January 27, 1985

A look at how local public access channels have changed over the past 21 years.

Let's go back to January 27, 1985. Why this date you may ask? It could be any date. Nothing special may have happened in your life, and nothing did in my life...at the time. Then, about 15 years ago, I found a tape. A tape with one of the greatest 3 minutes ever captured on film. For you see, either my Mom or Dad accidentally recorded channel 3 for a few minutes. For those of you outside the Salem, Oregon area (which means pretty much all of you), Channel 3 was KVDO, a PBS affiliate in Salem. Apparently, OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting, for PBS or something.) took ours away. The cable company, Viacom Cablevision, replaced it with something that looks like this:

Now, this may seem boring to you, but it's a little slice of history for my life. I bet most cable companies had a channel like this. I've seen one in Lincoln City. But, now Public Access either means crappy shows made with a camcorder or 24 hours of infomercials. But, I'd rather see this:

I wonder if Don Wilkerson ever saw this. I wonder if he's still alive. If you happen to be Sue, Mike, or Connie, e-mail me at [email protected] please.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Channel 3. They tried to make it be for everyone.

Heloise, are you listening? It's a good thing that the VCR was on channel 3, because if it wasn't, I might have never seen this:

Of course I had just turned 3 at the time, but now I wonder if any of those 78rpm records are valuable. And the phone numbers bring me back. Now you have to dial 503 before any 7 digit code because they added a 971 area code to the same area code even though, like 5 phone numbers use it.
And this is a little landmark of Salem history:

Now, there's over 100,000 people living in Salem, and an additional 20,000 in Keizer. If this same incident happened today, Channel 3 is now the WB (and soon to be CW), and Mom and Dad might have gotten three minutes of a Jerry Springer epsiode, and what parent would want their 3 year old watching Jerry Springer.

I have a whole bunch of old tapes. I call it "The Vault." There's at least 50. Meg Ryan on "As The World Turns," Johnny Carson's 21 and 25th anniversary, the Smothers Brothers 20th anniversary and a few episodes of the revival show that summer in 1988. The opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, up-to-the-minute news on the Challenger explosion, But, the one that will always stand out in my life was the tape that was recorded 3 minutes worth of channel 3 that fateful day in 1985. And it's a good thing I got it on DVD because the tape broke. I must go and make some more copies of this DVD.

Comments

I remember the first cable public access channel we had, we first got cable in 1971 and basically it was a camera that went back and forth where you saw the local time, temperature, barometric pressure and humidity in glorious black and white.

In the early 1980's, our access channel looked the same as yours. Our cable company was locally owned and around that time, maybe a little bit after, we became "Newchannels," but we had the old public access channel. My own opinion, I think it was run by a Commodore 64. This continued on until 1990 or so, after that, I think they used Windows 3.1 and later systems to run things. Man, those were the days. B-)

There is music only. The segment is 4 minutes and 16 17/30 seconds in length. The music sounds like OTR (old-time radio), Broadway, or classical.

Not much else is present besides what is shown here but the text comes up in a way that makes you think someone's typing it (it comes up letter by letter).

Hey this happened exactly 10 years before my little brother was born.