#wmar-tv

[moonbasetycho]

Stu Kerr, aka Professor Kool.

Professor’s Kool Fun School ran from 1967 to 1977. It ran on Saturday mornings on WMAR-TV

[retrobaltimore]

This Day in History: March 11

In 1948, WBAL-TV broadcasted for the first time from its studio on North Charles Street, becoming the second TV station in Maryland. WMAR-TV was the first, having launched in October of 1947. (Baltimore Sun photo, 1979)

1888: The “Blizzard of ’88” struck the northeastern United States, resulting in about 400 deaths.

1917: British forces captured Baghdad in World War I.

1959: The Lorraine Hansberry drama “A Raisin in the Sun” opened at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theater.

1997: Rock star Paul McCartney was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

2002: Two columns of light soared skyward from ground zero in New York as a temporary memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Compiled by Laura Lefavor and Paul McCardell.

[retrobaltimore]

Baltimore enters the TV age

Maryland Gov. William Preston Lane Jr. and Baltimore Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. watch as the WMAR cameras broadcast from Pimlico. (Baltimore Sun photo by Alex Malashuk, Oct. 30, 1947)

If you could read, and sounded good, you could be on TV. Hard to believe it was that simple, but it was.

“We didn’t know what the hell we were doing,” McManus – who would go on to greater fame as Jim McKay, an Emmy-winning broadcaster for ABC Sports – recalled in an interview 50 years later. Added Kelly, who would spend nearly 70 years writing about horse racing in Maryland, “There was no script and no plan.”

And how did they get these esteemed jobs as broadcast pioneers? “The editor called me upstairs one day and said, ‘You’re it because you were president of the drama society at Loyola College and that’s good enough for us,'” McKay later recalled with a laugh.

This test pattern was the first image telecast over Baltimore's airwaves in October 1947. (Baltimore Sun file photo)

The station’s debut could hardly be called auspicious. At 2:30 p.m., a test pattern (“Scientifically developed to assist in the adjustment of transmitter equipment,” according to an article in The Sun) appeared on the air. At the time, there were fewer than 2,000 TVs in Baltimore, so the audience wasn’t exactly overwhelming.

At 3:08 p.m., the racing broadcast from Pimlico began. A cameraman (his name does not seem to have been recorded) stood atop the grandstand, ready to track the action. Alongside him stood Maryland Gov. William Preston Lane Jr. and Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr.

Lane, doubtless happy that local TV viewers would no longer have to depend on stations based in Washington, D.C., for their programming, labeled the first broadcast “a landmark for the state.”

D’Alesandro told The Sun, “I doubt the present era will accomplish anything greater in the field of entertainment and education than the television receiving set.”

The winner's circle at Pimlico, as seen on WMAR's inaugural broadcast on Oct. 30, 1947. (Baltimore Sun photo by Robert D. Cochran)

That first broadcast, The Sun noted the next day, “from an engineering standpoint was completed smoothly, despite poor visibility conditions.”

(Among those watching the broadcast was the Sage of Baltimore himself, H.L. Mencken. “I wouldn’t have given a dime for an hour of that stuff even if it included a massacre,” he wrote in his diary, according to McKay, who was chuckling at Mencken’s bleak assessment half a century later. Publicly, Mencken wrote in a review of the telecast, "The young man doing the talking was poor at the job.” He was talking about McKay – who certainly got the last laugh.)

The broadcast from Pimlico was over by 4, at which point the test pattern – which, for some reason, included a drawing of an Indian chief just above the center – went back up. At 8:50 p.m., a program called “Instruments for the Orchestra” aired. At 9:15, live from the Baltimore Coliseum, a basketball game was broadcast between the Baltimore Bullets and the Indianapolis Kautskys (named for the team’s owner, grocer Frank Kautsky).

The Bullets won, 68-61. (The team would go on to win the NBA championship that season.)

WMAR cameras broadcast a session of the Baltimore City Council. (Baltimore Sun photo by Walter McCardell, Dec. 6, 1947)

A year later, WMAR celebrated its first birthday with an evening of news highlights, special events and documentary films culled from its first year of operation. A Sun article noted that the station’s news cameras had been “on the spot at such special events as City Council meetings, the installation of Archbishop Keough, the induction of the president of Loyola College, and dramatic productions of the Johns Hopkins University Play Shop.”

The station had also produced five documentaries, including “Three Men from Suribachi,” about three soldiers who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima during World War II. Other documentaries looked at practice landing operations by Annapolis midshipmen and West Point cadets, the slums of Baltimore and “the flight from Chicago to Honolulu of the Glenn L. Martin Company’s giant flying boat Mars.”

WMAR was also broadcasting a daily 15-minute news telecast.

Its audience was growing, too. By October 1948, some 22,000 televisions were operating in the Baltimore area.

(Thanks to Sun researcher Paul McCardell for his invaluable help)

[abc2news]

VIDEO: Woman assaults teen on-camera for flying drone over Connecticut beach

CONNECTICUT - A video captured on a Connecticut teen's cell phone shows a young woman attacking him after accusing him of taking photos of people on the beach with his drone... (Read More)

[abc2news]

MARYLAND - Between long hours at work, sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic and struggling to pay the bills - we're all a little stressed out.

It turns out that here in Maryland, we have a right to be.... (Read More)

[abc2news]

Stroke survivor Tia Timpson walks 5K a year after massive stroke

ABINGDON, Md. - It was four years ago but Tia Timpson remembers it like it was yesterday.

"I was really healthy 20 years of my life, no problems did everything sports, work, just like a normal child, honor roll, college student and all of a sudden one day I'm away at college watching football with my friends.  I stand up to use the bathroom, my speech went slurred and I collapsed to the floor," Tia said. (Read More)

[abc2news]

The Tropics Come ALIVE and EL Nino Could = BIG 2015 Winter

Plenty of weather to talk about this Thursday afternoon.

First things first our local weather! It's an easy forecast right through Monday as the sun will control things heating us up into the 80s to nearing 90 in some areas by Sunday. Today marks our average high temperature for the year at 80 degrees which is a sure sign summer has officially arrived! 

In the TN valley an MCS is blowing their way. The storm prediction center has placed Memphis in a moderate risk for severe weather as forecast models show winds potentially gusting to 60+ MPH. An MCS stands for mesoscale convective system MESO meaning large! The areas at high risk include Fayetteville, Jonesboro, Memphis, and Tupelo. (Read More)

[abc2news]

Nissan CEO: Self-driving cars could hit roads in 4 years

(KEITH TSUJI - Image copyright 2013 Getty Images. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

PARIS - Once the stuff of science fiction, the self-driving car could be on American roads in four years, according to the leader of one of the world’s largest auto manufacturing groups.

The only roadblock? Red tape.

“The problem isn’t technology, it’s legislation,” said Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault-Nissan, at a French Automobile Club event on Tuesday. Ghosn predicted the controversial cars could hit the road in 2018 in “pioneer countries,” like the United States, France and Japan... (Read more)