Lawrence H. Rogers II
The author provides a meticulously detailed account of the TV station business from its virtual beginnings in the late 40's until 1976. It examines the details behind the FCC "freeze" on any new TV license grants in 1948 until the implementation of the "Sixth Order & Report," which transformed TV transmission standards in 1953, and the author's deep involvement in the solution.
It tracks the history of the TV networks and their interaction. It follows the author's participation in the foundation of virtually every TV institution: The TV Code, the TV Bureau of Advertising, the TV Information Office, AMST, etc. It covers the conversion, by the author, of Taft Broadcasting Company from a troubled family group to the largest single group operator, including what was then (1963) the biggest dollar volume deal in the history of broadcasting. It treats in detail the succession of events that moved Taft from basically a CBS affiliate to an ABC affiliate, resulting in the rise of ABC to first place in prime time, and the fall of CBS for the first time from first to last, resulting in the firing of CBS president Jim Aubrey.
We follow the acquisition by Taft of the Hanna-Barbera Cartoon empire, and the subsequent huge world-wide distribution income from TV animation and allied merchandising. In short, it is a compendium of everything of importance that happened in the world of TV for the thirty years before the ascendancy of cable, satellite distribution, and the other electronic marvels that have completely transformed the medium.
Lawrence H. Rogers, II, earned a bachelor's degree with honors in history from Princeton University, then served as an artillery captain in Patton's Third Army in World War II, before building the first TV station in West Virginia, where he worked from 1946 until 1959. He then became chief operating officer and president of Taft Broadcasting Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, in which capacity he served until 1976.
He was also Chairman of the Board of the Cincinnati branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Then he became president and CEO of Omega Communications, Inc., which owned and operated WOFL-TV in Orlando, Florida. Earlier on, he had designed and built the first privately-owned microwave transmission system in the TV industry, to bring live network service and major league baseball to West Virginia. He also brought an end to the FCC's ban on editorializing by broadcast licensees and became radio and TV's first editorialist. After selling Orlando, he sailed a 48-foot boat across the Atlantic with his family and lived the next ten years in the Mediterranean.
women who had devised the radio medium from scratch barely a generation earlier. Only with the development of independent cable television entities, largely freed of FCC regulation, and the introduction of satellite receivers on a large-scale and even a consumer basis, did television begin to emerge as a new medium of its own, not the visual mirror image of old radio.
So great was the power of radio entertainment at its zenith in the United States during the depression years of the 1930s, that the nation's activities came to a virtual standstill every weekday evening at seven o'clock for fifteen minutes with Amos 'n' Andy. Even the movie theaters-those havens of escape from the numbing experience of everyday economic realities-had to knuckle under to the magic spell of these outrageous imaginary caricatures of Negro life in America at that time. If a theater owner expected any one to show up at his box office in the vicinity of the seven o'clock PM hour-New York time-he had better reckon with the awesome competition from the Mystic Knights of the Sea, the comic heroes' mythical lodge hall in Harlem. Practically every movie house in the land closed its proscenium curtains and played that treacly theme song "The Perfect Song" on its mighty Wurlitzer Organ, while the unctuous voice of NBC's Will Hayes intoned over the Vitaphone sound system that we would all together join our beloved and beleaguered friends at the office of the Fresh Air Taxicab Company.
Andrew H. Brown-"I'se de Pres-i-dent!"-and Amos Jones, Andy's hardworking but harder-worrying partner, were the main characters, along with "The Kingfish," George Stevens, Andy's demanding but always silent lady friend Madame Queen, Amos's wife Ruby, likewise never heard from, and timorous Brother Crawford, whose wife was always "very unhappy," kept the entire nation in thrall for a decade.
No matter that all these characters and their daily antics were the spontaneous ad lib creations off-the-tops-of-the-heads of a couple of white former actors named Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden. To all America they were really Amos 'n' Andy. Amos 'n' Andy really lived; and poor, broke America laughed till it cried. They were simply a phenomenon without parallel before or since.
Of course, radio did have its serious side, too. Early news commentators, from Floyd Gibbons and Boake Carter to Lowell Thomas and H.V. Kaltenborn, did their level best to keep the American public abreast of the cataclysmic events that were unfolding in Europe throughout the decade of the nineteen-thirties. Indeed, William K. Shirer lived through the entire birth of the Nazi Thousand Year Reich in Berlin, and told every American who cared to listen what was coming.
But there were very few Americans who cared to listen. They were far more concerned with Amos 'n' Andy, Fibber Magee and Molly, and Bing Crosby, to let their radio escape machine get them interested in another miserable European war. After all, didn't we just go through that "war to end all wars" exercise less than twenty years ago?
When the war really did come to Americans, to the disbelief of three-quarters of the population, it was to their radios that they turned first to find out what was really happening.
Edward R. Murrow's This Is London Calling, during the blitzes of 1940 and 1941, was pretty thrilling stuff. You could hear the bombs going off and people dying. You could hear the air raid sirens and the ambulance klaxons. Although it was real, somehow it was not really real until that day in December 1941, when President Roosevelt intoned those words:
"Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, is a day which shall live in infamy!"
