The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • F3

Orlando Sentinel: PRODUCT: LIV DESK: LIV DATE: 06 27 2004 EDITION: FLA ZONE: FLA PAGE: F3.0 DEADLINE: 18.22 OP: walden COMPOSETIME: 13.39 CMYK SUNDAY, JUNE 27, 2004 F3 Orlando Sentinel WKMG-CHANNEL 6 manager said the station's first employees (such as those in the control room, above) had never worked in TV production before. fuzz created a local buzz Must-see TV. In the early days, WDBO televised a popular children's show that was hosted by 'Uncle Walt' Sickles (with moustache) Also shown: industrial and Army films. Amateur hour. Channel 6's first production The TV TV FROM Fl month.

But it's unlikely that any retrospective could capture the sheer excitement of television's arrival in Orlando. 'The public could not wait to watch television. It was phenomenal," says Marc Danforth, 68. "Everybody wanted TV. It was a novelty.

It was free entertainment." (His father, Harold, was Channel 6's president at the start.) The front page of the Orlando Sentinel reflected that enthusiasm on July 1, 1954. A cartoon heralded the end to "eyestrainin' blizzards" of static that came with watching the Jacksonville station. A short article predicted thousands of viewers would watch WDBO sign on that morning. The next day, Sentinel readers gave their reactions. A mother reported her children had gone "just hog-wild" over the small screen.

The reception was the main issue, with descriptions ranging from "crystal clear" to "barely wiggles." Slow growth market Orlando was slow to claim its share of the TV universe. In 1949, stations had gone on the air in Miami and Jacksonville. But the Federal Communications Commission, overwhelmed by the demand for new stations, restricted their development from 1948 to 1952. The process of granting licenses and building stations was time-consuming, and Orlando lagged. The Panama City, Pensacola and Fort Myers markets had stations months before Central Florida.

"It took a good deal of time for a distribution system to be hooked up across the entire country," says Ron Simon, television curator at the Museum of Television Radio in New York. "Many places, especially the West Coast, would see Lucy or Ed Sullivan weeks later. I have friends who didn't see Christmas specials until after Christmas." Like many other TV stations, WDBO was started by radio owners (in this case, WDBO) who had the money to undertake the daunting start-up. For a short period, Central Florida was a one-station community. WESH-Channel 2 reached the airwaves in 1956, and WLOF-Channel 9 (later WTTV) arrived two years after that.

The original WDBO station was not They tried to get me to do something about my bald head. I said, 'No, they're going to see a baldheaded Another time, the director demanded that Kimble lengthen Chopin's "Minute Waltz" so the program could pan over his fingers. Kimble nixed the idea. He played the piece as written. It was so primitive' Channel 6 offered many live programs every day, but technical problems cropped up frequently with films or the long-distance feed from the network, says Danforth, who worked as a soundman.

"When we didn't have network, we'd show industrial films or there'd be some Army recruiting film," Danforth says. "They'd always play something in the public domain. It was terrible. They showed all the movies from the 1930s and '40s. The film would break, and the slide would come on, 'One minute please.

Technical Yet the amateur-night quality couldn't sap the young industry. The public became intrigued by the new medium anyway. "It was so primitive, what we got away with," says Colin Murchison, 81, who started as a cameraman and moved up to production manager. The images looked like "lousy motion-picture photography." "But people didn't know any better," he adds. "Even you, as a person doing it, didn't know any better." Television's effect on the culture is traced in a new exhibition, "Changing StylesChanging Dials," that opened Friday at the Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archive in Miami.

The show, which runs for three months, includes TV trays, vintage articles on how to watch the medium (avoid the dark) and early remote-control devices that were hooked to the set and which people kept tripping over. "What we always lament about is that a lot of stations have not kept their original programs," says archive director Steve Davidson. "They thought: What was the value? Our goal as an archive is to preserve the material and make it accessible." SENTINEL ARCHIVE lie Greco. He got them out so fast. That was something very novel." WDBO was a CBS affiliate, but it was allowed to carry series from NBC, ABC and DuMont, a network that folded in the 1950s.

The local offerings included talent shows, cooking shows and old movies. Local stations groomed their own personalities. Many older viewers fondly remember an afternoon children's show that "Uncle Walt" Sickles hosted for 13 years. Organist Walter Kimble had a 15-minute show, sponsored by a jewelry company in Jacksonville. He played popular songs at 6 p.m.

every Monday for three years. 'The lights in the ceiling were so hot that, after 15 minutes, I was ready to take a bath," says Kimble, 92. "I had to wear a pink shirt. White was too bright. Big news.

The front page of this newspaper published a cartoon that reflected the public's enthusiasm for the first local TV station. cutting edge in any sense. It sat on Texas Avenue, off Colonial Drive, at the edge of a swamp. (Channel 6, which later became WCPX, started broadcasting from its current location on John Young Parkway in 1984.) 'We had many complications getting the station on the air," Barker says. "The building was metal.

We had a horrendous problem of killing the sound of rain on the roof. One of the engineers had designed a mess. The studio ceiling kept getting lower as we tried to insulate." Low-tech beginning The beginnings were crude. Picture quality and reception could be awful. The backdrops were skinny sets in shades of gray.

The news amounted to radio men standing at desks and reading stories. Ben Aycrigg, the former anchor nicknamed "Central Florida's Walter Cronkite," did early announcing at Channel 6 and remembers the unusual way the station relayed news images. A freelance photographer, Charlie Greco, took still photographs and sold them to the station. 'They'd put the picture up on an easei, snow me pnoio ana say there'd been a fire or accident there," says Aycrigg, 78. "Greco L'f Memories remain Like many other stations, Orlan do's Channel 6 didn't save a lot of early programs.

The different departments have collected their own stashes of photographs and memorabilia through the years, says WKMG General Manager Henry Maldonado. "The first transmitter is sitting in the lobby," he adds. "It's a work of art. It's beautiful." But the thrilling, odd adventures that were transmitted play mostly in the memories of Orlando's TV pioneers. Even as they describe long-ago blunders and rudimentary technology, they speak with the awe of people who were part of something miraculous.

Hal Boedeker can be reached at 407-420-5756 or hboedekerorlandosentinel.com. WKMG-CHANNEL 6 And thaf the way it was. Ben Aycrigg, who was nicknamed 'Central Florida's Walter was an anchor at WDBO's TV station..