Memories of Downtown Marion, 1950s
Here are a few stories I wrote in 2003 about my experiences from 1953 to 1974 in Marion, where I became a TV producer. If you enjoy them, I welcome you to view more on my personal website, t2buck.com. There you’ll find a green button in the left-hand margin labeled Broadcast; click it for a chronological list of articles including, halfway down, a half-dozen about Marion.
I grew up in the village of Richwood, Ohio, in the 1950s. To our family, the “big city” was Columbus, 45 miles away, with its television stations and big department stores like Lazarus.
But we traveled to the state capital only on special occasions. More often, we went 15 miles in the other direction to the smaller city of Marion, with its one radio station and small department stores like Uhler’s.
The Uhler store was downtown on the corner of Center and Prospect. Its multi-story building still used the technology of the late 19th century. For example, there were no cash registers. When you made a purchase, the clerk put your cash and sales slip into a metal cylinder and whisked it up to the office via pneumatic tube. In a minute or two, the cylinder would come back down with your change and receipt.
The building also had an elevator, operated by a man sitting on a stool inside the car. He opened and closed both sets of doors (a folding gate on the elevator car and a solid pair of doors on each floor) and pulled the levers to make the elevator go.
My mother and I rode the elevator up to the fourth-floor office of Dr. D.W. Brickley. This “Eye Ear Nose & Throat” specialist always wore on his forehead one of those concave mirrors with a hole in the middle, the purpose of which I never understood. Dr. Brickley oversaw the removal of my tonsils in 1953. Then, as I grew up, he prescribed a new set of eyeglasses every six months for my progressing nearsightedness. We’d take the prescription up to the next floor to get the glasses made at the White-Haines Optical Company.
Back in Richwood, my father owned a small Chevrolet dealership. If our service department needed a part that we didn’t have in stock, we’d check with other Chevy dealers. Midtown Chevrolet in Marion often would have the part, so we’d send someone to pick it up. Sometimes my mother and I would be the ones to run this errand. I remember riding back to Richwood alongside a slightly greasy new tailpipe, which was wedged between our car’s windshield on one end and the rear window on the other. Midtown Chevrolet was located on South Main Street, near the top of a hill that slopes down to Columbia Street. Local competition in the Chevy-sponsored Soap Box Derby was held on the hill.
Later, the business changed hands and became Frank Bennett Chevrolet (1960-1965) and then MARCO Motors, a Plymouth dealership.
When I got my first job in 1970 with Marion CATV, I found myself right across Main Street from MARCO Motors.
I had been working there for only a few months when, like my father's business several years before, MARCO Motors burned to the ground. From the roof of the LSY Building, I took a Polaroid photo of the ruins to use in my newscast that evening.
Marion CATV: Those Seventies Shows
In the early Seventies, Marion actually had its own television "station." The local cable TV system, then known as Marion CATV, produced shows in a small studio at 196 South Main Street and occasionally televised events from as far away as Columbus. The programs were seen daily, in black and white, on channel 3. And as the Program Director, I helped make it happen, until the time came for the plug to be pulled.
TV-3 debuted on June 1, 1970. These pictures were part of a full-page ad and a full-page story that appeared during the previous month in the Marion Star.
Among the first offerings were several short programs for women with Mary Ann Stolarczyk, and Nancy Fisher had a daily exercise show, ‘Measuring Up”. There was a kids' show, with a costumed Linda Davis portraying teacher Jolly Jingles in Alphabet Land.
Soon Columbus TV pioneer Sally Flowers had a daily hour. After five months, this morning talk show was turned over to home-grown hostesses and became Marion Today. And there was a 15-minute evening newscast, first with Terry Van Dyke, then with John Snyder, and finally, starting in September of 1970, with me.
Later we added bingo, movies from the 1930s and 1940s, gospel and country and rock music half-hours, telephone talk shows. One program was hosted by the sheriff of Marion County, first Max Ross and then Richwood native Ron Scheiderer. High school coaches would bring in their game films. If a local basketball team had a good run in the state tournament, we'd go there to tape their games.
Why did Marion CATV do all this? At first, local programming was an FCC requirement. Also, our parent company wanted to win lucrative cable franchises in other cities, and one way to impress the politicians there was to show them what we were already doing in Marion.
However, CATV didn't want to absorb all the programming costs or raise the rates on subscribers' monthly cable bills. We tried to make TV-3 self-supporting by selling advertising, mostly to local merchants, but it was tough to balance the budget. Do you know how much Regis Philbin makes for hosting a live hour every morning? I don't either. But I do know that the same job in Marion paid only $8 per show. We cut costs as much as we could, using cheap equipment and doubling up on our duties.
On the revenue side of the ledger, we couldn't charge much for the advertising we ran. The networks get megabucks for a Super Bowl commercial, seen by millions of people; but our commercials were seen in (at most) a few hundred homes, so they were worth only a few dollars. And our technical quality was far below the networks, so the ads weren't easy to sell. All that we had going for us was the local content.
Eventually, we had to give up. I found another job in Pennsylvania, and TV-3 shut down on February 22, 1974. But I still have memories of that "one brief shining moment" in Marion.
