Broadcasting Baltimore Update #6: Prime-time People

During the summer of 1976, a San Francisco CBS affiliate station (KPIX) owned by Westinghouse Broadcasting (Group W), premiered a local weeknight television news and entertainment series titled Evening: The MTWTF Show, eventually becoming Evening Magazine. The show was designed to add a local focus to the news. This show was created in reaction to the FCC’s newly enacted “Prime Time Access Rule” which gave back the half-hour preceding prime-time to local stations. The rule prohibited these stations from accepting network programming for that particular time slot.

Evening Magazine was one of the first television shows to begin the trend of shooting on videotape rather than 16mm film. The production called for the local hosts to have on-location wraparounds (a narrative bridge between segments in a program) and to tell short stories about ordinary and everyday people. As the show gained popularity, the other Group W-owned stations around the country created their own Evening Magazine shows, including WJZ-TV in Baltimore, first broadcasting their version in the fall of 1977.

We have close to six thousand tapes from this series. Some of them are dated and titled while some only have one or the other, or nothing at all. Because of this, we sometimes just have to take a chance on a tape. That’s how our Technical Coordinator, Austin Miller found this particular 1981 story about Black folk artist, Walter Flax.

*Walter Flax, Untitled (Ship), mixed media: scrap metal, wood, plastic, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chuck and Jan Rosenak, 1981.63.4*

Flax grew up around Norfolk, Virginia, and lived in Yorktown. Growing up in a Navy community, he had aspirations to join but ultimately made a living as a handyman. Over sixty years, he created over 100 scrap metal and wood vessels in his yard. One work, Untitled (Ship) can be seen in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum thanks to a gift by folk art collectors, Chuck and Jan Rosenak. Flax passed away the year after this prime-time feature in Evening Magazine.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning. To learn more, visit www.clir.org and follow CLIR on Facebook and Twitter.

This blog post was adapted by AV Archivist, Joana Stillwell from a previous post about Evening Magazine by MARMIA Founder and President, Siobhan Hagan.

October 15, 2024: Broadcasting Baltimore Update #5: Community Festivals
July 3, 2024: Broadcasting Baltimore Update #4: Focal Point
August 15, 2023: Broadcasting Baltimore Update #3: WJZ-TV Collection Featured on Digital Maryland
June 6, 2023: Broadcasting Baltimore Update #2: Shakedown!
February 6, 2023: Broadcasting Baltimore Update #1: City Line Is Digitized
August 28, 2022: Digitizing Hidden Histories Begins
April 28, 2022: MARMIA Receives a CLIR Grant

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