NAEB Newsletter (Feb 1957)

Having roused ourselves at 5:30 in the mor¬ ning of January 16 for a flight to Hagerstown for the ceremony there in connection with their closed circuit project, Frank Schooley, Cecil Bidlack and I yielded to the weather in the face of the obvious misgivings of the pilot of the light University of Illinois plane which was to have taken us out and back the same day. Therefore, we do not now have a report on that ceremony, or the chats we had hoped to have with Dorothy Smith of the ACE-TV Committee, Ralph Steele and Walter Em¬ ery of the JCET, and many others with whom we had planned to compare notes. As this is written we are ready to leave for the Region III meeting at Purdue. We have ar¬ ranged for a separate brief report on this meeting and you will find it elsewhere in the Newsletter. I believe these regional meetings are among the most important activities of the NAEB, since many staff members who cannot normally get to the national conventions can generally come. We always greatly enjoy them. The Professional Advancement Committee will have held its meeting in Urbana by the time you receive this. We hope to have a report on this and other regional and committee activity in time for the March issue. In closing, I’ve just looked over a brief state¬ ment on coverage, costs, and other useful guidance about lower-power TV which Cecil Bidlack has pre¬ pared. We decided to send this to our various mailing lists, together with similar material on low- power FM. These will be followed by similar sug¬ gestions for closed-circuit TV. In this we hope to increase our service to members and to education nationally when it needs all the tools it can get to meet the great increase in school enrollment at all levels. We’d be interested in your reaction to this and the various other services we seek to provide. Until next month then, that’s thirty. —NAEB— HEADQUARTERS PERSONNEL y At the end of January Headquarters lost Traffic Manager, Mrs. Martha Kappmeyer, who left to await an addition to the family toward the end of the month. Mrs. Peggy End’erby has come to replace her from the Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Company in Chicago. y Also, Headquarters gained a new chief secretary, Mrs. Judith Gans, who came to us from NBC in Chicago where she was secretary to the Director of Programming. We are happy to say our previous secretary, Mrs. Mary Francis Bryner, is still with us as secretary for the Engineering Service. TV CONSULTATION SERVICES AVAILABLE ETV stations are reminded there are still some funds available (from the Ford Foundation grant) to provide continuation of the consultation services in¬ stituted last year. Under the terms of the grant, NAEB will provide consultation service, on either a team or individual basis, in such areas as production, direction, program planning, engineering, station management, writing, staging and lighting, etc. Any ETV station desiring to take advantage of this service should write a formal application to the Executive Director, setting forth in detail the area (s) in which consultation is desired, reasons why the ser¬ vice is needed, preferred dates, etc. The station may indicate consultants preferred, and, if possible, an ef¬ fort will be made to obtain those indicated. However, final selection of consultants is made by the Executive Director on the basis of availability and suitability for the task outlined in the request. —NAEB— BRITISH IN-SCHOOL BROADCASTING —by Dr. Eric Goldschmidt, Managing Editor Tellex Publications Ltd. The way broadcasting to schools is being intro¬ duced in Britain could be an excerpt from a musical comedy if it were not stark fact. About 18 months ago Miss Enid Love toured the U. S. on a fact finding trip launched by the BBC. On her return she was ap¬ pointed head of the BBC’s special schools service. Right through 1956 plans were laid to begin educa¬ tional telecasts during the fall of 1957. In harness with the BBC are advisory committees and joint educational bodies and, of course, a long and distinguished record for sending lessons to schools over radio. The weight of this machine will be brought to bear on the problem when the time arrives. But in April of this year commercial TV is going to launch its own service. This was announced almost as an after-thought by the chairman of the company which had incurred extremely steep financial losses while pioneering private-enterprise TV in England. The intention is to send out science, geography and history programs three months from now. There will be an experimental schedule during the early afternoon when the commercial screen is not other¬ wise filled. One immediate reaction came from Sir Eric James, headmaster of the Manchester Grammar School, who said, “A TV set for listening to the BBC or its rival will enter my school over my dead body.” Be sure to route your Newsletter to other staff members so all may know about NAEB and national developments in the educational broadcasting field. Page 4 NEWSLETTER