It is a felicitous and typically Chicago-style coming together, this marriage of the fledgling Chicago Museum of Broadcast Communications and a south Loop real estate development called River City.
For nearly five years, a group of local broadcasters and civic do-gooders have labored to find a site for a museum that would house all manner of television and radio tapes and would celebrate the considerable broadcast history associated with Chicago as well.
Friday night the swells gathered at 800 S. Wells St. to mark the opening of the museum, a 14,000-square-foot library-showcase that began in 1982 with a $250 research and development contribution from the Chicago Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Don`t let the fancy designations put you off. When you come through the door at the River City complex, the first exhibit to meet your eye will feature radio`s Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd and Effie Klinker. Audio tapes and puppet memorabilia on permanent loan from the Edgar Bergen Foundation will focus on the legendary broadcaster`s influence and his Chicago roots, from Lane Tech High School to Northwestern University.
”We even got the wooden Oscar that Hollywood gave Charlie McCarthy,”
says museum President Bruce Dumont.
”More than anything else we have in this complex, the Bergen exhibit captures what the museum has tried to do. It`s national in scope but Midwestern in focus. The Edgar Bergen stuff and the donations from (TV puppeteer) Burr Tillstrom`s collection (which include 50 hours of `Kukla, Fran and Ollie`) set the tone.”
Other features of the facility include a 99-seat auditorium, funded by Kraft, which will be used for television retrospectives, seminars and lectures. A series titled ”Jazz on Television,” developed by the Museum of Broadcasting in New York, will open June 17 and run through August.
A radio studio donated by WGN Radio is part of the permanent exhibit. As a working studio, it will be available to other stations for remote broadcasts. And a bungalow living room from the 1950s, complete with television`s relentless blue light, will be the first of so-called ”Decade Rooms” to be mounted within the museum.
A collection of vintage radios, TV sets and broadcasting equipment will be on display, and there will be a representative collection of TV
commercials, some from advertising agency reels, others donated by the U.S. Television & Radio Commercials Festival.
For some museum backers, the A.C. Nielsen Research Center, which will amount to a video and audio library, a catalogued cache for thousands of hours of TV and radio programming, will be the most significant element in the complex. Arthur C. Nielsen Jr., the former chairman and chief executive officer of the wildly influential market-research organization that bears his name, signed on with the museum in 1984 and is now its chairman.
”We`ll have 10 study bays outfitted with video and audio equipment,”
Dumont says, ”and when we open, we`ll have between 800 and 1,000 TV shows and 400 radio shows available. We anticipate that the library volume will double in six months` time.”
For veteran Chicago broadcaster John Callaway, the research center is the linchpin of the museum notion.
”For broadcasters, there`s a side of us that feels a sense of inferiority because what we do is so ephemeral,” Callaway says. ”I`m terribly excited about the research possibilities for the broadcast industry itself, for the academic community, for newspapers, for anyone who requires a kind of video bibliography.
”The scholarly side of this–and I don`t mean scholarly in a dry sense
–could be very exciting in that it could provide a sense of genuine posterity for what is on TV and radio.”
Horror stories about disappearing videotapes are a staple of television newsroom conversations, and no doubt hundreds of hours of Chicago-based broadcasting have been taped over or sent out with the trash in economy or space-saving moves.
An example of television`s casual approach to its own history, particularly in these penurious times, showed up in a recent ”Newsweek”
cover story on ABC anchorman Ted Koppel.
When Paul Volcker resigned as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board two weeks ago, Koppel`s ”Nightline” staff went in search of a videotape of Volcker from 1979.
”The tape was just about to be erased,” Koppel told the magazine. ”We heard there is a plan afoot (at ABC) to erase thousands of tapes because it became too expensive to keep them all.”
Similar local stories abound. In the 1960s, a producer at WLS-TV wiped out hours of the station`s ”history reels” in the throes of an ill-advised desire to recycle the tapes.
”The museum is a significant part of a national movement to preserve television,” Dumont says. ”The feeling, we think, is that after all these years, the product of broadcasting is now significant enough to merit more than one 6,000-square-foot museum in New York.”
The library being put together by archivist Margaret Majorack will include tapes, recordings, kinescopes and films from the Chicago salad days of Dave Garroway, Hugh Downs, Paul Harvey, John Chancellor, Frank Reynolds, Studs Terkel, Don ”Breakfast Club” McNeill and Fran Allison.
The material on file will include current local programming, with recent evening newscasts by local television stations, which the museum staff began taping on a rotating weekly basis at the beginning of 1987.
The museum staff will make copies of all video and audio tapes and, as a precautionary measure, the master tapes will be stored in a separate location. The notion of a broadcast museum for Chicago stems in part from New York`s Museum of Broadcasting, which opened in 1976 under the firm hand of CBS founder William Paley and has enjoyed considerable success. A recent multimillion-dollar grant from the television networks has set the New York museum in search of a new and much larger site, which it will occupy in about two years.
Paley`s initial mandate was to collect the best TV programming from the last 60 years and make it available to scholars, archivists and broadcast junkies. A pair of broadcast centers and three 50-seat theaters have kept New Yorkers coming through the doors and provided inspiration for a Chicago effort.
Not surprisingly, the New York facility betrays a certain Manhattan broadcasting bias. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Chicago, with its overarching radio history, was arguably the boiling point for the new medium known as television.
From ”Studs` Place” to Aunt Fanny`s (Fran Allison`s) ”Fancy Doers and Busy Fingers Club,” from the present-at-the-creation work of ”Garroway At Large” on NBC to the live newscast, ”Paul Harvey Today,” to the pioneer work of Tillstrom, Alex Dreier, Lee Phillip and a host of others, the work of the so-called ”Chicago School” of television has been much discussed but seldom organized.
That perspective supplied a jumping-off point for the museum, and Dumont has enjoyed the cooperation of just about all of Chicago`s TV stations in establishing a working foundation for the facility.
”Channel 7 (WLS-TV) and (then general manager) Dennis Swanson gave us our first major financial support,” Dumont says. ”WMAQ (Channel 5) was the first station to offer videotape contributions, and Channel 2 (WBBM) helped us stage our first big fundraising event off the anniversary of the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1985.”
WGN Radio has been active in aiding the museum, as has the management of WTTW-Ch. 11, which gave office space to Beverly Kennedy, the museum`s first executive director, and a volunteer staff.
”We got a lot of financial help from people like Paul and Angel Harvey, Bob Newhart, Jane Pauley, people with Chicago roots in broadcasting,” Dumont says. ”Hey, we got $10,000 from (CBS News correspondent) Mike Wallace.”
Initially, in 1982, Dumont and his committee had the promise of a site in the proposed central library that was to be built into the former Goldblatt`s department store on State Street.
Later, as the library plan foundered, there was talk of a spot in the downtown Cultural Center and, even later, in the Chicago Avenue Armory. But this is Chicago, where the wheels grind slowly when they grind at all. The new library remains a blueprint, but the Museum of Broadcast Communications is open to the public, Wednesday through Sunday.
”The library deal was a fiasco that got caught up in the 1983 elections and the `Council Wars,` ” Dumont says. ”For a year and a half, we labored under the misconception that we had a site. When that didn`t happen, we found we had a real estate problem.”
Dumont, taking time from his post as political correspondent for WTTW-Ch. 11 and his work for WBEZ-FM, went in search of ”a real estate angel,”
eventually finding one in the developers of the River City complex.
A marriage of logistical convenience, the development supplies the museum with a long-term lease and a considerable block of time in which to get established. For River City and the south Loop, it`s ”a destination point,” in Dumont`s phrase, a focus for the so-called ”instant community” that has grown up on the edge of the Chicago River.
A few weeks ago, sitting amid packing crates, waiting for the man with the air conditioning, Dumont speculated on the future of the museum experiment.
”A lot of people don`t believe this place is going to open,” he said with a smile. ”I got into this on a gut level, on an instinct that something like this was needed. Then I got hooked up with Art Nielsen, the guy who`s pratically the father of market research. We began to look into just who would make use of this place, who it might serve and interest.”
The research indicated that Chicago, like other big cities, has a built-in ”museum constituency,” in Nielsen`s phrase. There is simply a segment of the population that frequents museums.
More directly, the organizers look to the nostalgia set, to the double-dyed devotees of television and radio, as a group that will make its way to the south Loop. Ultimately, Dumont believes, the serious researcher in mass media will find his or her way to the museum and use it as a resource.
Meanwhile, the search for the recorded history of Chicago broadcasting, for the private collections and dusty secrets, will go on.
Says Dumont, ”We hope the reality of the museum, the fact that it`s not a storefront or a hole in the wall, will fuel the idea and encourage private donations, as well as encourage more support from local TV and radio stations. ”We think of it as a starting point for Chicago broadcasting history, not a novelty shop.”
