Nicest Kids in Town

by Delmont, Matthew F.

  The strongest remedial powers at the CHR’s disposal were public hearings, which it used for the first time in the skating rink discrimination cases. In the internal meeting where it decided to use public hearings, the CHR identified three purposes: First, it would give “the respondent an extra chance to comply before taking him to trial.” Second, it would have a “good psychological effect [and] both the respondent and complainant would be more impressed by the power of the CHR.” And third, the “hearing could be of tremendous community value.” Whereas the CHR lacked the power to address many facets of discrimination in the city, it believed these youth cases would “strengthen the CHR” and show that the group was “coming of age,” without forcing the group to test its authority by confronting the school board or business interests as it would in large-scale education or employment cases.64 In May 1954, the CHR held public hearings charging the proprietors of two skating rinks in Northeast Philadelphia of failing to comply with city and state laws prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations or recreation. The CHR reached a settlement calling for the rinks to stop using membership cards and other discriminatory membership practices, and to post signs stating the new nondiscriminatory admissions policies.65 While the agreement reduced the discriminatory practices at most rinks and the CHR did not hear another skating rink case, the Fellowship Club volunteers continued to find evidence of segregation at skating rinks and bowling alleys through the late 1950s.66

  The CHR’s public hearings on discrimination at skating rinks came just days before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the first Brown decision on May 17, 1954, outlawing de jure racial segregation in education. Although the decision applied only to the southern and midwestern states in which schools were segregated by law, many civil rights advocates in Philadelphia expressed optimism that the decisions would force the city to address the de facto racial segregation of its schools. As chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate, however, the school board’s independence from the city government insulated the schools from CHR investigations. The CHR’s inability to check housing discrimination or address school segregation made small victories like the skating rink cases all the more important. Yet despite its attention to integration in these youth spaces, the CHR was wholly ineffective when faced with the segregation of Bandstand, the most visible youth space in Philadelphia. If the housing fights in Bandstand’s backyard of West Philadelphia were about the physical proximity of people of different races as neighbors, the struggles over segregation on Bandstand were about the potential for teenage social interactions, and televisual representations of these meetings, to disturb anti-integration sentiments among the viewing public.

  CREATING WFIL–ADELPHIA

  Broadcasting from West Philadelphia, WFIL could not ignore the battles over segregation taking place around its studio and across the city. The station, however, had a vested interest in not presenting visual evidence of these local fights to its regional viewers. Like the Angora Civic Association, WFIL viewed the station’s neighborhood through the lenses of property values and race. Yet while the homeowners’ groups fought over individual houses and blocks, WFIL’s calculations included millions of homes in the Philadelphia region and the advertisers eager to reach this lucrative market. This meant that WFIL courted viewers not only in Philadelphia and the growing suburban counties outside of the city, but also those across a four-state broadcast region that included parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. The station called this area “WFIL–adelphia,” and in the early 1950s the station made this phrase the centerpiece of its marketing campaign. Radio and television broadcast signals, of course, do not conform to the geographic or political boundaries of cities, so WFIL was not unique in having a regional audience. WFIL’s use of WFIL–adelphia to bring the station, city, and region together under one brand name, however, illuminates the station’s approach to early television and is essential to understanding how Bandstand became segregated.

  The WFIL–adelphia moniker was part of a larger campaign by Walter Annenberg’s Triangle Publications to promote the Delaware Valley as a center for business and industry. In October 1952, the Philadelphia Inquirer (owned by Annenberg) featured an eighty-page pullout magazine on the growth and promise of “Delaware Valley, U.S.A.” Aimed at the business community, the magazine’s inside cover thanked more than eighty companies for their advertising support. The report, extolling the virtues of the Delaware Valley port and the region’s “steel, oil, textile, auto manufacturing, electronic, and chemical” industries, recalled the nineteenth-century boosterism that helped draw industries to midwestern hubs like St. Louis and Chicago.67 A full-page world map, for example, illustrated how “raw materials from at least 75 foreign countries funneled into Delaware Valley” port facilities, including cocoa beans and iron ore from Nigeria, marble from Italy, and lumber from Brazil. All routes on the map lead back to the Delaware Valley, the only site labeled in the United States. A large circle marks the region, covering the entire Eastern Seaboard.68

  FIGURE 5. WFIL pitched the station to potential advertisers as the best way to reach viewers not just in Philadelphia but across the Delaware Valley. October 13, 1952. Used with permission of Philadelphia Inquirer.

  While the Delaware Valley-centric worldview was undoubtedly exaggerated, promoting the Delaware Valley as a place of “amazing, breathless growth” and the “greatest industrial area of the world” also helped to promote the value of Annenberg’s media properties in the region.69 Indeed, two full-page advertisements described WFIL as the best way to connect people and potential customer across the Delaware Valley (or WFIL–adelphia) region. WFIL promised advertisers that the television station would bring them “5,869,284 customers” across a “27-county area.” The ads described these viewers in explicitly monetary terms: “Advertisers … there’s $6 Billions [sic] waiting for you in WFIL–adelphia. SELL ALL of America’s 3rd market on WFIL–TV. You can really go to town—to hundreds of towns in the rich Philadelphia market—on WFIL–TV … Get the most for your money, the most people for your money. Schedule WFIL-TV.”70 West Philadelphia may have been the station’s physical home, but this vast regional WFIL–adelphia consumer market was what WFIL sold to Bandstand’s advertisers.

  FIGURE 6. The WFIL–adelphia broadcast market included parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Mary land. October 13, 1952. Used with permission of Philadelphia Inquirer.

  These ads also cast WFIL–adelphia as the new “Main Street of Delaware Valley, U.S.A.”:

  Turn statistics into people and you’ll find they have a common address: Main Street. … MAIN STREET is every town’s link to the world. Today, thanks to electronic science, Main Street goes to the people. And from curb to curb of the Philadelphia Retail Trading area, the busiest Main Street is WFIL–adelphia. The population of this trading zone, as well as a vast area beyond, lives, works and shops in WFIL–adelphia. WFIL–adelphia is a market place—where America’s leading advertisers sell their wares, via WFIL–TV.71

  In describing WFIL–adelphia in this way, the ads reenvisioned the “resonant and symbolic location” of Main Street.72 Historian Alison Isenberg has described how “varied downtown investors endeavored to make their own markets and to chart Main Street’s future in order to protect and enhance their stakes.”73 Isenberg notes how local newspapers and regional news companies, like Annenberg’s Philadelphia Inquirer and WFIL radio and television stations, had a vested interested in bolstering Main Street’s advertising value and frequently sponsored the Main Street postcards that were ubiquitous in the early twentieth century.74 “The ‘place’ … illuminated in the postcards was not a brick-and-mortar location,” Isenberg writes, “but rather a territory within Americans’ imaginations, a hopeful vision of urban commerce transformed.”75 WFIL’s ads imagined the place of Main Street in similar ways. The ads did not make reference to a physical Main Street, but rather to the “5,869,284 customers” in homes dispersed across a “27-county area.” With WFIL�
�adelphia, WFIL promised to use broadcast technology to further transform urban and regional commerce. If Philadelphia could no longer connect businesses, advertisers, and customers on Main Street, WFIL–adelphia would provide this safe and prosperous commercial space. (Disneyland, of course, also made use of this Main Street ideal to promote a suburban and racially homogenous alternative to urban and multiracial commercial spaces when it opened in 1955.)76

  While not mentioned in the ads, the WFIL–adelphia viewers that WFIL promoted to advertisers lived in states that supported racial segregation by both law and custom. Both Maryland and Delaware maintained de jure segregated school systems until the Brown decisions and resisted court-ordered desegregation for another decade thereafter.77 Interracial marriage was also illegal in both states until Loving v. Virginia in 1967.78 For a station pitching itself as a regional Main Street, the existence of legal segregation in its broadcasting area offered a significant financial incentive to not upset anti-integration sentiment among viewers and advertisers. At the same time, the segregated housing policies in Pennsylvania suburbs also contributed to WFIL’s understanding of WFIL–adelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s pullout magazine on the Delaware Valley offered pictures and glowing profiles of housing developments under construction in Levittown and Fairness Hills, Pennsylvania, as evidence that the region was “booming.”79 These neighboring Bucks County developments had policies that prevented blacks from buying homes, making Levit-town and Fairness Hills what Charles Abrams termed “closed cities.”80 While WFIL–adelphia attempted to reconstitute Main Street in an era of suburbanization, the decision to profile Levittown and Fairness Hills as exemplars of the Delaware Valley reemphasized that WFIL–adelphia would privilege the desires and attitudes of white suburban consumers.

  In this way, WFIL–adelphia offers an example of how television helped reorganize urban and suburban spaces. As media studies scholar Lynn Spigel has suggested, many postwar commentators argued that television “would allow people to travel from their homes while remaining untouched by the actual social contexts to which they imaginatively ventured.” Television could act as a space-binding tool to promote public culture among viewers living in detached single-family suburban homes, while also keeping “undesirable” people and topics out of the home. Spigel calls this a “fantasy of antiseptic electrical space.”81 WFIL–adelphia promised a version of “antiseptic electrical space” to both viewers and advertisers. To viewers, it offered the ideal of Main Street without upsetting their anti-integrationist attitudes. To advertisers, it offered access to a growing market of suburban consumers with disposable income. All the while, WFIL still needed Philadelphia—the economies of scale it provided, the size of its population, and the creative energies of its people—in order to promote WFIL–adelphia. The best place to see how WFIL navigated the conflicting demands of WFIL–adelphia is the show that became the station’s most popular locally produced program, Bandstand.

  BROADCASTING BANDSTAND TO WFIL–ADELPHIA

  From its debut, Bandstand’s producers looked beyond Philadelphia to the potential profits available from advertisers and record companies eager to reach the largest possible television audience. In doing so they carved out a new position for a local television program in relation to the radio and record industries at a time when all three industries were undergoing significant changes. Bandstand debuted in a pivotal year in television’s development into a national medium. Between 1948 and 1952, the number of television sets increased from 1.2 million to 15 million, and the percentage of homes with television increased from 0.4 percent to 34 percent.82 More important, in April 1952 the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) lifted its freeze on television licenses, ending a four-year block on new licenses and making more frequency assignments available to a larger number of metropolitan areas. Over the next three years, the number of television stations in operation increased from 108 in 1952 to 458 in 1955. By 1955, the most populous cities each had between three and seven stations, and the FCC believed that 90 percent of the nation’s population lived in the broadcast range of at least two stations.83

  Media consolidation increased as the FCC allocated new television licenses. Newspapers owned 69 percent of TV licenses in 1953, up from 33 percent when the freeze started in 1948. Multiple ownership also became much more common in television than in radio, where newspapers owned 20 percent and 32 percent of AM and FM radio stations, respectively, in 1953.84 The FCC’s decision to allow newspaper-television cross-ownership helped to ensure that television, like radio before it, would follow the commercial advertising model. With an increased number of potential viewers and a limited number of new licenses, VHF TV stations were extremely valuable. Lobbying FCC commissioners became commonplace, and newspapers were among the applicants most capable of assuring favorable licensing decisions.85 Triangle Publications, owned by Walter Annenberg, who had inherited the Philadelphia Inquirer from his father in 1942 and had purchased WFIL radio in 1945, was among the media conglomerates to add a television station in 1948. Annenberg described the reasoning that pushed him into television to his biographer in 1996:

  I was willing to gamble that [WFIL–TV] wouldn’t lose that much money. And it didn’t cost me much. It operated in the red for only six months. But my instinct told me this was an opportunity. How could it fail? WFIL had authorization for television [grandfathered in by the FCC] and I knew Philadelphia was going to be entitled to three stations. I would have one of three in an area that served more than five million people. I knew the advertising potential. It had to be a bonanza!86

  As Annenberg liked to say, acquiring a television station only cost him a “three-cent stamp” to mail the license application, so the ratio of risk to reward was decidedly in his favor.87 Annenberg expanded his investment in television by acquiring television magazines in several major cities and starting TV Guide in 1953. TV Guide combined television listings tailored to specific local markets with a wraparound national edition promoting television shows and personalities.88 By 1959, Annenberg’s Triangle Publications also owned television stations in Binghamton, New York; Altoona-Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Hartford-New Haven, Connecticut; Lancaster-Lebanon, Pennsylvania; and Fresno, California.89 For Bandstand, Annenberg’s media empire provided advertising connections and expertise that helped to launch the show.

  Through the early and mid-1950s, the increase in the number of channels expanded the total amount of airtime that stations needed to fill and left stations looking for profitable shows to broadcast in the daytime hours, when networks supplied affiliates with little if any programming. Like many other stations in the early 1950s, Philadelphia’s WFIL filled its afternoon schedule with old movies, since ABC offered its affiliates no daytime programming and Hollywood leased only outdated movies to the perceived rival medium. These movies flopped, leaving WFIL with an afternoon slot to fill. Roger Clipp, the station’s general manager, asked disc jockey Bob Horn to host an interview show, interspersed with filmed music shorts that had been collecting dust in WFIL’s archives.90 Horn already hosted a radio Bandstand program at WFIL; although his radio program was successful, like a number of prominent national radio personalities, he wanted to move from radio to television.91 Radio comedians like Fred Allen, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Sid Caesar, and Bob Hope all moved to television in the early 1950s. Television networks viewed these radio personalities as established talent that would help the fledgling medium attract large national audiences and lucrative sponsors. In many cases, popular variety shows and sitcom programs were simply picked up from radio and reworked for television.92 Like the national networks that signed these radio stars, WFIL viewed Horn as a dependable radio personality, and like these more widely known comedians, Horn viewed television as an exciting and potentially profitable endeavor.

  The first televised version of Horn’s Bandstand debuted in September 1952. Jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie, a friend of Horn’s who happened to be in town, was the guest
. Horn chatted with Gillespie for a few minutes about his current recordings and tour. Horn then turned to the camera to announce a film of Peggy Lee singing “Mañana.” Subsequent shows continued in the same way, moving between Horn’s interviews with whatever guests he could find and the films.93 Despite Horn’s talents as a disc jockey, this format proved unsuccessful. Determined to hold his television slot, Horn met with Clipp and station manager George Koehler and proposed to bring in a studio audience of teenagers and make their dancing the focal point of the program. Horn looked to Philadelphia’s 950 Club (1946–55), where radio hosts Joe Grady and Ed Hurst invited local high school students to come to the show’s center city studio and dance to the records they broadcast on their program.94 Horn combined this successful format with the name of his own successful radio show, Bandstand. WFIL’s Clipp and Koehler gave Bandstand a second chance because the station wanted to add a show with low production costs that would attract teenagers, and the advertisers eager to reach teens, to WFIL’s afternoon television lineup.95

  Tony Mammarella, a talented producer at WFIL, joined Horn in readying Bandstand for its debut. As Bandstand’s producer, Mammarella prepared the set, managed the admission of the studio audience, acted as a liaison between sponsors and Horn, and served as an occasional cameraman and stand-in host. Working with a modest budget, Mammarella devised a set that looked like the inside of a record store using a painted canvas backdrop and a mock-up sales counter. Banners from neighborhood high schools hung on a canvas next to the record store set, and Mammarella installed wood bleachers at one side of the studio for seating. With a studio designed to resemble two teenage spaces—the record shop and the high school gymnasium—Horn’s television Bandstand premiered on October 6, 1952, as a daily program broadcast in the Philadelphia area from 3:30 to 4:45 P.M.96