I love the idea Sergeant S
and a few ads from Wyoming at that time.
serials were still being played on radio back then
I remember ab out that time listening to Orson Welles reading "The Black Museum"
A western serial or two??
I would definitely listen
I love your playlist now SgtEric
Radio 2 will have some old time radio shows on it to enjoy from the era when it launches.
There are just over 150 songs in my collection that made it big in the mountain west region in 1963, so it can be an extensive review of the music of the era. Back then, most folks in rural mountain states had nothing on FM to listen to, and their AM radios received the few local stations that operated at the time, almost all of them playing country or a variation, and the rest listened to the regional clear channel radio outlets running 50,000 watts which made it regionally in the daytime (groundwave reception) and throughout the entire region at night (skywave - the same thing that lets you hear stations from around the country at night on AM - as well as shortwave radio stations around the world). By far the most important stations for most in the mountain states were the 50,000 watt KOA Denver, KSL Salt Lake City, KTWO Casper, and the CBC outlet in Alberta. Wyoming had a handful of radio stations in most of its larger communities (and for Wyoming, large might be 15,000 people).
What the filmmakers may not have realized is that television in Wyoming was a far bigger challenge than they let on in the film with shots of Del Mar family TV in the apartment in Riverton and the TV set in the trailer with nothing beyond rabbit ears. Good luck. In the 1960s, Riverton had access to just one television station in Casper - around 120 miles away!
In large parts of the state, the only way you watched television was with a robust external antenna on your roof, if not mounted on a large metal tower! Rabbit ears would not cut it.
KTWO was the first TV station in Wyoming, signing on in 1957, owned by the same family that owned the major newspapers in the state. KTWO, being the only choice for most of the state that was able to receive the signal, was a primary CBS affiliate (no surprise there - until the early 1970s, CBS was by far the most popular network in the heartland, south, and rural west - NBC was favored more in urban areas on on the east and west coasts, and nobody watched ABC until the mid-1970s when they finally stopped being considered a perennial loser). However, they also picked some popular shows from NBC and aired those, and there are unconfirmed reports they would carry one or two shows from ABC as well. And that, until 1981, was about it as far as network television in the Riverton area is concerned.
Living in Wyoming until the 80s arrived was a great way to escape, because television was a challenge, especially in mountainous areas that would easily block the signal.
Then cable and satellite TV arrived and things changed rapidly. For many early cable subscribers and large "C" band satellite dishowners, if the cable company couldn't bring in another station from Wyoming, most folks got network affiliates from Denver which were uplinked on satellite. As new stations could be assured they'd have a spot on the cable TV dial, they demonstrated enough viability to get startup money from investors, and a bunch of new stations signed on, including translator/repeater stations that rebroadcast signals from larger cities into smaller ones. Riverton/Casper finally got its second station carrying NBC shows in 1981.
And what did Jack watch down in Childress? With a decent antenna, that Thanksgiving football game would have come from a TV station in Amarillo, Texas which just barely served Childress county as part of its market.
