Loomis, Steven, IC3

WWTV went on the air on the first of January 1954 as Channel 13, Cadillac. My father was hired to sell advertising and market the station. A few other names I remember from that period, 1954 to 1959 were: My father Dennis Loomis, Dick Schappa, Ron Phillips, Bob Bishop, Kenny Roberts, my stepmother Cynthia Harlan and station manager Gene Ellerman (Cleetis Eugene Ellerman). I will note down others if and when they come to mind.

50 years of change, WWTV 1953-2003 (personal notes)

Newspapers, radio, and then television spread the news and told of events. It was brought to us by pioneers who lived among us. Can you imagine building a television station in north central Michigan when nobody owned a TV set? Well, if my memory serves me right, WWTV, Channel 13, went up and on the air to start broadcasting in 1953. The station house was built on a hill outside of Cadillac and the towering antenna was the tallest structure in the world. Yes, in the world. The Empire State building raised it's radio antenna height in order to reclaim the title.

What you needed with a new television station was someone to sell advertising. My father had been with the newspaper, the Cadillac Evening News, and was hired by Gene Ellerman to fill the bill, or pay them at least. Dennis sold TV time, commercials, to the local businesses like George Spicer's Furniture & Appliances. These early television commercials were like bringing Madison Avenue to Cadillac, and many went out to the public LIVE. And as live would have it there was the time George was demonstrating the hardiness of a desk with a formica top by smacking it with a hammer and broke the whole corner off of the desk top. A few slides or still photographs, a graphic or two and crude animation combined with the studio live action rocketed television past it's rivals in the printed or voice only business.

The cast of characters of my childhood around the station included Bob (or Ron) Phillips and Gene Ellerman. Gene had a airplane and I recall him flying us up and around the huge station tower. It was quit a site. There was George Kingsbury who went by the alias of Kenny Roberts the Singing Cowboy and his puppet Papeto with a blow up ballon for a nose. Many times we would load up the neighborhood kids and drive to the station to fill up seats for the show. And then there was an early woman to television, Cynthia Harlan and her woman's show PARTY LINE. I wish I could recall more, but it was a long, half century ago. Yet today, we take this technology and the people who made it possible for granted. Just yesterday, two of the world's largest telecoms merged claiming it would make access to cable television and high speed internet cheaper. A hollow promise I have heard too many times.

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AS SEEN ON TV: (a trip down memory lane) In the late 1940s and early 1950s my father was in advertising with a newspaper, the Cadillac Evening News, and when WWTV went on the air in January 1954 he became the sales manager for the television station in Cadillac, Michigan. One of his responsibilities was a Children's TV Show with Kenny Roberts, the Singing/Yodeling/Jumping Cowboy. And as a kid I'd been on his show several times. By the late '50s my father had moved on with Wolverine Tanning Corporation (Wolverine World Wide, WWW), the makers of Hush Puppies. His territory included Wisconsin and southern Minnesota. One of the things the corporate people supplied were Madison Avenue styled commercials, which didn't go down very well with the mid-west conservative/rural clientele, so my father's response was to do our own commercials. When I was a teenager, once or twice a year, we went to the local television stations and staged our own down-home commercials. Some years we set up my drum-kit and I'd start playing while the camera moved in on the foot pedal of my bass drum to show off my Hush Puppies, other times I would catch a football and drop down on one knee with the ball next to my shoe, showing off the latest in the Hush Puppies line. It was a family thing and fairly low key but once in a while one of my classmates would approach me and ask... "Was that you I saw in TV?".