WDSM: Queen of the Towers
Collected here are 1950s-era advertisements for WDSM-TV, the forerunner to KBJR-TV. The ads appeared in Broadcasting and Sponsor magazines and can be found in the Media History Digital Library.
Collected here are 1950s-era advertisements for WDSM-TV, the forerunner to KBJR-TV. The ads appeared in Broadcasting and Sponsor magazines and can be found in the Media History Digital Library.
Oddly, this ad uses Duluth as a benchmark against which a reader might understand how many Italians are in New York. For a while, Duluth was one of the 100 biggest media markets in the United States, and so among media professionals it could serve as a benchmark.
From the Media History Digital Library.
On Saturday, I was at Wussow’s for coffee, and midway through the morning Goat Hill Quartet appeared. The group’s traditional Christmas folk musical stylings raised money for Loaves and Fishes.
WHYZ was the ABC affiliate in Duluth — I think it would become WDIO? Or did WDIO begin after WHYZ died?
KDAL 610 AM is a commercial talk radio station in Duluth, owned and operated by Midwest Communications. There was also a KDAL-TV, which later became KDLH and then merged with KBJR.
Well, I’m not sure how to feel about posting this advert pulled from the Media History Digital Library, because the name of the company bears no connection to the people, that I can tell …
… but Ojibway Publications was a nationally significant trade-magazine publisher located in Duluth.
Advertising campaigns for Duluth’s KDAL radio in the trade press were intent on revealing the cosmopolitan dimensions of Duluth. These ads both reveal Duluth’s unique industries and reveal that some of Duluth’s retail, especially, can stand shoulder to shoulder with other major urban areas.
This ad campaign, luring businesses to advertise on TV in Duluth/Superior uses a picture of supporters of the Revolutionary government of Cuba manning a machine gun post overlooking one of the main streets, Zapata Avenue, into the heart of Havana, Jan. 4, 1959.
Radio and television audiences in Duluth were surveyed in 1961. While the general demographics could be useful for media historians, it might surprise the readers of Perfect Duluth Day that, in 1961, the category of “first generation Scandinavian immigrants” was statistically significant in a survey like this. We are not so far away from the days when Duluth was a rich community built from immigrants, with all the magic and tension that follows from immigration.
Information from Media History Digital Library.
Briefly, Duluth-Superior radio stations KDAL and WEBC advertised together. I found these joint ads while scouring a database of media trade publications.
I’ve been excavating media magazines for references to Duluth. Some of them are adverts for WEBC 560 AM, which is presently branded at “Northland Fan” and broadcasts Duluth-area sports interspersed with statewide sports talk from KFAN in Minneapolis and national sports talk from FOX Sports Radio.
Archive.org has the 1920 Duluth Central High School yearbook, Zenith, available for perusal online.
The Internet Archive hosts the 1941 edition of the Denfeld Oracle. My friends’ grandparents — those are the folks I am looking for in here, I think. And a nod to “then and now.”
Movie trade publications loved the NorShor Theatre and its milk bar. These features on the NorShor were taken from the Media History Digital Library.
A colleague sent me a link to the novel False Negative by David B. Rusterholz, which is set in a fictional university in Superior/Duluth. The author lives in River Falls, a semi-rural, semi-suburb-of-the-Twin Cities community.
Has anyone read it?
