Six decades after television took Baltimore by storm, digital broadcasting is around the corner. It’s just another transmission mode. But combined with the Internet, cell phones, texting and such social networking sites as MySpace and Facebook, digitalization offers technical possibilities that will change the way people — and whole neighborhoods — interact, just as television did after 1947.
WMAR-TV was Baltimore’s first station. It went on the air Oct. 28, 1947, when only an estimated 1,600 television sets existed in the city. Excited viewers called from as far away as Arlington, Va., and Trenton, N.J., reporting they could see the test pattern.
Two days later, WMAR did a live broadcast from the Pimlico Race Course. Although a technical feat in those days, the remote transmission was soon forgotten.
Well, not quite. The occasion marked a career change for Jim McManus, a newspaper sportswriter who did the racing commentary on WMAR that day. Under the name Jim McKay, he began a television career that culminated on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.”
Television spread like a wildfire. By the end of 1950, the number of sets in Baltimore had risen to 252,226, thanks no doubt to the arrival of WAAM, now WJZ-TV, and WBAL-TV in 1948. In mid-June 1954 newspapers reported that the number of sets had broken the half-million mark. An estimated 90 percent of homes had at least one television set.
Comedian Jackie Gleason came to Baltimore about that time to perform at the Club Charles, the leading dinner club. It was a Tuesday night and the place was empty, because Milton Berle, television’s first superstar, owned that night. Watching Berle on television, Gleason said: “Just wait and see, fellows; that thing is going to kill all of us.”
Over the past six years I have been trying to find out why some white Baltimore neighborhoods succumbed to blockbusters’ panic peddling in the 1950s and 1960s, while others did not. Every case is different, but I have discovered some intriguing contributing factors — including the influence of television.
Television altered the way neighbors interacted with one another. Everyday routines changed. Some must-see programs conflicted with bowling, others interfered with bingo. Fewer and fewer people walked around, or sat on porches, listening to radio and gossiping with neighbors, as they had done in the early years. The arrival of whirring air-conditioning units drew even more people inside from the humid Baltimore summers, insulating them from neighbors.
Edmondson Village, founded in 1917, was one place where the sense of community eroded. Its aging residents became easy targets for some 200 blockbusters who descended after racial change began in 1955. “I remember seeing neighbors and thinking that even their front parlors smelled of death. There were no kids around,” recalled author Mark Reutter, who lived and went to elementary school there in 1958.
The most notable factor accelerating racial change was the crisis of St. Bernardine’s Catholic Church, the community’s bedrock institution. The problem was the parish’s powerful monsignor, Louis C. Vaeth. He fell from grace because of his conservative views. But instead of reassigning him, the archdiocese kept him at St. Bernardine’s. At a time when Edmondson Village residents desperately needed reassurance and constructive leadership, Vaeth derided fleeing parishioners as “yellow-bellies” and “cowards.”
As a result, families began moving without telling neighbors or relatives. St. Bernardine’s languished.
“Nobody was doing anything. They didn’t want to get involved, they didn’t want to start something and not finish it,” recalled the Rev. Paul Witthauer, who came to the parish during that critical time. Membership dropped, church buildings deteriorated.
To residents television offered escapism — and an easy way out. Since Edmondson Villagers watched the droll suburban adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, why not move to the suburbs?
Antero Pietila is writing a book about how bigotry shaped Baltimore between 1910 and 1975. His e-mail address is [email protected].
