Saturday, September 29, 2007

1960's programming on Channel 17.Minimal and Monochrome


Tuesday, May 7, 1968 Canton Repository



Canton Repository ad-December 1969...

As we saw in our last installment..John Baker appeared to be the only "personality" involved locally with Channel 17 at first..Here is the first full week of programming as listed in the Canton Repository:

Monday, January 9, 1967
4:30 Tall Man
5PM Shotgun Slade
5:30 News
6PM Ray Milland
6:30 Thriller
7:30 News
8PM Movie-Dragon Wells Massacre-1957
9:30 News


Tuesday, January 10, 1967
4:30 Wide Country
5:30 News
6PM Bachelor Father
6:30 Johnny Midnight
7PM Soldier Of Fortune
7:30 News
8PM Movie-Junior Miss 1945
9:30 News

Wednesday, January 11, 1967
4:30 Kit Carson
5PM Restless Gun
5:30 News
6PM Love that Bob
6:30 Checkmate
7:30 News
8PM Movie-TBA
9:30 News

Thursday January 12, 1967
4:30 Overland Trail
5:30 News
6PM Pride Of The Family-Paul Hartman Sitcom
6:30 M Squad
7PM Coronado 9
7:30 News
8PM Movie-TBA
9:30 News

Friday, January 13, 1967
4:30 State Trooper
5PM Tales of Wells Fargo
5:30 News
6PM Leave it to Beaver
6:30 Riverboat
7:30 News
8PM Movie-TBA
9:30 News

Interesting Schedule:The average TV watcher then would have said:"All these old moldy shows? I'd rather watch 3, 5, or 8!"..These days, we would love a similar schedule on TV Land..

At first all they had was News and the filmed programming as shown above..and all Black and White at first. Plus they were only on 5 days a week..By 1968 They had added Sunday Hours but only from 8:25 AM-1:30 PM!

Sunday May 12, 1968:
8:25 Sign-On
8:30 Faith, Hope and Inspiration
9AM Faith For Today
9:30 Hour of St. Francis
10AM Canton Baptist Temple-Harold Henniger-Eventually the evening 7PM service would be carried live as well. This was the longest running local program on 17-from 1967-86 when TBN took over and it left the air on 17 shortly after..Still airing locally on channel 52 and Time Warner Local Access
11AM Insight
11:30 This Is The Life
Noon Wrestling
1:30 Sign-Off

At first, any Saturday programming would be minimal. wrapped around a High School Football or Basketball game..Mostly from Canton's Fawcett Stadium or Memorial Field House or Canton Civic Center. Eventually there would be some local programming such as Sidelight 17 and Talkback, which appears to be a phone-In show..Movies were not the blockbuuster hits..Mostly very old..and not good prints, either..

Next:1970-77..The best attempts at programming..17 goes color..

SideNote:I'd like to thank the Stark County District Library Periodical Department for help with copying the Channel 17 pages I got the ads from, etc..the Lady spent a lot of time trying to make the copies look as good as possible..It was very hard finding much about the early days of this station..This is probably the first time anyone has done much with anything online about WJAN-TV 17..

3 comments:

  1. Came thro from WIXY' s blog.
    Very interesting stuff.
    I' m from India and our tv schedule looked very much simliar even in the 80' s.We got color tv' s in the early 80' s and had just 1 channel till the early 90' s and very few shows you could actually watch.I remember Fraggle Rock,I love Lucy,Odd couple etc and then Cable tv came ...........

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great post Tim!
    And you know, that was not so long ago.....Wonder where we'll be, technologically speaking, in 40 more years! Hmmmmmmmmm
    Hope I'm still kickin' around when that time comes! Have a super day and I am really enjoying your blog!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Really enjoy your posts about early stations such as WJAN. Hope you can do my hometown station, WAKR-TV, Somethings I remember from the '50s include Rex Humbard (very popular), a early local talk show, Akron Tonite (or Tonight) with Eddie Elias, a live quick sketch call-in contest show around dinner time, the increase in Xmitter power around '55 and Pepsi Cola being the major sponsor of most local shows. The Wikipedia article on the station seems correct, at least through 1962 when I left Akron.

    ReplyDelete