Both the faithful readers of this blog know that I’ve written about my dad having the first television set in Maysville, Oklahoma. He sold furniture and appliances (including radios) and for some reason he had gotten a Motorola TV along with a shipment of Motorola radios.
Anyhow, I have often talked about how I was lucky enough to catch probably the first TV pictures ever broadcast over the air in Oklahoma….
The TV station was WKY-TV and it first officially signed on the air on June 6, 1949 – I was eleven years old. The station was owned by the Oklahoma Publishing Company that published the two Oklahoma City newspapers at the time (The Daily Oklahoman, published in the morning, and the Oklahoma Times, published in the afternoon.) As I’ve mentioned before, their first studio was housed in the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Oklahoma City. Because of a freeze on broadcast licenses imposed by the FCC, WKY-TV was the only television station in Oklahoma City until 1953.
All of this is well and good, but it wasn’t what I started to blog about…. the subject of this blog was going to be weather and weather warnings. I got to thinking about this a couple of nights ago when a “banner” came across the TV screen warning of severe weather in several locations around us. When I lived in Oklahoma, we had severe weather (tornados) all the time. People just looked at the sky and if it looked like there was going to be a tornado, they went to their (or a neighbor’s) storm cellar. We didn’t have people to tell us the weather was going to get bad.
But back to my first years with television… WKY-TV came up with another “first,” when on March 21, 1952 it aired the first tornado warning ever broadcast on television. The station had hired a meteorologist by the name of Harry Volkman who broke into the regular programming with a bulletin about a thunderstorm containing a tornado approaching Oklahoma City. That seemed like a nice thing to do — except — at that time, the FCC prohibited broadcasters from disseminating public tornado alerts because they believed that relaying them to the public would cause panic. Volkman was at risk of losing his job for a while, but the station received a number of letters sent by “survivors” of the tornado thanking him and the station for the warning.
I’m not sure why I thought of this the other evening… it just popped into my head. If you’re one that grew up in the age of “breaking news” it’s hard to believe that in 1952, telling people (especially in Oklahoma) that a tornado was coming would spark panic….
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