racer with all those wonderful crashes and explosions and gasping! And the song was really kind of … happy.

Later on, during one of our teenage "KRUD" radio sessions when we were looking for music for commercials, Dana found an album in his parents collection. The Best Of Bert Kaempfert. Playing it, we recognized a few of the tunes. "Hey, that's the song to the old Match Game!" "Yeah!" Then we listened to a song called "That Happy Feeling" and the world stopped. "CHANNEL 52!!!" we screamed! The mystery had been solved, and we weren't even trying to solve one! The composer and performer of the "Waiting for channel 52 to start" was Bert Kaempfert and the song was really called "That Happy Feeling", and from that day on, I've been a fan. And because of the channel 52 connection, I've found quite a few people who feel the same way.