His show wasn’t carried in my city, but he, like Morton Downey Jr., was nationally-known at that time for being loudmouthed and abrasive. The only other thing I knew about Wally George was that he was the father of actress Rebecca De Mornay.
Thanks! That solves a lot of the mystery for me. As the only channel in the 50s after 52 became scrambled for ON TV, I assumed the station I remembered just evolved into the right wing Christian channel 56 has been since the 1980s. Another staple of CH 52 was British mystery shows like The Saint and My Partner the Ghost.
Wally George was the first inkling I had that my generation had a vicious fascist streak. Most of his audience were young men my own age.
Ditto, in San Diego. KTLA also had movies interesting to kids, such as Mad Monster Party (1967), and frequent Kaiju and Sinbad movies. [Side note: When I first watched Gigantor, it was called Tetsujin and was in Japanese. I had an inflatable Tetsujin toy.]
I left LA in 1982 but I watched Wally George when I lived in San Diego. Most of the audience was young men who went to a college near where he broadcast and a lot of them were pretty much trolling and playing along. That said, it was the beginning of the Reagan Youth movement and the College Republicans blowing up in membership.
Possibly playing along. But then, they were behind the Orange Curtain.
The early to mid 70s were my core DFW TV watching years, and 21 was dead by then, so you must be a bit older than me. 27 and 33 weren’t around yet, but 39 was there for religious broadcasting, and channel 11 was the big independent, with all the sitcom syndications. And PBS on 13! Proud first US presenters of a show called Monty Python’s flying circus.
And like you, I don’t remember any channel 56 at all. That must’ve been some big fancy city kind of thing.
No 56 here. We had 16 (local religious) 21 (Fox) 29 (PBS) 33 (weaker PBS) 40 and 62 (WB and UPN, don’t remember which was which).
Thank you for that, which seems to definitively answer the question; there were television stations on Channel 56 in Anaheim, California; Salinas, California; Salisbury, Maryland; Cambridge, Massachusetts and Detroit, Michigan. Many lower channels were in more cities than that.
There wasn’t a channel 56 in the New York area when I was growing up, and I don’t think there’s one there now.
When I came to Boston I discovered 56 and 38 (mentioned already by others), the place where Old TV Shows went in syndication. But in the New York area in the 1960s and 1970s the stations that did this were in the VHF band – channels 5 (WNEW Metromedia, although it’s now a Fox station), 9 (WWOR, usually called simply WOR in Secaucus NJ) and 11 (WPIX).
I don’t know if it was ever advertised on Channel 56, but does anyone remember commercials for King Snedley’s Beer?
In the 80’s, Chicago also had 60 and 66 that showed these types of reruns, particularly after 32 started transitioning to high-quality, original content like Small Wonder.
I didn’t know this, but it is the reason there was no 56 in Chicago. From Wikipedia:
The WDAI construction permit had existed since 1982, but short-spacing concerns to channel 60 and to two allocations in southeast Wisconsin had meant channel 56 could not be placed on the Sears Tower; this finding crippled a previous attempt to build the allocation as WGMI in 1968
I’ll give you original content, but “high-quality”???
I suspect that that was a bit of sarcasm.
Do you remember the interstitial “Snipets”, especially this one about how to make a “come back” can?
A teacher in junior high school or high school had a Quaker Oats can that would do that. I never figured it out.
Was there any technical reason why 56 was commonly used? It’s not as memorable as 44 or 66.
Yeah!
Exactly correct. We must never forget Small Wonder lest humanity repeat its greatest mistake.
The short answer is that Channel 56 wasn’t particularly common. The cite from @whitetho says there were five stations at Channel 56 nationally in 1979. There were many channels lower on the UHF band that were more common nationally, like seventeen stations on Channel 19.