KMBT's mother was Clicks Radio. Its father was Clicks owner, Frank McIntyre.
Clicks Radio in 1952, under the direction of Frank McIntyre, announced they were going to start a TV station.
It took them three years to get it on. And there were some tough times.
The equipment that was expected did not show up. Plans that were worked out did not come to fruition.
When the plans finally did come to pass, a site was chosen for the KLIX TV tower atop the Jerome Butte.
We were all alone in the world in the beginning. It was kind of nice.
Gib Anderson, one of the TV station's first engineers, remembers the backhoe dislodging a huge rock at the crest of the ancient volcanic cinder cone.
Flashlights didn't reveal the bottom of the hole from which noticeably warm air was blowing. So they dropped in a large rock.
We never heard it hit bottom. It could still be falling for all I know. We never did hear.
It was a gigantic hole and it was blowing a lot of air. And as far as we were concerned, there was no end to it.
So that's where we built the tower.
These days, such a project would be handled by professionals working under strict government regulations. Not back then.
I borrowed an old cherry picker from my father-in-law and lifted all the sections of this antenna up.
And that was quite a feat. I didn't have any way to hold it. I had to sit there with my foot on the brake to hold the antenna.
Soon, the pictures transmitted from that tower would transform the entertainment landscape of the Magic Valley.
Now instead of a box that talked at you, you look back at a box that made pictures for you. Of course it was all black and white back in those days.
Quite marvelous at the time.
I can recall when I was growing up here in Twin Falls in my neighborhood there was one television set in that neighborhood that was owned by somebody who worked at Twin Falls Bank and Trust.
And occasionally we would be invited to go over and watch television.
And so television and the people who worked in television began trying to figure out how to harness this new medium and who would do what jobs.
Most of the people when television first started were technically oriented. We did production work. We ran camera.
Unlike today when you have people specializing in particular operational areas, we did just about everything.
Just getting to those jobs could be quite an adventure, especially for a 1949 sedan that often had to make the muddy or snowy trip to the Jerome Butte.
It may be still buried out there. I don't know.
What was it like to work in this emerging industry? We'll save some of those stories for tomorrow night when the series continues.
For KMVT News, Doug Maugham reporting.
Listening to KMVT's early employees, it often sounds like people did things because no one told them it couldn't be done, like the day the transmitter caught fire.
We got together and I think it was 14 hours later we were back on the air.
This was long before satellite signals or even reliable microwave transmissions.
To get important national sporting events, KMVT engineers had to climb a mountain near Albion with a portable generator.
We'd fire up the generator, get the signal and about three hours later we knew how long the generator was going to run before it ran out of gas.
The program was over and the system shut down and next Saturday we went back up to the hill and put more gasoline into the generator and pulled the cord.
We had our sporting events in the afternoon.
In the wintertime, a nearby rancher often plowed out a makeshift road or pulled stuck vehicles out of the snow.
All that for a fuzzy black and white signal. The wonders of color came along in the early 60s.
It was even very amazing back in the early 50s to get a black and white picture.
But when color came out, it was just awesome. It was something unbelievable.
On New Year's Day we had the Rose Bowl. It was in color and that was the first color program.
People came from all over to sit in the lobby at KMVT to watch the color Rose Bowl parade.
As time went on, equipment got smaller and more reliable.
One of KMVT's first engineers remembers a crucial device that originally took up seven feet of rack space.
Now, sink generators are on chips about the size of your thumb.
Before television employees eventually became more specialized and educated, they too were often spread pretty thin.
I was doing on-air announcing during a newscast and then during the break I would run up the stairs to the control room
and take over the director position, switching the buttons, putting the cameras on, while the director ran downstairs to do the next segment of news, reading it.
A new medium was being born and everyone was watching.
And you look back in those days of noise and smear and ghosts and black and white and round-tuned television sets,
it was a pioneering effort on the part of the viewer as well as the broadcasters to tolerate the mess we had.
A new medium was being born and everyone was watching.
Tomorrow, a look back at the television programs we grew up with.
For KMVT News, Doug Maughan reporting.
May 31, 1955. The KLIX-TV transmitter was turned on, but there wasn't much to watch.
Free films, a lot of travel logs, industry on parade.
At that time everything was black and white, sometimes it was totally black.
Finally, after that long first summer, the fledgling station began getting a quality programming lineup.
Fall of 1955, Gunsmoke started on the air, ran for 20 years.
A lot of comedy shows, I Love Lucy started in 1952.
How you do? I went to the dentist this morning, only had a dollar.
What happened?
Had to get buck teeth.
Ed Sullivan was on.
Boy, that's going to be a long trip, of course, out of space, although it's as many days long.
Now, what do you plan to do to entertain yourself?
I plan to cry a lot.
The burlesque shows, Milton Burrow, Jackie Gleeson.
At that time, television was trying to find what it was.
A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.
Your next stop, the Twilight Zone.
Tell us about your quarrel with Joe Bradford over the defendant.
Tell us how you grabbed the fire axe and hit him.
Network TV out of New York was based on theater.
That's what they had, and sports.
And it wasn't until the Westerns started coming around, I think it was 1957,
eight out of the top ten national programs were Westerns, that Hollywood became involved.
You get up.
Hell, a man could get shot and killed for doing what you just did.
Get moving.
In the meantime, local TV stations were scrambling to fill the many hours that the networks couldn't fill.
That produced some of the first news and sports casts, as well as kids' shows.
Those are still to come this week as our series continues.
For KMVT News, Doug Mon reporting.
Music.
One was a radio sound effects man from Illinois who found Idaho on a family visit.
One was a chemical engineer looking for a new home for his asthmatic wife.
Each became a local television star.
Holly Hofberg's widow Beverly, reluctant to appear on camera,
remembers the time Holly upstaged Tex Ritter in a local parade.
He rode Tex Ritter, rode in the parade ahead of Holly, and none of the children knew him.
They were waiting for Holly to come along, and it really hurt Tex's feelings.
That recognition and admiration followed Holly throughout his life in the Magic Valley.
He died in 1983.
Jack Lithgow continues to entertain audiences, though not on television, and even to this day.
It is rather blushing for me to say that every now and again, last night in Ontario,
I had a gentleman come over and say, weren't you the Mary Milkman?
Fame had its price.
Hofberg's day started with a Clicks radio show at 5 a.m., selling advertising until a noon TV show,
the kids' show in the afternoon, and then playing with a band in jackpot in the evenings.
But he still made time for endless civic activities and charities like the annual March of Dimes campaign.
They would fill up his ten-gallon hat, and the children would bring in their change, whatever they had on them.
And they stood in line. He'd go home maybe and change clothes and come back.
Somebody else would take over for a while. But it went on for several days.
From 1955 to 1958, Lithgow was driving between Idaho Falls, Twin Falls, and Boise to do daily episodes of the Mary Milkman.
Nothing could be taped in advance. There was no tape. But that never stopped him from making his rounds.
Yes, 5 o'clock. 5 o'clock every day was the Mary Milkman.
For their many efforts, they won the hearts and loyalty of that long-ago generation.
Holly Hoffberg or Happy Holly, he was one that the children wanted to be on the show.
It's something that children watched every day, whenever it was on, right after school.
And it was really something, if you were on it.
Holly had this thing. He was kind of Twin Falls' art link letter. You never knew what the kids were going to say.
And he asked me if I had a boyfriend. And I turned around and said, yeah, I sure do. And it's him.
And I embarrassed that kid to death.
Every time he told me I was pretty, and I thought, oh, wow.
Because he had the ability to relate to people, and he made them feel so good. What a great thing to be remembered by.
Lithgow, too, looks back fondly on those days.
You'd go in a little cafe, and you'd notice little noses up against the window watching the Mary Milkman coming in for autographs.
And you would go in to a grocery store and have children run down the aisle and throw their arms around you.
It was nice being a Captain Kangaroo.
By 1965, most of the locally produced shows had been replaced by new, flashier kids programs put together in Hollywood.
A rising television generation would never know what they missed.
But the former TV generation would never forget.
For KMVT News, Doug Mon reporting.
This is perhaps the earliest KMVT News story still in existence.
A very quick interview with Marilyn Monroe, north of Sun Valley, during the filming of Bus Stop in March of 1962.
I must say, I don't know why I had to come to the coldest place in the world to finally work with you.
But you've made it very pleasurable.
Well, thank you. It's beautiful country up here, isn't it?
KMVT photographer Vic Grabeel remembers shooting that film and having lunch at the North Fork store with Marilyn and other cast members.
One year later, in 1963, George Brown, now the station's program director, was KMVT's only news employee.
Ken Rickey started a year later in 1964.
Staff announcers would read the newscasts, the short newscasts that we would do.
It originally was 15 minutes. CBS would do 15 minutes of world and national news,
and we would then do another 15 minutes once a day using just the announcers who were there.
News sets were usually just a table with a microphone on them.
Sponsors' names were not only visible, they were usually read by the announcers.
And gathering the news was a daily adventure.
We'd just climb into our cars and cruise around town, and if it looked interesting, take a picture of it.
Film was expensive, and the photographers were on a tight budget.
If you ran out of film on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, we're still pictures instead of that good old black and white film.
Ten years later, the cameras hadn't changed very much.
These were the old Bell and Howell triple turret ones that literally were World War II relics.
Some of them had reportedly fallen out of aircraft at 15,000 feet altitude and survived.
Film and sound were being shot at the same time a few years later when presidential candidate Ronald Reagan came to Twin Falls.
I and the news director went out to, we had a private audience with Mr. Reagan at the firehouse out at the airport for half an hour.
And we had a sound, we had sound film at that time on a camera, and we had it available that day.
Film was discontinued in television by 1980. Today, video equipment is light, portable, and fast.
In only a few more years, videotape too will become obsolete at most television stations, giving way to all digital cameras and computerized editing equipment,
like what Kevin Esslinger is using to put together this entire series of reports.
In spite of the many changes over the years, some things, like the constant deadlines, haven't changed at all.
Two years after I left television, I refused to wear a watch.
The hour hand is irrelevant, the minute hand is of secondary interest, the second hand is your life.
Which could be the most common denominator of newsrooms from every generation.
For KMVT News, Doug Mohn reporting.
In 1962, KMVT installed a new, taller tower at its transmitter site on the Jerome Butte.
The new tower was about 50 feet from where the old one had been.
Little did we know that pilots from Mountain Home Air Force Base had been using the old tower as a navigation landmark, as they made bombing practice runs to Wyoming.
All this time they'd been going off into Montana to do their bombing runs when they should have been a little further south, because we'd moved our tower, didn't bother to tell them.
A few of the blunders back then were actually pranks, like the ones pulled on more than one car salesman during the live commercials in the old late night Tyson Theater.
One of them I recall, someone slid underneath one of those used cars while the salesman, Abbie Euregan or Dick Dyer, whoever was talking about it,
and with a rubber mallet and started bashing on the gas tank while he was doing his spiel on what a wonderful car this was.
But among the funniest are the incidents that occurred quite accidentally during a live broadcast, like the time a TV monitor on the news set caught fire during the newscast.
And I was literally delivering the news through flames and smoke that were now starting to infringe on the actual news desk.
Or the time the Mary Milkman was running late and trying to change his pants behind the desk as his show came on.
And one day we had a new cameraman and I was watching the monitor and thinking, well I'll be alright because I can get my shirt buckled up and I can get set down there.
And then they can come in and then I noticed that I was on television with no pants.
All I had on was my shirt because the cameraman had wheeled around and back to get a shot.
One of my favorites is told by Kelly Carlson. Kelly is an engineer here at KMVT right now, but he used to be a news anchor back in the late 60s.
And he talks about the darnedest thing that happened on one show in particular.
The newscast had gone to a commercial break and one of the studio crew members was supposed to rush around behind the set there and trade one of those background panels for another one.
Now these were very heavy. They were made of plywood. Suddenly it comes off the runners. The commercial break is over and the camera comes back on.
I looked down and I could see myself on the air and behind me is this camera kid.
And he's got a hold of this huge piece of plywood and it came off the runners.
And he lost his balance and the camera kid and the plywood came right over on top of me.
And I'm pressed down on the set, can't do a thing, but I'm pressed right into the monitor that's in the set and I can see we're still on the air because I can see this camera kid's arms flailing.
In view of these stories, former KMVT engineer Bond Malden seems to sum it up best.
To survive 40 and still be on the air in glorious color is amazing.
Thanks for watching Magic Valley. Here's hoping for 40 more.
For KMVT News, Doug Mon reporting.
KMVT's Mo-