because WUNC’s transmitter normally would go about 60 miles,
but we got reports from people from as far as 100 miles away in
South Carolina,” recalled John Young ’ 48, the program director for
Channel 4 at the time.
The only catch — there was no sound.
TV still was the new kid on the block, and the station management didn’t want to turn their friends at WUNC radio into enemies. So the crew opted to omit any play-by-play commentary or
sound from their production and suggested that viewers fire up
their radios to listen along with the picture.
They made up a new name for all this: “broadvision.”
“That got the nickname, which I think was not very appropriate,
‘broadvision,’” Young said. “It was a tremendous success. And the
first broadcast with Wake Forest was just absolutely very exciting.”
Young said the crew did decide to hang a microphone from the
gymnasium’s ceiling, so that viewers could hear the faint ramblings
of the P.A. announcer in the background.
“It was a very pioneering kind of thing,” Friday said. “It was not
perfect at all — you could see the game, and that was it.”
But the attraction was immediate. N.C. State was used to selling
out the 12,500-seat Reynolds Coliseum, but on the same night as
the Carolina-Wake “broadvise,” State, which was close to the top of
the national rankings at the time, had a bunch of empty seats for its
game with Duke. The Daily Tar Heel said the TV game was supposed to have caused a 2,000-person drop in attendance in
Raleigh; The News & Observer of Raleigh put the State attendance
at 6,500. “Well, you can’t please everybody,” a DTH columnist
wrote.
Billy Carmichael ’ 21, at the time the UNC System’s vice president for finance, said the future TV schedule would take into
account the impact on other schools’ ticket sales, and in fact,
WUNC planned to air some N.C. State games — “sellout games
or those assured of good attendance,” Carmichael said.
The station also made a point not to broadcast games on nights
when Chapel Hill High School’s team played a game. “We didn’t
let them compete with high school basketball,” said Allen McIntyre
’ 48 (MA), the station’s chief engineer.
On that first day, the station opened with a short film, This is the
Life, at 5: 30 p.m., followed by a live song-and-dance show from
Woman’s College at 6, and the freshman and varsity basketball games
starting at 6: 30.
WUNC did not open to rave reviews on the Chapel Hill cam-pus.Various University faculty and staff members believed that the
$2 million put into the station’s startup — $217,000 of which was
provided by the N.C. General Assembly — should have gone
into buying new books.
But basketball broadvision — in which the TV and radio signals often were just a second or two out of sync — was a big hit.
“It just created a wider support base because more people
watched the games,” Friday said.
“We got fan mail from all over the place on basketball games,”
McIntyre said.
By the time of the 1957 national championship season, Tar
Heel fans were getting used to positioning their easy chairs
between the TV and the radio.
BOO KS
Briefly noted
Chicago’s Progressive Alliance: Labor and the Bid for
Public Streetcars (Northern Illinois University Press,
2006) by Georg Leidenberger ’ 91 (MA). The story
of the coalition of reformers and workers advocating
municipal control over Chicago’s streetcars during
the 20th-century Progressive era.
Collecting American Paintings: Identification and
Values (Collector Books, 2005) by A. Everette James
Jr. ’ 59. A guide that covers all the steps for collecting
American paintings — from the selection and auction to the collection management and financing —
as well as descriptions of artists and various schools
of art.
Jimmy Black’s Tales from the Tar Heels (
SportsPub-lishingLLC, 2006) by Jimmy Black ’ 82 with Scott
Fowler ’ 87. A member of the 1982 basketball championship team and
a Charlotte
Observer sports
writer collaborate
on a behind-the-scenes look at
Dean Smith’s first
title season.
Lost Summer
(MTV
Books/Pocket
Books, 2006) by Alex McAulay, who is pursuing his
doctorate in literature at UNC. Thriller featuring
Caitlin Ross, a Southern California princess who
ends up on a desolate island off North Carolina
against her will.
Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig: Poems
(Louisiana State University Press, 2006) by Jane
Gentry ’ 76 (PhD). A compilation of poetry written
over a span of more than 10 years by a Yaddo Fellowship recipient, revealing the author’s uncommon
perception of subjects as commonplace such as
mornings, the furnace and Sam’s Club in the winter.
Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia,
1920-1945 (UNC Press, 2006) by Pippa Holloway
’ 90. Explores the ways white politicians used eugenic
sterilization, efforts to control venereal disease and
prostitution, a crackdown on interracial marriage
and movie censorship to exercise social control.
thirteen moons (Random House, 2006) by Charles
Frazier ’ 73. Long in the works, the author’s follow-up to the mega-successful Cold Mountain is a story
from the Cherokee Nation through the eyes of a
white man who was sent as a bound boy to run a
remote Indian trading post.
