I really can't stay. . . . But baby it's cold outside I've got to go away. . . . But baby it's cold outside This evening has been. . . . Been hoping that you'd drop in So very nice. . . . I'll hold your hands they're just like ice My mother will start to worry. . . . Beautiful, what's your hurry? And father will be pacing the floor. . . . Listen to the fireplace roar So really I'd better scurry. . . . Beautiful please don't hurry Well maybe just a half a drink more. . . . Put some records on while I pour The neighbors might think. . . . Baby it's bad out there Say what's in this drink. . . . No cabs to be had out there I wish I knew how. . . . Your eyes are like starlight now To break this spell. . . . I'll take your hat, your hair looks swell I ought to say no no no sir. . . . Mind if I move in closer At least I'm going to say that I tried. . . . What's the sense of hurtin' my pride I really can't stay. . . . Baby don't hold out . . . baby it's cold outside . . . ah, but it's cold outside!
In 1949, this was the NBC Television Network. It stretched from New York to St. Louis, all hooked up to the coaxial cable, as ably explained that year by Howdy Doody, Buffalo Bob Smith and Clarabell the Clown.
If your city wasn't on the hookup, then your local network affiliate (assuming you had a TV station at all) got its national programming, what there was of it, via kinescopes -- 16-millimeter film recordings of a TV monitor at the New York studios. The hinterlands got network shows when they got them.
And videotape still was the better part of a decade in the future.
What you see here -- the state of the art four years after the end of World War II -- features less capability and lower quality than a 4G-enabled smart phone today. And it was miraculous.
As primitive as it seems today, it would revolutionize an entire society in the years following 1949.
THOUGH TELEVISION still was very much in its infancy in April 1949, NBC was in a mood to celebrate how far the medium had come since the advent of regular American broadcasts 10 years earlier in New York.
Through the New York facilities of WNBT (now WNBC), here we have a kinescope of TV's first anniversary gala. NBC was celebrating a decade of television, and the network was throwing a party.
Kind of an austere party by today's standards, but a wingding nevertheless.
IN THIS CASE, the folks at WNBT were thanking their lucky stars for now-forgotten singing stars, because not only was TV history in short supply in 1949, but also reliable ways of archiving old programs. That tends to make retrospectives problematic.
Let's just say I hope you enjoy old kinescopes of fighter planes taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. That was a really big deal back then -- it wasn't the content; it was that the TV people could broadcast from an underway naval vessel at all.
IT'S TIME to go, now. And, of course, that would be Bulova Watch Time.
