New York City had lots of VHF channels, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 so no real need for UHF, and as the few UHFs were in Spanish, English only speakers never missed UHF. Orginally 13 was a commercial station, but they folded and someone bought it out and made it an educational channel in the early 60s. So forget about trying to set up an English language UHF channel, if a VHF channel couldn't cut it. Market saturation. Until the mid 70s when New Jersey set up its own educational network of stations on UHF.

Speaking of educational TV, someone provided my grammar school TV sets in every classroom. Which the teachers never used, as educational TV never taught anything that would show on the annual achievement tests we had. Testing ala "No Child Left Behind" is nothing new...
http://www.wa2ise.com/radios/classtv.jpg

Didn't you go to a private Catholic school. If so, You received a superior education over the public schools at the time. I know I did.

In grade school, we had TVs that were moved from one classroom to another as needed. Channel 25, WVIZ, was the only educational station in Cleveland at the time (mid-'60s). In junior high we had TVs that were also more or less permanently set on WVIZ, except when the teachers wanted us to see shows like the Today Show or the local news on channel 3 (WKYC, NBC) in Cleveland, as part of our world-affairs classes. These TVs were not connected to a MATV (master antenna TV) system as my junior high school did not have one that worked worth a darn -- we watched channels 3 and 25 on rabbit ears, but I don't remember what the large RCA set in our world-affairs class had for UHF; probably a loop antenna that worked little better (at the time, I lived in an eastern Cleveland suburb that was at least 30 miles from all Cleveland television stations and got very poor reception of WVIZ on indoor antennas).

When I got to senior high school, there were TV jacks in every room, connected to both the master TV antenna installation and a closed-circuit TV system. The televisions in the classrooms were mostly used for viewing videotaped programming over the in-house CCTV system; however, I don't recall these sets ever being tuned to local Cleveland network stations, even for news or the educational station (NET, National Educational Television, at that time [early 1970s], now PBS).

For WA2ISE: I remember seeing a picture in Popular Science magazine years ago of a group of TVs, all tuned to New York City's channel 13 showing a test pattern -- only then the station was known as WNDT and was probably not an NET affiliate at that time.

I looked up WNDT on Google a while back, and discovered that the station was in fact a commercial station (New Dimension Television, hence the NDT in the call sign) in its early years. I don't recall if the article mentioned when WNDT became a public-TV station, but when it did it changed calls to WNET -- for National Educational Television, but remained on channel 13.

You make me feel "old". There were no "video tape" mechanisms - at least at a consumer level. The first video recorder I had ever seen was when I was a senior in College working at a TV station were there was a big cabinet Ampex using something like 3" wide tapes on big reels.

Nary a Television in any school or college I attended ... then again, we did not have calculators either - just "slide rules" :-)

Carl

Interesting history here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNET
It appears that the WNDT calls remained for several years after the station became "educational"... some interesting union legal battles involving the teachers/actors on the station as well.

jr

I remember when I was a kid, the first TV we had in school was one of those big table Zenith's with the pop up speaker. The 4th grade teacher brought it from home. The next year we got a couple of new Setchell Carlson's. It seems SC must have had an in at schools in Minnesota, since they were made in MN, as for the next few years, every set at school was an SC.

As far as this Stromberg Carlson goes, at least I feel a little better now.

Back in the seventies when I was in grade school we had Magnavox and Rca Victor tvs in our classrooms I remember it took atleast 3 to 5 min. for these tvs to come on. our tv stations were WIPS channel 14 and WEDF channel 17. When I attended School for the blind our dormitories had Zenith, RCA, GE consoles and those were also tube type as well my personal tv for my dorm room were RCA, Zenith, Motorola I had more than 1 tv in my room my first dorm had a 1962 Zenith roundie that was the best tv on campus. .. Timothy

Watched a great Sterling Hayden movie tonight all the way through. This, I believe, was Marilyn Monroe's first appearance in a major production. The picture is much better than it photographed. Still a little tweaking to do.

Actually, 13's status as a commercial station was under two call letters - WATV (1948-58) and WNTA-TV (1958-61). In 1961 - with the help of FCC commissioner Newton Minow - an educational group stepped in to purchase 13 from National Telefilm Associates which had owned the station since 1958 but was losing money hand to foot over it. It had been a non-commercial, educational outlet ever since it was reborn as WNDT in 1962. Within a few short years of that, it was airing NET programs. It was the last of the New York area VHF's to go color in 1967 (this was presumably when the pics of the color test pattern were taken off various color TV sets for that early 1968 issue of Popular Science referred to earlier - 13 most certainly was an NET affiliate by that point). The 1970 call change to WNET was the result of a forced merger between NET and the station's parent Educational Broadcasting Corporation.