New Orleans Television
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About this ebook
Dominic Massa
Author Dominic Massa is a native of the New Orleans area who works as the executive producer and special projects director at WWL-TV. A past president of the Press Club of New Orleans, he has produced two programs on local television history for the city’s PBS affiliate, WYES-TV: New Orleans TV: The Golden Age and Stay Tuned: New Orleans’ Classic TV Commercials.
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Reviews for New Orleans Television
2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is a series of photos dealing with the television industry in New Orleans area before the advent of modern cable networks. It is the golden age of New Orleans television. The book starts off chronologically, beginning with the birth of the first local tv station. Each page is filled with picture after picture of classic New Orleans tv anchors, host, and programming. The book does not provide a reference list. Instead, every photo has a caption with it, providing a short description as well as stating the photo collections that provided it. This is an interesting choice for an american history class. The photos provide a great peek at what life/ society was like at that time, especially since all of the photos are in black & white, which many students have never seen before. Just looking at the photos make you what to ask questions: why do they look like that, what was there life like, what makes them different than me.
Book preview
New Orleans Television - Dominic Massa
is.
INTRODUCTION
Do you remember when Terry Flettrich was Mrs. Muffin? How about when Mel Leavitt was Mr. Mardi Gras or when Nash Roberts was the Jax weatherman? Maybe you have better memories of Miss Ginny or Uncle Henry. How about Wayne Mack as the Great MacNutt? Or is it Midday you think of when someone says his name? What about Morgus the Magnificent or John Pela? If you grew up in New Orleans, or have spent any amount of time here, chances are that you answered yes to all of those questions.
More than 50 years ago, with the flip of a switch and the turn of a dial, local television became part of New Orleans culture. Ask local baby boomers to recall their favorite shows or stars, and the answers are much the same. There are unforgettable memories of growing up while watching this new medium develop. Sometimes those memories are of watching the test pattern—the only thing there was to watch at some points during the day. Still, it was new, it was exciting, and it was New Orleans.
Everything we did in those early days was new,
explains WDSU founding father Edgar Stern Jr. Everything was a first, everything was an experiment, which made it a lot of fun.
It was also unpredictable. Two months after New Orleans’ first television station signed on the air, its most popular program was To Be Announced.
At least, those are the words that popped up more than any other title on the WDSU program schedule in February 1949. Fortunately, there were only a few dozen television sets in the city at the time. By the end of that same year, the number of New Orleanians with a television set grew to 15,000. One year later, it was closer to 40,000.
When asked about their role, most of the television pioneers will modestly say they were simply in the right place at the right time, but in reality, it is what they did with the new medium that sets them apart. Many of them had a background in radio and tried to transfer their talents to this new thing called television.
There was Terry Flettrich, the radio host who was recruited by WDSU to help sell
New Orleanians on the idea of television in the months before the station signed on the air. She produced and hosted demonstration shows from the D. H. Holmes department store cafeteria, which had been converted into a studio. As the first lady of New Orleans Television, she went on to contribute some of the medium’s most memorable moments, most notably as Mrs. Muffin and the star of Midday, one of the most popular programs in local history.
Mel Leavitt, the dashing young sports announcer, came to New Orleans from New York for a job at Channel 6 in 1949 and never left. A true renaissance man, Leavitt anchored sportscasts, hosted talk shows, produced documentaries, anchored Carnival coverage, and so much more.
Mel Leavitt is and will always be Mr. Television in New Orleans,
says former WDSU colleague Al Shea, whose Channel 6 career began in the mid-1950s.
Creativity, originality, and personality were hallmarks of the golden age of television in New Orleans. How else do you explain Morgus the Magnificent or the Great MacNutt? What else could account for the sportscasting success of someone like Hap Glaudi? Where else could a young comedian named Dick Van Dyke sharpen his talents, in hopes of one day landing his own network show?
Local television has also been about longevity. Meteorologist Nash Roberts spent 50 years on the air here, becoming the most trusted man in New Orleans, at least when it came to hurricanes. Alec Gifford’s 50 years in local television included coverage of every major news story imaginable. Phil Johnson bid viewers Good evening
for 37 years as Channel 4’s bearded bard, delivering nightly editorials. His colleague Don Westbrook spent nearly 40 years in front of the WWL weather map.
Add to that roster a cute married couple named Bob and Jan Carr, a dance show host named John Pela, a tough investigative reporter named Bill Elder, and a gifted writer named Jim Metcalf, and one starts to see why it truly was a golden age of television—for the people in front of and behind the camera and for