Chad Dresing is at the anchor desk. The news is that President Clinton has named Chicago’s William Daley as Secretary of Commerce, and the specific line Dresing is reading, “The President is expected to announce other cabinet selections soon.”
This news morsel cracks the anchor up, as do many of the others that scroll across the TelePrompTer. His deskmates on the news team are similarly amused.
The highly unprofessional behavior is not, unfortunately, an anchor-desk meltdown, the kind of event that would bring some quirky life to the routine of television news delivery. Nor is it the Chicago tradition of news desk “happy talk” taken to a giggly extreme.
A cherubic 8th grader joined by three classmates from Downstate Jacksonville, Dresing is doing the news at the one place in Chicago where you don’t need makeup or an agent to get in front of the cameras and deliver the (somewhat dated) news. You don’t need a professional demeanor; or even puffy hair.
The Museum of Broadcast Communications is perhaps a minor peak amid the range of Chicago public cultural institutions. But as a place where amateurs can play newsreader, where people with an hour to kill can pop in and watch a continuous reel of the world’s best TV commercials, and where tens of thousands of hours of radio and television programming are available, it is easily one of the city’s more entertaining indoor destinations.
Plus, it’s a lot simpler to sell to attention-challenged 8-year-olds than, say, a speckled portrait of people picnicking on a Parisian island. And as an occupant of a public building, the elegant Cultural Center at Michigan Avenue and Washington Street, the museum is, with one minor exception, free to the public.
Friday night, the museum will celebrate its 10th year of public life with a black-tie fundraiser, open to the paying public (see details in adjacent box), that will feature a number of the broadcasting celebrities it has honored during that decade. Larry King has dropped out, but Mike Wallace, Betty White, Edie Adams, Jayne Meadows and Steve Allen all were confirmed attendees.
Planting roots
Perhaps as important as the anniversary, though, in the museum’s ongoing efforts to plant roots in the landscape is the recent publication of a three-volume “Encyclopedia of Television.”
At 2,000 pages, this is not exactly a general-interest tome, although most people would find it generally interesting. While its collection of more than 1,000 articles on important American and British television programs, people, trends and events draws from some of the medium’s foremost scholars, there is an entry for “The Rockford Files” just as there is for “Radio Television News Directors Association,” for “Room 222” as for “Vietnam on Television.”
At $300 for the set, published by Fitzroy Dearborn publishing of London and Chicago, it’s more likely to land on library or academics’ shelves than adjacent to family dictionaries. Still, with its more detailed, more scholarly bent, it fills a niche not served by other TV reference works, which have tended toward comprehensive, though sketchy, surveys of prime-time programming, for example. As such it could help imprint the Museum of Broadcast Communications’ name among the community of people who study and work in television.
The editor was Horace Newcomb, a University of Texas communications professor who serves as the museum’s absentee curator. He called the book a “collection of outstanding scholarship (that) clearly demonstrates television’s truly central role in the issues and events of our times.”
Bruce DuMont, the Chicago broadcaster whose inspiration and sweat turned the museum into a reality, said the encyclopedia “is the next huge development for the museum. That makes us global.”
Still, the institution’s primary focus is a local one, as it started out to be. DuMont was working as a news producer at WBBM-Ch. 2 in the late 1970s, and in using the station’s own archives, he was dismayed to find the haphazard storage of tapes of such historical import as the first Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate, held at CBS studios here.
In 1982 the Chicago Academy of Television Arts and Sciences was looking for a way to commemorate its 25th anniversary, and DuMont pitched the idea of a museum. In the long tradition of people who open their big mouths getting the opportunity to back up their words, DuMont was given $250 in expense money and made a committee of one.
“The idea was a place where television history could be preserved, primarily history created by Chicago television stations, Chicagoans and people whose careers were nurtured in Chicago who went on to help define American television and radio,” said DuMont.
He began a steady struggle to find a home and real money to fund the museum, he said.
“Ours has been an entrepreneurial, bootstrap, constant climb and struggle for survival,” he said. “We’ve done it the old-fashioned, hard-work way, and I’m not sure it could have happened in many other cities.”
DuMont initially thought he had a line on the Cultural Center as a home, but a switch in Chicago Public Library boards changed that. A fortuitous meeting with a developer would lead to the museum landing in its first home, at the relatively isolated River City complex on the Chicago River south of the Loop. Its doors opened June 13, 1987.
In 1992, it was time to renew a lease there or find a new home, and the museum won the chance to land in the Cultural Center after all. The move has paid off in increased foot traffic: an estimated 185,000 visitors in 1996, versus 75,000 in the last year at River City.
Funding was even more of a struggle. In fact, DuMont was nearly ready to shelve the whole idea back in 1983 for want of seed money, when a pair of broadcasters’ deaths helped open the door.
“People had been patting me on the head for eight or nine months,” he recalled, “saying, `Great idea, but we should have done it 20 years ago. I said, `Yeah, but let’s not meet again in 20 years and say we should have done it 40 years ago.’ “
DuMont received a call from WLS-Ch. 7 saying the station wanted to donate $5,000 in honor of recently departed ABC stalwarts Fahey Flynn and Frank Reynolds. That helped turn the head patting into check writing, and still more was encouraged in 1986 when Kraft ponied up a $400,000 check.
A variety of local foundations, trusts and corporations, along with twice annual fundraisers — a television honoree in the spring and the Radio Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in the fall — have been the principal funders of the not-for-profit institution in the years since; last year’s budget, covering a staff of nine, was $750,000, DuMont said.
Visitor friendly
Whether the museum is global or not, and whether it gets money from the MacArthur Foundation or from Beatrice Arthur, probably doesn’t matter much to the museum’s visitors.
On a recent Monday, a steady stream of them wandered through the first floor galleries. One room, devoted to radio, allows listeners to sample snippets of such programs as “The Lone Ranger.”
“Her childlike friendliness and trust are heartwarming, Tonto,” the masked man says of an inquisitive little girl.
Little Orphan Annie secret decoder rings and old microphones are on display, as are an exhibit called Jack Benny’s vault, honoring the Waukegan-raised comic, and Fibber McGee’s closet, from the national hit comedy “Fibber McGee and Molly,” which started life in Chicago.
The first-floor radio studio is a rarity: a functioning studio that can accommodate a live audience. From 1 to 5 p.m. each Saturday afternoon, local radio historian Chuck Schaden broadcasts his history and highlights show, WNIB-FM’s “Those Were the Days” from the studio.
The first-floor also houses the television studio, where visitors like the Jacksonville group can play TV news personality, and if they want, spend $20 to buy a tape of themselves afterward.
The largest exhibit rooms cover television and television advertising. Directly in front of a neat little gift shop, the first Kennedy-Nixon debate plays constantly, with the actual camera that was used for close ups of Kennedy also on display.
Those debates and what they said about the power of the medium were key to ushering in our current era of politicking by television. The tape was also one of the first 10 put in the museum’s collection, DuMont said.
“People who listened on radio said Nixon won,” said Tom Trinley, a 32-year-old aspiring documentarian who is the museum’s finance vice president and its defacto on-site curator. “People watching television said Kennedy won.”
Tapes from the Chicago-based “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” program run nearby, one of the most popular features and a sample of the first important collection the museum landed, from puppeteer Burr Tillstrom.
Another section of the room is still largely open but wall displays highlight the Chicago School of Television, a creative outburst here that made a national impact in the early 1950s, before production shifted to the coasts.
Focus on advertising
And a back room focuses on television advertising. Two continuous video booths are currently showing the droll series of advertisements for ESPN’s “SportsCenter” and a reel of TV spots that have won world honors for their creativity.
A Sears-sponsored exhibit highlights the creation of an ad in its successful softer side of Sears campaign. It’s a well-done and revealing display, but its prominent commercial aspect does highlight the compromises a budget-challenged institution must make.
Similarly commercial, an incongruous series of wall plaques in a mock bar area, where the TV shows famous sports highlights, details the history of Chicago cable station SportsChannel.
An extensive wall display lists famous advertising industry folk, along with a row of photographs of some of these middle-aged white men. It’s not much visually, and when you pick up the headset for the interactive portion of the display, you are treated to a dry recital of the particular executive’s accomplishments.
Perhaps the museum’s most exciting place is its second-floor archive. On a recent Monday, a handful of people were taking advantage of the opportunity to view tapes (a $2 fee is charged to use the viewing carrels) from amid a library of 50,000 hours of radio, 10,000 TV programs and 8,000 TV commercials.
There are larger video and radio collections in the country, especially the one at UCLA, and there are ones that delve more deeply into a specific topic, said Mark Alvey, the museum’s new chief archivist. But after the collection at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, Chicago’s is the second largest open to the public, Alvey said.
Patrons never actually handle the tapes. Those remain backstage, where staffers plug them into a central bank of VCRs. Those tape signals then get fed into the individual TVs in the public areas, where there are also remote tape controls: stop, fast forward, etc.
Helmut Hofer came in to watch news reports about himself, staffers said, before he was acquitted of murder in the death of Suzanne Olds, the wife of his lover. The main users of the collection, however, are scholars, students and people seeking nostalgic experience.
“Our strength is Chicago TV,” said Alvey. “If they want `Kukla, Fran and Ollie,’ they come to us.”
Behind the loan counter, staff, volunteers and interns work to put together clips of some of the celebrities who’ll be attending the 10th Anniversary gala, so those will be available to the media.
Out in the public viewing area, a father and his young son were watching “Fat Albert” and “Speed Racer” cartoons together. A woman had called for a professional wrestling tape. Another patron was watching an episode of the classic 1960s series, “The Prisoner.” Someone else had called for a David Susskind show featuring “real-life Tootsies.”
There’s a serious side
The museum’s two most comprehensive collections are the library of David Susskind shows and of Tom Snyder’s “Tomorrow” programs, but the museum is concerned more with making its current collection accessible than greatly increasing it, DuMont said.
The snapshot of people’s viewing suggests only the range of pop-cultural offerings. “One of the things that is frequently missed is our serious side,” said DuMont. “We have one of the largest accessible collections of documentaries in the world.”
The museum also maintains a comprehensive library of the WTTW public affairs show, “Chicago Tonight” and it has taped late local newscasts, nightly, rotating between the local stations, since the year the museum opened.
And if you look in the computer database of the archive, you can learn such interesting details as the last name of “Jim,” Marlon Perkins’ assistant on the “Zoo Parade” TV show that would become “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”: It’s Hurlbut, a name that would likely cause more snickering from your average 8th-grade news anchor.
BY POPULAR DEMAND
TV shows most frequently requested at the MBC’s archives:
Audition tapes for “Days of Our Lives”
“Bozo’s Circus”
“The Dick Van Dyke Show”
“Garfield Goose and Friends”
“The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show”
“The Jack Benny Show” (radio and TV)
“Ray Rayner and Friends”
“Three Stooges”
“Twilight Zone”
Vintage commercials
Source: Museum of Broadcast Communications
THE CELEBRATION BEGINS
The Museum of Broadcast Communications celebrates its 10th anniversary at 6:30 p.m. Friday, with a benefit celebration at the Chicago Cultural Center, Michigan Avenue at Washington Street.
The “Salute to Television” will feature appearances by: Edie Adams, Steve Allen, Irv Kupcinet, Jayne Meadows, Mike Wallace and Betty White.
Tickets to the event are $300. Call 312-629-6023 for more information.
