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neighborhood bars to watch TV. Tav¬ ern-viewing was a big deal then. It reached the point where Comedian Henny Youngman was quoted in Va¬ riety as complaining that his brother couldn’t get a job as a bartender. “He didn’t know how to fix the TV set,” Henny explained. Four-City Network Six years ago there were 19 sta¬ tions dispensing TV entertainment. Today there are 360. In 1948, there were 170,000 TV receivers, a good number of which were in bars. Today there are nearly 27,000,000 sets in the U.S. The biggest network in those days comprised four cities—New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washing¬ ton. Today, TV programs span the continent with programs seen simul¬ taneously in more than 130 cities. Remember those glass magnifiers that set owners used to hang on their screens? They were a hot item in every TV store then, together with Polaroid filters to eliminate glare from the screen. Performers who braved the wilds of a TV studio complained about the tremendous heat thrown by studio lights and the lack of air con¬ ditioning. Girls who modeled fur coats on TV in those days wore bathing suits underneath. Otherwise, they would have suffered heat prostration. Berle Set The Pace Berle is generally credited as the single performer who did most to boost TV into its present big-time status. But he didn’t enter TV on a regular basis until June, 1948. Ed Sul¬ livan’s Toast of the Town, which also spurred TV’s growth by introducing top show business personalities for the first time to TV cameras, started about the same time. Few shows now on the air were even gleams in a producer’s eye in 1948. The outstanding exceptions were Kraft TV Theater, which debuted in May, 1947, and Original Amateur Veteran TV fans recall Dunninger co- starring with Winchell and Mahoney. Hour, dating from January, 1948. The parent actors’ union negotiated its first minimum pay scales for TV performers at about that time. The minimum for a live, 90-minute pro¬ gram was $75, and for an hour show, it was $60. Today, the 60-minute minimum is $191. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made their TV debuts on Toast of the Town six years ago. They were paid $250. Today, they earn a reported $35,000 for each perform¬ ance on Comedy Hour. The Theater Guild was producing an hour-long drama series on NBC in January, 1948. NBC offered the shows to sponsors at a total cost for talent and production of $9,000 per week. Today, the Theater Guild pro¬ duces an hour-long drama series on ABC. U.S. Steel pays approximately $40,000 as sponsor each week for tal¬ ent and production costs. The Ameri¬ can National Theater and Academy produced a weekly half-hour dra¬ matic show on NBC in 1948, for which the asking price to sponsors was $5,000. Today, sponsors pay from $20,000 to $30,000 for a half-hour dra¬ matic program. By January, 1948, NBC had already televised the second Joe Louis-Billy Conn bout and the Louis-Joe Walcott 6