Television History Comes Alive On HOT

There was a time when NBC kept a card file listing every known television set owner. Each week the network sent out postcards to the owners listing the coming week’s programs and asking for comments on them.



The year was 1939 and television had been around for more than ten years but outside of New York City, it was unlikely that anyone saw one. Commercial network television was born in 1941 when NBC and CBS were granted licenses but World War II delayed the effort until the late 1940’s when network TV reached across the country. By long with ABC and the short lived DuMont Network, television was reaching millions of homes with original programs by 1951. The golden age of television had begun.


Sixty years later, two fans of that golden age are sharing their love of early television with local cable and digital TV subscribers. The station is appropriately called HOT-TV for the History of Television and airs on DISH at Channel 26 as well as digital channels 26.1, 31.3 and 50.4.


Joel Stevens, an advertising executive with Regional Media Solutions always wanted to be in the television business. He saw an opportunity when approached by his partner Fred Hutton, who had a collection of old television programs and movies that he wanted to share.


HOT-TV is more than re-runs of familiar classics like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. HOT’s programming includes shows that have rarely, if ever, been viewed by today’s viewers. These include early 1950’s shows such as I Married Joan, Sherlock Holmes, Mr. and Mrs. North, Ozzie and Harriett and My Little Margie. Vintage movies and cartoons fill in most of the weekly programs but the weekends are set aside for westerns. Fifties western serials like Tate - the one armed good guy, Kit Carson, and Gabby Hayes run alongside classic western movies.


A personal favorite airing on Hot-TV this month is a little known show called Life With Elizabeth that featured Betty White from 1953-55.


Looking beyond their obvious production flaws, Joel Stevens still prefers watching the old TV shows. “Because the shows were often filmed live and had no special effects, they needed to be well written and tight. Besides, I’m color blind,” he admitted.


“The response has been good in the three markets that HOT-TV is airing (Seattle, New York City and Dallas),” added Stevens. “It has surprised me that the appeal is across generations. Grandparents who remember the shows, especially the westerns, enjoy sharing them with kids.”


Fred Hutton, manager, operator and program director for HOT, picks the shows that air and personally owns many of the programs and movies.


“We are looking for shows and movies that are not carried on other local stations. Dallas-Fort Worth is such a large media market that the more common ‘vintage TV shows’ are always running somewhere.”


Hutton feels that viewers particularly enjoy the weekend westerns because many of them such as Annie Oakley and Range Rider were shot as Saturday morning kiddie shows. These are the shows they watched when TV’s first came into their homes.


For viewers like me that grew up watching TV in the 60’s and 70’s, the old shows offer many surprises. Many movie and TV stars got their start on the old shows and it’s fun to see Herman Munster (Fred Gwynne) as a cowboy outlaw or Colonel Binghamton (Joe Flynn) as a mad scientist.


“We get emails every day,” says Stevens, “showing appreciation for bringing back the old shows and movies. Some say ‘where have you been’ while others just offer suggestions for more shows. I guess everyone wants to be TV program director.”

A Casual Fan's Guide To Hockey

Now that the Allen Americans are in town, I watch a lot of hockey games. I don’t understand everything I see but I’m willing to learn. That’s why I called upon the Allen Americans director of business and hockey operations, Erik Adams, to help me and hopefully a few more folks out there to become better fans by answering some common hockey questions.



What are the rules regarding players fighting on the ice? When pushing and shoving leads into a fight; referees may allow the players to fight and let off some steam. Once a player is clearly being beaten, falls to the ice or is in a vulnerable position (shirt over their head for example) then the fight will be stopped. A player who intentionally starts a fight may be assessed an additional two minutes for instigation plus the five minute fighting penalty.


Why are broken hockey sticks left on the ice during play? Rules state that a player must release a stick immediately when it breaks, even if it breaks up at the handle. There is no stoppage of play though so the stick may get kicked around until there is a faceoff or timeout.


Why do goalies sway back and forth during the National Anthem? Players go through their warm up routine and once the adrenaline is running, it is hard to stand still. Goalies are ‘on their own island’ and often do things to stay loose and focused during the game like skating back and forth when play is at the other end of the ice.


In addition to the goalie, what are the five positions and what do they do? A team consists of three forwards and two defensemen. The forwards are classified as the left wing, right wing and center. The job of the forwards is to start the rush towards the goal and keep the puck moving that way. The defensemen’s role is to get the puck out of their own zone. The center also falls back to help on defense and handles most of the face-offs in the game.


Why do players keep going on and off the ice? Players are usually on the ice for about 40 seconds although that can stretch up to a few minutes in some cases. A ‘line’ of players will enter the ice and play for about 40 seconds before returning to the bench. The time may vary but during a 60 minute game, players are on the ice for an average of 20 minutes. NHL teams carry four lines of players while the CHL (Central Hockey League) teams have three lines.


How do face-offs work? Each player must stand outside the circle in the designated area. The visiting team’s player must put his stick on the ice first. Once the home team player’s stick touches the ice, the puck is dropped. If a player crosses into the circle, he is kicked out and replaced by another player. There is a lot of strategy being employed in the instant that the puck drops


What does the coach do during the game? Most of the coach’s work is done before the game and between periods when strategy and systems for the game are set up. Teams for penalty killing and power plays are set and lines are adjusted. They are not as involved during the game as a football coach, for example, but they are always breaking down good and bad plays and making notes of adjustments that need to be made. Like all athletic coaches, they constantly work to keep the players confident and mentally focused on the game.


Finally, what’s with the beards in hockey? Playoff beards started with the NY Islanders in the 80’s when the team chose not to shave until they lost a playoff series. Instead, they won four straight Stanley Cup titles. The tradition has caught on with many teams as a show of camaraderie and determination when the layoffs come around.


The Allen Americans currently hold first place in their division and play the second place Wichita Thunder tonight (Thursday) at 7:05 at the Allen Event Center.

A Military Career In A Paragraph

When it came to World War II, my father was not much of a nostalgic. If it weren’t for some yellowed papers and old photographs, there would be almost no record of his three and half years in the U.S. Army.


The credit for preserving his military record really goes to his future wife and my mother; Lt. Mary J. Lynch. Stored safely in her dresser were three envelopes filled with letters, photographs and official correspondence collected from their years in the Army from 1942-1946.


It is hard to say whether the stack of papers is what was important to her or just what survived the years. Some are literally marching orders while others are just memos written in military jargon. All of them are carbon copies of course.


A typical memorandum comes from the 12th General Hospital and it instructs the nurses to “pack your trunk lockers at once for shipment. Do not put anything in your trunk locker that you will need in the future as no one knows when this will be available to you. Pack in it everything not to be carried in your bedroll or on your person. Keep in your possession your gas mask and helmet.”


Two single documents that tell the whole story are their military separation papers or officially the Army Separation Qualification Record. My father’s states that: “Lt. William Carroll attended OCS (Officer Candidate School) at Fort Dix and was assigned to a Signal Air Warning Battalion. His unit was sent overseas to Oran in 1943 with heavy radar. The unit went through all North Africa campaigns, then through Italy and took part in the invasion of Southern France on D-Day. Unit moved to N. France and into Germany and was near Munich on V-E Day and returned to U.S. in Oct. 1945.”


The author of my mother’s separation papers was even more brief. “Lt. Mary Lynch was trained at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, IL. She served as a general duty nurse in the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Rome-Arno campaigns.”


For all of the traveling and hardships and excitement, their entire military career was summarized into a paragraph by a clerk who probably typed thousands of similar carbon copy documents.


My favorite documents are the V-Mail letters that my father wrote to my mother as they traveled about North Africa and Italy. Working around the censors, the letters are written almost in code. “We are about 150 miles north of where I last saw you,” he says. “It looks like we are shipping out to one of two places and one of them is where you are now” and so on. Apparently no vital military secrets were divulged but they did keep in touch and marry after the war.


For those of us who never served in the military, it is easy to think of the military in large numbers and snippets from history books and TV news.


For those who did serve our country, I am sure it was much more of a personal experience full of memories both good and bad. They have their own letters and orders and separation papers that tell their story.


For the men and women in each one of those stories, we extend our thanks and appreciation as we celebrate Veterans Day.

Playing The Slots Ain't What It Used To Be

There were toys that every boy had like army men and Matchbox cars. Then there were toys that only a select few had and the rest of us dreamed about like gas powered airplanes and slot cars.

After years of slot car envy, I finally saved up and bought a used HO scale set when I was eleven. I had been “hired” by a retired teacher in the neighborhood to do outdoor chores such as mowing and raking. The money was good at $2 per hour so I couldn’t understand why my friend Gary would give up the job and pass it along to me.

As it turned out, he wasn’t giving me a job, he was getting rid of one. After two weeks of well supervised yard work, I was ready to pass the same thankless job onto another friend. I did leave with about $40 and quickly spent it on the slot car set.

My “new” set was made by Aurora in the early 1960’s and was sold to me by a 17 year-old neighborhood kid who drove his real car like a slot car. The cars and track and accessories were dumped in a large box but I was thrilled just to have a set for my own.

For those who are unfamiliar with slot car sets, the road to enjoyment could be paved with frustration. First, the track had to be built. Most layouts looked more like the high five interchange than Daytona because every single accessory and track in the box had to be used. Step two involved the tedious process of connecting and testing the tracks to eliminate dead spots. Finally, the cars had to be reassembled and cleaned and oiled before they could even complete a full lap.
Kids with ambitious dads had permanent track layouts that looked more like model train sets. My friend Gary and I settled for the basement floor with the constant threat of destruction by Duke, his German Shepard.

We spent countless hours playing with our slots car sets and devoted almost as much time building new track layouts. There was no Playstation or cable TV so slot cars could fill a long winter day better than any other toy in the house.

Many years later (but a few years too early), I bought a big slot car set for my son. He eventually grew into it and then quickly grew back out of it when he started driving his own car. It had been stored deep in the closet ever since -until last weekend.

In the name of research, I pulled out the box and set up the old slot cars one more time. My friend Barry joined me and we tinkered with the track and cars until everything was running smoothly. Then we sat back down and watched the football game and never really got back to it.
I realized that it never was about the competition. There was no neighborhood slot car champion when we were kids; we didn’t even keep score. The real fun for us was in the building and tinkering.

I packed up the slot cars tonight and placed them back into the closet next to the model trains. Like many things in that closet, I have no need for them but no desire to part with them either. It’s comforting just knowing they are in there – for research purposes of course.

Cardinal Red Trumps Yankee Pinstripes

There are two different scenarios that may have taken place by the time this column appears. The Texas Rangers will have won the World Series or the St. Louis Cardinals and the Rangers are preparing for a dramatic game seven. Either way it plays out, I win.

I have faithfully followed the hometown Rangers baseball team for years and enjoyed their rise out of mediocrity. I cheered them on through last year’s World Series and celebrated with each win in this year’s playoff rounds. The only team and I mean the only team that would test that allegiance is my team - the St. Louis Cardinals.

The sports pages are full of adjectives to describe the unlikely circumstances that led them to the National League Pennant so I won’t repeat them. Let’s just say that anyone who is truly a Cardinals fan should admit they were lucky to play a single game in October.

I admit that I rooted for the Cardinals last Sunday as I attended my first World Series game. Actually, it wasn’t much of a game at all for Cardinal fans. The Rangers were certainly favored to win the series and the momentum is heading towards that end but I will remain loyal to the team that killed the Yankees.

Growing up in the New York City area in the 60’s, loyalty to the pinstripes was an expectation. A few disillusioned kids rooted for the terrible New York Mets but the Yankees were king. They had played in 15 World Series over the previous 20 years and they were favored to win another one in 1964.

There were Yankees pitching everything from cars to Yoo Hoo I just wasn’t buying the whole Yankee thing but didn’t have an alternative yet.

I was eight years old and joined my classmates each afternoon as we ran home to watch the second half of the games that started around 2 p.m. I secretly tuned in to the 1967 World Series on a small transistor radio and my junior high teacher tuned in the game for the whole class in 1970. The Sisters of Charity were not as understanding when I was in third grade. They had us reciting Mother Seton poems while Bob Gibson was throwing pitches to Mickey Mantle.
The Cardinals won that ’64 World Series in seven games and earned my loyalty for life. Many years later when I moved to the Midwest I learned that a good portion of the country were Cardinal fans because their radio broadcasts reached from Minnesota to Texas. In New Jersey, however, you had to search hard to find a Cardinals fan.

As our hometown team, I have celebrated or suffered along with Texas Ranger fans since moving to Texas in 1995. It’s not like I was cheating on the Cardinals. The Rangers were an American League team and the odds of St. Louis and Texas ever crossing paths were nearly impossible.
Now that the impossible has occurred, I need to stick with my Yankee killers but I’ll be cheering that Rangers victory parade if (or when) it occurs. Is that wrong?

West Side Story Goes West

You know the hit songs and probably saw the award winning movie. You may even own the soundtrack but have you ever seen a stage production of West Side Story? Many critics rank it among the best American musicals of all time but the opportunities to see the production performed live have been few and far between.

That is why the opening of West Side Story at Fair Park Music Hall this week is such an opportunity for hard core musical fans and those who want to experience what they can only imagine on their television screen.

West Side Story was conceived by Jerome Robbins in 1949 when he brought the composer Leonard Bernstein and playwright Arthur Laurents together to modernize the story of Romeo and Juliet through a stage musical. The project was first called East Side Story and focused on the romance between a Jewish boy and Italian-Catholic girl set on New York City’s lower east side. The project floundered and was delayed for six years. By that time the storyline seemed dated and it was rewritten to reflect gang conflicts between Puerto Rican and Polish gangs on New York’s west side. A young lyricist named Stephen Sondheim was added to the team and the rest is history.

As a youngster I had no idea what the musical was about but the familiar red and black album sat in my parent’s stack of records. I would skip over the ballads (mushy songs) and drop the needle on sing-alongs like Gee Officer Krupke, America, the Jet Song and Cool. I eventually saw the movie starring Natalie Wood and made some sense out of the storyline. I’ve seen it many more times since then but caught my first live performance of West Side Story at Fair Park this week. It was amazing.

To understand why West Side Story was so big from the start, you have to consider the year 1957. Up to and including that year, musicals were happy sing-alongs that followed a standard formula. With the possible exception of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, musical theater was very predictable in the 50’s. West Side Story shared the spotlight in 1957 with The Music Man and while both are golden era musicals, they couldn’t be more different.

For starters, The Music Man is a musical with dance. West Side Story is a dance production made even better with a memorable score. The current national touring production that opened on Tuesday is an amazing display of dance from the big production numbers to the choreographed fight scenes. Numbers such as The Rumble could best be described as ballet with a switchblade.

Fans of the 1961 West Side Story movie won’t be disappointed and stage musical purists will find this current production to be an excellent revival of the original musical. Either way, it is memorable show to close out the Dallas Summer Musical season.

West Side Story is playing through October 23 at the Fair Park Music Hall as part of the Dallas Summer Musical series. The show is concurrent with the Texas State Fair so parking is a challenge but a ticket to the show is also good for admittance to the fair. For more information about tickets, visit www.dallassummermusicals.org or call 800-982-2787.

Godzilla: King Of The Monsters

It was late at night (at least 8 p.m.) and I had climbed the stairs into our third floor attic to get a better view. Even though Manhattan was about 12 miles away, I knew the danger would come from that direction so I looked to the east. I nervously scanned the horizon above the rooftops for the tell tale power line explosions but they never occurred. Godzilla did not emerge from the Hudson River that night and our neighborhood was safe – for now.

How a black and white movie about a radioactive dinosaur could keep me on guard duty escapes me now but logic isn’t needed with little kid fears. There was no monster in my closet as a kid - just a 164’ reptile trouncing across New Jersey.

The next day I sat in school occasionally glancing out the window to ensure that Godzilla wasn’t clearing traffic on the Garden State Parkway. I even devised a backup plan in case the monster destroyed the neighborhood between the school and my house. We would all stay in the school’s fallout shelter with the nuns until the sirens sounded.

Over the years Godzilla has become more of a camp joke but for a kid with an active imagination, Godzilla was a movie monster to be feared. The 1954 movie Gojira was the first and probably best Godzilla movie but the version most often seen by American kids was the 1956 classic Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Raymond Burr starred in the movie as Steve Martin, an ambitious reporter who comes face to face with beast who was awakened by nuclear testing. The big guy (Godzilla, not Burr) rises from Tokyo Bay to destroy the city with his radioactive breath.

Like many classic monster stories, Godzilla is meant to serve as a warning to humans to change their behavior or forces beyond their control will do it for them. The first movie was made less than ten years after Hiroshima so the theme of worldwide nuclear disaster wasn’t much of stretch.
It wasn’t power lines or secret weapons that killed the terrifying Godzilla, it was fame. The early movies were so popular in Japan that the Toho Movie Studios would crank out 15 more over the next twenty years. English versions were usually released about five years later with titles that frequently changed when released for U.S. television or video.

Each movie through the 1960’s made Godzilla more likeable and cartoonish. He morphed into a tree hugging, monster hating dinosaur. The world owes a great deal of gratitude to Godzilla for defeating Gidorah ( a genetically altered three-headed monster from the future), Mothra (a psychic caterpillar turned psychedelic moth) and Hedorah (a monster formed from the earth’s smog). He even fought King Kong and a robotic version of himself called MechaGodzilla.

Toho Studios celebrated Godzilla’s 30th anniversary with a sequel in 1984 which led to six more films through the 1990’s. I stumbled upon the 1992 Godzilla vs. Mothra movie on Showtime last week, which prompted me to write this column. The plot, which includes twin fairies from a lost civilization, has Godzilla killing Mothra’s ancient enemy Battra with his atomic breath blast. A grateful Mothra then flies to space to save the earth from an approaching meteor.

I cannot explain the entertainment value of watching a bad monster movie late at night but shortly after it ended I stepped outside and looked to the south. The power lines in Plano were intact and Allen was safe – for now.


A Guide to Godzilla Movies
1954 — Godzilla (Japan) / Godzilla, King of the Monsters (U.S.A., 1956)
1955 — Godzilla Raids Again
1962 — King Kong vs. Godzilla
1964 — Mothra vs. Godzilla
1964 — Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster
1965 — Invasion of Astro-Monster
1966 — Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster
1967 — Son of Godzilla
1968 — Destroy All Monsters
1969 — All Monsters Attack
1971 — Godzilla vs. Hedorah
1972 — Godzilla vs. Gigan
1973 — Godzilla vs. Megalon
1974 — Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla
1975 — Terror of Mechagodzilla
1984 — The Return of Godzilla
1989 — Godzilla vs. Biollante
1991 — Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah
1992 — Godzilla vs. Mothra
1993 — Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II
1994 — Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla
1995 — Godzilla vs. Destoroyah
1999 — Godzilla 2000
2000 — Godzilla vs. Megaguirus
2001 — Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack
2002 — Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla
2003 — Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.
2004 — Godzilla: Final Wars