♪ (Horns) ♪ ANNOUNCER: Produced live in the studios of the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting.

ALEC WEBB: When I was a kid, I'd watch TV in my house and look at the picture and wonder how in the world do they do that?

How's that done?

What is it like behind the scenes?

How does that picture get into my living room?

I had no brothers or sisters.

I had a vivid imagination, but I had no clue.

And then, something amazing happened.

A TV personality, a local weatherman and staff announcer named Jim English moved in next door.

JIM ENGLISH: Hi, Jim English with a look at the weather for Atlantic.

ALEC WEBB: We were standing in the backyard.

This other man asked Jim so, what do you do?

And, without hesitation, Jim rumbled out I'm a television announcer.

I couldn't believe it.

My knees buckled.

I almost fainted.

I said my God, to be able to say that.

I don't know whether it was a watershed moment or not, but I thought what would it be like to be able to say that someday?

JEFF SALKIN: I grew up maybe 10 miles from here, and so I remember I was a kid when MPT came on the air.

And I remember Hodgepodge Lodge.

DONALD THOMS: You know, we're off to the forest to see Miss Jean.

DON BARTO: She lives in a house that is mostly clean.

JEFF SALKIN: I still have the opening sequence of Hodgepodge Lodge burned into my brain, and now I won't be able to forget the theme song for the rest of the day.

FRANK J. BATAVICK: Public broadcasting was born during the Johnson administration, Lyndon Johnson.

That's when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created and PBS was created, and National Public Radio.

And all this was to be federally funded.

EVERETT MARSHBURN: In the early days, the station had great hopes for changing America.

Cities were in flames.

King had just been killed.

So, there was a lot of talk about the need to get people of color into positions to cover stories to help people understand what was going on.

ANNE DARLINGTON: And remember the time period.

Students were still marching in the streets.

It was a very... yeasty time.

RICK BREITENFELD: The country was in turmoil.

The leading contender for the most combustible issue was the Vietnam War.

DON BARTO: I was in the Army, stationed at Aberdeen throughout the late '60's.

As my discharge time came closer and closer, I noticed in the newspaper there was a feature article about public television and that there was going to be this mega-facility built in Maryland.

It would open in the fall of 1969.

So, I decided to check it out myself.

I was a military man, so I was on a mission like to... you know, do a reccy on this place.

MARSHBURN: We came out early, before the place officially opened.

And, it was an interesting ride because Owings Mills Boulevard did not exist.

You'd come off Reisterstown Road to Bonita Avenue and then you'd go down this winding dirt road.

GEORGE BENEMAN: And about 5 or 10 minutes on the road, you knew you were lost.

And, as we told everybody, just keep going.

DARLINGTON: Owings Mills, Maryland was nothing but a gas station crossroads.

I mean, it was the back of beyond.

BARTO: I started driving towards Owings Mills.

That's the one thing I knew was going to be built in Owings Mills.

I saw this tower, so I said that must be the TV station.

DARLINGTON: That summer, I took a drive on a Sunday with my son and saw the driveway and drove up.

It just looked like a very sprawling place to me.

I walked around and I thought what an odd place to put a major television operation.

BARTO: It looked to me like the size of a shopping center.

I walked in the front door and there were workmen all over the place, and nobody really questions who I am or why I'm there.

G. BENEMAN: Going by what's control room C, the glass wasn't in.

BARTO: There was no roof over studio B.

That had been left open intentionally because they had to pour the concrete floor for the studio.

G. BENEMAN: There were just lots of people, and they were all like me.

BARTO: A lot of people talk about how they join an organization on the ground floor.

Well, I was there seeing the floor being poured.

WEBB: I got there in September of 1969, and that was about two weeks before we first went on the air.

When I first started out there, I was hired as an announcer.

Everything I did was live on the air.

And, I was a little bit lost because I had come into it without any previous experience.

BARTO: When I finally got called back for an interview, he said how about 67?

I said, like channel 67?

He said no, $6,700 as a salary, a starting- $6,700 per year.

I said I got it.

I'll take that.

WEBB: Originally, there was just one station, which was channel 67, WMPB.

In the early days, public television was new.

None of us knew what public television really was.

And we made up a lot of it as we went along.

And it was a wonderful place to learn, for that reason.

♪♪ ♪♪ DON BARTO: In the 1970's, I remember it was an equipment rack and it had a logo on the side of it.

It was a hand drawn thing.

And it said the Maryland Center for Cosmic Consciousness.

EVERETT MARSHBURN: The 1970's was an insane time, because anything goes.

We were new, we were young.

We didn't know what we couldn't do.

We didn't know what we didn't know, so we tried a lot of things.

Some of that worked, some of it didn't.

ANNE DARLINGTON: We had a lot of young people, a lot of them fresh out of college, and for many it was their first job.

So, they were excited.

MARSHBURN: We're going to change the world and make it better for everybody.

BARTO: We were a bunch of hippies in the '70's, and all the things that go with that, as far as being creative or finding a better way to do something or reinventing something, that would happen in our work every day.

GAIL PORTER LONG: I was a child of the '60's and we all wanted to make the world a better place.

And I was convinced, and remain convinced today, that one of the ways to do that is through media and technology.

Particularly public television, which is devoted to advancing the common good.

RICK BREITENFELD: I was the first employee.

My sister called me on the phone after I got the job and she says how do you build a state network?

Do you call somebody up and say build a state network and send up a ham sandwich?

And I...(chuckles) I like that, but I really did not know what to do.

VINCE CLEWS: Rick was creative himself.

Rick was a writer.

He was a musician.

He loved, he loved being an entertainer.

BREITENFELD: Say, it's special guest time here at the old ice cream shop.

Yes, and here he is, Little L and the Velvet Britches, singing the number one platter in the whole country, The Itinerant Roofer.

And, here he is.

VINCE CLEWS: He wanted that place to be just a... the source of a wealth of creativity.

If you were hired at the Maryland Center, you were hired to accomplish.

It didn't matter which department you met people, those people were excited about doing something with their area of expertise.

DONALD THOMS: You saw the long hair.

I mean, the hippies, you know.

This was the '70's.

The other thing that astounded me was the diversity.

I'd simply never seen that many people of color in one building.

And I just don't mean black and white.

I mean Black, White, Latino, Native Americans, Asians.

They were all over the building, doing all sorts of jobs.

There were also women running camera and women TV directors.

I'd never seen that.

DONNA FAW: I think being a young woman, I was young, was a challenge.

I wasn't the first executive producer female, but I think it was harder.

I don't think I knew it at the time.

As a producer, you work with a lot of egos.

Male artists, male scenery guys, male musicians.

They were good, good, good people, but I think I had to fight a lot harder.

But, I think some of that fed into the Working Women series that we all produced.

FRAN DORN: Good evening, I'm Fran Dorn and welcome to Working Women.

What would happen to you if your world fell apart?

ANNE DARLINGTON: They hired me because I looked like one thing.

I looked like that nice little round blonde woman who does cooking shows and isn't very bright.

And I turned out to be something very different.

And that didn't please everybody.

(laughs) CLEWS: The first producer hired there was Anne Darlington.

Anne Darlington, she set a standard.

She set the bar.

All of us who followed, that was the bar.

You shot for that.

If you weren't shooting for that, you didn't get it.

DARLINGTON: A fellow came into my office and he said you know, why don't you do something useful, like teach people how to manage their money?

My first reaction was oh God.

I worked on it all winter and I thought this could really be something.

This will be the biggest thing we ever do.

But I still didn't have a host.

JOHN DAVIS: Wall Street Week really did pioneer all of the 24/7 financial television that you see today.

There wasn't a lot of finance on TV, and what really set the show apart is that the whole emphasis was to talk about the money that individual people have, their retirements.

It's their money.

We're not talking super technical stuff that you can't understand.

It's what about the money in your back pocket?

DARLINGTON: I tuned in to a program the BBC did and Louis was on.

And, Louis was so smart.

And I thought I wonder if I could persuade him to do this program.

LOUIS RUKEYSER: Why, the smiles have been so broad up at Broad Street at Wall that you'd think Pollyanna had just declared a dividend.

JOHN DAVIS: Very early on, Anne Darlington knew that if you're going to do live television you were going to have problems.

Microphones were going to go out.

Something else would happen on the set.

And, she didn't want just a technician to come in and fix it.

She wanted someone that looked like they belonged there.

So, she created this role of Miss Smith.

She would come on, they would see her lead in the guest and so forth.

But, if something happened, Louis' mic went out, she would come in, put another mic on him.

The show never lost any tempo.

Louis would barely even stop in his cadence of reading or asking questions.

And it was really a brilliant stroke.

DARLINGTON: I knew that if a man wearing a headset came on, the audience would think what's going on?

But, if a very attractive woman in a lovely dress came on to undo the cord, they wouldn't think anything of it.

And Natalie Seltz was perfect because she was a director.

GEORGE BENEMAN: Wall Street Week.

I worked the first show and I worked the last show, and a large number of those in between.

I did the first couple years as the assistant director and then I became the director.

And yes, everything I think that could happen did happen.

Mics got hung up, lights would go out.

But the show went on.

MARLENE RODMAN: Wall Street Week, as a crew person, was the epitome of working on a national show.

And they didn't let just anybody work on that show.

So, when I got to be floor director, I thought that was a big deal.

I have made it.

WEBB: I have so many fond memories of just doing announcements for the show.

Every once in a while, I would walk into the studio when the show was getting ready to air.

There was always a certain buzz in the air and a certain wonderful, magical feeling that this is a special show.

RODMAN: We had some really high profile guests.

Malcolm Forbes, Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs before we even really knew who he was.

STEVE JOBS: Although we've heard a lot of hype about Silicon Valley meeting Hollywood, Pixar's the first company that's really done it.

JOHN DAVIS: Word got around pretty quickly in New York that if you were asked to come down and be interviewed by Louis Rukeyser on Wall Street Week that that was a big deal, so you took the train down.

We actually had a far harder time getting politicos from Washington to make the short trip up here than we did people from New York or Boston.

WILLIAM SIMON: So, it's consummate nonsense.

DAVIS: But, as the word got around that you really, really want to do this, it got much easier.

DARLINGTON: We didn't have any money at all for advertising.

It was all word of mouth.

People would discover us, they'd tell somebody else and somebody else.

And by the second year, we were getting wonderful mail.

RUKEYSER: I also want to thank what must surely be the most loyal group of viewers that any television program could hope to have.

I hope you'll all be back with us in October for another presumably glorious season.

Meanwhile, this has been Wall Street Week.

I'm Louis Rukeyser.

Good night and have a happy, and hopefully a prosperous, summer.

FRANK J. BATAVICK: I arrived in 1971.

And I was right out of graduate school at the University of Maryland.

It was just a fantastic place to be back then.

I would walk down the hallways and it was electric.

They had three studios going.

At least two of them were in production.

The third, they'd be putting up a set and lighting.

So, they were just constantly cranking out shows.

WEBB: The Maryland State Department of Education Division of Instructional Television.

F.J. BATAVICK: iTV was in charge of daytime television.

We'd go on the air at 9:00 in the morning and I think we'd go as far as maybe 2:00 or 2:30, I forget now.

After that, MPT would take over with its programming.

But, ours was instructional television and we covered a variety of topics, from mathematics to earth science to water safety.

I mean, you name it, we produced either a single program or a full series on that.

But, I'll never forget the Washington County Board of Education had a calculus teacher shortage and they weren't able to offer calculus to their students so they came to the Maryland State Department of Education and they said what can you do to help us?

They said well, we just created this division of iTV.

They can produce a series for you.

So, we produced 60 20 minute programs on calculus.

60 of them.

And they were really very creatively done, with graphics and things of that sort.

And then they were aired on channel 67.

So, that was pretty cool, to be able to answer a mission like that.

BREITENFELD: I came to public broadcasting from education.

We quickly learned that you don't do education on stations across the country the way educators do education.

You got to come around the side door if you want to affect people.

In Maryland, we set out to do it right.

ANNOUNCER: And he can do it up and down too.

RODMAN: We operated the College of the Air Program, working with a couple dozen colleges around the state.

We distributed programming, but we also created our own programming to eventually distribute it nationally.

WOMAN HOST: David Hume, the philosopher to whom we are about to turn, will drop a bomb on your belief in the truth and progress of science.

F.J. BATAVICK: When they were building the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting, its neighbor was Jean Worthley.

She came walking over one day and asked what was going on and they said they're building a center for public broadcasting.

She came back and sought out the people in charge and they talked to her and some genius had the idea of putting Jean on camera and creating Hodgepodge Lodge.

JEAN WORTHLEY: Hi.

Welcome to Hodgepodge Lodge.

Hal and Julie and I are thinking about kinds of things to grow in winter.

F.J. BATAVICK: So, Jean did this wonderful show for kids in studio A.

They built a Hodgepodge Lodge outside that they would use for exteriors and then they'd go to Jean in the studio.

Now, she had Aurora the parrot on her shoulder all the time.

G. BENEMAN: Aurora stayed either on her shoulder or on a stick that she would have.

Aurora was just there.

Sometimes there were some staffers who Aurora liked.

If Aurora didn't like you, she would just turn around and bite you.

WORTHLEY: Aurora loves to chew on wood Bill, so be careful.

MICHAEL STYER: My first day on the job here they asked if I'd mind sharing the office with Jean Worthley, Miss Jean of Hodgepodge Lodge.

She was very willing for me to come and work at a little desk in there.

And I didn't know she had this huge parrot, who was with her all the time.

I walked in and there was this wonderful blue chair that I was supposed to sit in at this desk.

Well, this parrot had done its business all over this chair, so it was streaked with white.

I said what is that?

She says oh, that's just Aurora.

You know, Aurora.

Yeah.

It's quite clean and you'll be okay.

You won't get a disease.

And I thought oh, wow.

G. BENEMAN: Hodgepodge was one of our early staples.

We would tape the shows, and they were done live to tape.

No breaks.

There was nothing like oh, can we stop and pick up?

No.

You just start.

Half hour later, thank you very much.

So we would do two shows on Monday during the day.

One before, in the morning, one after lunch.

We did one Tuesday night and two on Wednesday.

So, in three days we did five shows.

STYER: Miss Jean, as you know, would have students, young people, around the table and she would bring out flowers and plants and animals and talk about them and teach them all about nature.

WORTHLEY: Now, a few days ago, one of my friends, she said that she had found this poor little creature out on her front yard.

G. BENEMAN: It was just amazing what Jean was able to do with the kids.

Some were Jean's kids.

Some were kids who grew up in the neighborhood.

And she had no budget.

WORTHLEY: Hi.

Have you ever gone on a camping trip and forgotten to take your frying pan or your kettle to boil water in?

STYER: Her and her husband was also a naturalist.

They would find dead animals and they would freeze them.

And so, she would bring those in and use those as props on the show.

There's this particular show, she has I think a Baltimore oriole, and studio lights are very hot.

So, they had the little bird on the table and she started to explain.

The little boy, probably about five years old, says Miss Jean, she says, oh the poor little bird is crying.

She says oh no, don't worry about that.

He's just defrosting.

(laughs) ♪♪ BREITENFELD: Early projects included something I was proud of called Our Street.

We went head first into that and produced a drama series about a black family in Baltimore.

It's quite good.

♪ (jazzy music) ♪ MARSHBURN: Our Street started out as sort of a public service program, where we were going to look at ways families in urban areas could help themselves.

Howard Rollins came out of that.

He started out on Our Street, playing the oldest son, Jet.

Maybe two years into the run, he became the younger son, Slick.

That show ran for four years.

ROLLINS: Oh, forget it, Momma.

Just forget it.

Damn.

MARSHBURN: After that, he finally got his movie break in Ragtime.

And then, in A Soldier's Story.

And then, he became Virgil Tibbs on television on In The Heat of the Night.

And the last year, it was picked up by PBS and went into distribution.

We were doing that before Good Times, before The Jeffersons, and before Sanford and Son, and all of those things.

We were doing Our Street.

ACTRESS: Mae?

MAE: Yes?

ACTRESS: What you sitting up here in the dark for?

Why don't you go to bed?

(jazzy music) RHEA FEIKIN: People always want to know how and when I came to Maryland Public Television.

Well, the answer is I have no idea when, I just know it was a long time ago.

RODMAN: The first time I ever met Rhea Feikin was on Consumer Survival Kit.

FAW: Consumer Survival Kit was a half an hour of, basically, consumer information.

But not done in a dry way.

There were a lot of topics, from small claims courts, to buying an appliance, to finding a lawyer, to doing a will.

CLEWS: Consumerism was hot then.

Ralph Nader was the hottest thing in America.

So, I decided a consumer show might be interesting and something people would want.

But I wanted to do a show that I would watch.

FAW: Vince's idea was to have humor and to have people like Tony Randall come in and talk about auto repair or buying life insurance.

The just practical stuff, but in a very entertaining way.

JOAN RIVERS: If everybody knew what I had just told you, we'd be out of business.

LARRY LEWMAN: Hello, I'm Larry Lewman.

CLEWS: The host drove the show, but the information was presented in song and dance routines and comedy skits.

♪ I just fell in love with this vacuum cleaner ♪ FAW: And so, in this half hour, you'd have some ridiculous skit that a lot of the writers created out of just brilliance and it worked.

ROBERT MORSE: I will create (evil laugh) a begonia flytrap.

(evil laugh) CLEWS: There was one key to Consumer Survival Kit that set it apart.

All the consumer shows went out and found what was wrong.

You can't buy meat here because the meat isn't always fresh.

Well, how does that serve me if I live over here?

So, I decided to do a consumer show that presented this is what you should look for.

This is what's right.

If it's not exactly like this, it doesn't mean it's wrong, but it means it warrants re-examining.

And so, that was the premise.

BARTO: Consumer Survival Kit was a great opportunity for the music department because we were often called on to turn out music for the programs, and they were usually like song parody kind of things.

We had performers like Rita Moreno, Ethel Ennis.

♪ supermarket rag ♪ CLEWS: Here's a good example.

Song about buying a house.

This couple, one wanted to buy an old house, one wanted to buy a new house.

But, instead of having them argue, they sang their positions.

TOGETHER: ♪ Old house, new house, ♪ ♪ which one to buy..?

♪ BARTO: It was all pretty quick.

It was always kind of a last minute thing.

Hey, let's have a song, you know.

FEIKIN: I remember working here on Consumer Survival Kit.

My job was to do the location segment every week.

So it was really a lot of fun.

FAW: We often did a lot of things kind of quickly, at the last minute.

We were always kind of doing it by the seat of our pants.

The head writer would say well, I needed a script yesterday.

And, you had to get it to PBS in a certain timeframe and we were like, just barely making it.

CLEWS: And I thought I was going to have to go and say to Warren I failed.

I can't do this show.

It's too complicated to do every week.

FAW: And the thing that saved us, which we often laugh about, is the Watergate hearings.

That preempted everything on PBS.

Everything was just Watergate, which gave us breathing room.

FEIKIN: See you later.

Mama Feikin's going biking.

LEWMAN: Listen, you have your fantasies, we have ours.

Ride easy.

We'll see you next week on Consumer Survival Kit.

STYER: I came to Maryland Public Television in 1973.

I really didn't know much about Maryland Public Television.

And I saw the facility and I was told that I could you know create anything I wanted to.

Well, I mean, that was... you know that was the world.

My official title was executive Producer of Cultural Affairs.

ELLIOTT WILEY: I came to Maryland Public Television in 1976.

Mike Styer hired me to work on a program called The Critics' Place, one of the best shows in life.

When I started working at Maryland Public Television, my take home pay every two weeks was $212.50.

Man, it was an amazing thing.

They smoked in the control room.

Go get me some cigarettes.

Go get me a pencil.

Go get this, go get that.

I was eager.

STYER: I came up with the...

The famous story is I was in the shower one day and it hit me.

If we could cover all the arts on one program every week, it would be terrific.

How do we do that?

So, I thought well, we could get critics.

People who are already critics, some who maybe are not, but experts in their field.

We got people with very strong opinions, and they might disagree, and that worked out very well because that made it a very interesting show.

ELANE STEIN: Now, what she doesn't have, poor thing, is a well written television script with a decent storyline.

DONALD THOMS: I'd been there for six months.

And I was watching the rehearsals, and there was Alfie Brown, who was just amazing.

All these great artists and professionals and critics critiquing the movies and television and dance and literature.

And I was watching.

I was just fascinated by this whole thing.

I actually walked into the control room just to see what was going on, and I really wanted to be a part of it.

STYER: Sometimes the show got a little wild.

Some of our critics got pretty excited.

JANE MURRAY: Is that what's being taught in Chicago?

JOHN GOODSPEED: Yeah, it's the Milton Friedman School of Economics... CARL LAMPLEY: I think it's being taught all over by people who, more or less, were born with a silver spoon in their mouths or indeed had it made.

I come from North Carolina, the same area Mr. Sowell comes from.

I didn't have it made.

My parents couldn't send me to Howard University or Harvard.

And I'd like to see him write a book like this if he had to grow up with what I had to grow up, including going to college and trying to live on $75 a month.

Boom.

DONALD THOMS: It was like a family, and it worked out very well.

It was on for 12 years.

F.J. BATAVICK: It was just fun working at the Center back in those days.

And they did a series called Stories of Maryland, which were shot on 16 millimeter film.

There was a certain summer where they were going to do a homestead out on the frontier.

So, out back, they cleared trees and they built the exterior of an old cabin.

CLEWS: Warren Park had this idea that Maryland Public Broadcasting should tell the history of Maryland through half hour episodes, and they should be stories but they should be stories without high drama.

Slice of life stories.

I wrote and produced one called Once to Every Man.

BARTO: They had to like recreate a working farm in Maryland in the 1700's and it was done like out on the back lot of Maryland Public Television.

CLEWS: Rather than go scout for a farm, the scenic group, which was really great, Bob Gibson, who was head of it, said we'll build the farm.

F.J. BATAVICK: And they brought in animals, cows and pigs and chickens.

BARTO: Usually it would take about a month or two to shoot these things, of all that was going on out behind the studios in the woods.

The Revolutionary War.

CLEWS: This farmer had to make his decision.

Was he going to stand up to the British and say no, you can't take everything on my farm and leave me and my children penniless and homeless, or give them everything he wanted?

FARMER: I have to let those fight who have nothing to lose.

CLEWS: When the British troops came through the woods, it was pretty... F.J. BATAVICK: It was beautifully shot.

And, on the very first day of production, after all this pre-production, when they said roll, all of a sudden they heard jackhammers and hammers.

(metal hammering) Here, there was a construction crew just on the other side of the woods, building something.

CLEWS: Rrrrr...

Heavy equipment.

So, we ran up the hill- BATAVICK: And asked them to stop.

Well, you know how that ended.

They said we're not stopping.

CLEWS: So, we elected to go ahead and shoot.

And every single sound in that film was post-dubbed.

BARTO: So, you have to recreate all of the sounds as a part from the picture.

To have actors come back in and perform their lines in a studio while watching the picture that was shot weeks ago or months ago, it's a huge job.

CLEWS: The editing was tedious, but the shoot was spectacular.

I couldn't believe that I was on location of that sort for something I wrote and produced.

WILEY: One of the most exciting remote productions I ever worked on was a program that Mike Styer produced called Bartleby the Scrivener.

STYER: Outside of working in television, my greatest passion is theater.

I love theater.

I thought wouldn't it be great if we could do some theater here?

We got in touch with a very, very prominent American playwright, Israel Horovitz, and we hired him to do the adaptation.

Center Stage provided the drama director, we called him, and then we paired them with one of our directors and they learned to together.

Center Stage also had the casting abilities in New York, so we would go and do our casting there.

And we proved we could do it.

OLD MAN: It was Bartleby.

STYER: Bartleby the Scrivener was the first one we did.

PBS aired them, prime time, and we got great glowing reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, from all over the country.

It was a proud moment for us here at Maryland Public Television.

F.J. BATAVICK: To me, it'll always be The Maryland Center, with such a wonderful community of talent.

There were people from all walks of life that had specific abilities, whether it was running camera, whether it was doing sound, writing music.

And you became really friendly with them.

And, the neat part about it is that there was an upward track for those folks.

They would come in at the entry level and if they showed promise, the next thing you know they were in charge of something else and something else.

You could work your way from being an assistant producer, which I was, all the way up to becoming an executive producer.

DONALD THOMS: It was Camelot, it was the Magic Kingdom.

It was all those things.

Because people gave you the leeway.

They gave you the ability to grow and to blossom and to come up with ideas.

It was just an exciting place at the time.

BREITENFELD: We were fortunate enough in Maryland to start out with an abundance of machinery and ability.

Herding the creative cats was a particular joy of mine during those years.

DARLINGTON: I mean, '70 was a different world entirely.

(gong) ♪♪ MARSHBURN: The 80's were different for a variety of reasons.

I mean, part of the enthusiasm of the 70's met resistance on the federal level.

We began to be watched more closely.

DAVIS: The 1980's was a decade where Maryland Public Television became a more mature operation.

Our budgets were under more scrutiny.

State support was not as generous as it used to be.

We did have a period of time where we started looking more at big international productions in the last, towards the international, or even local productions.

♪♪ KEN DAY: I think we had settled down a little bit from the 70's.

We were all a little older and America was starting to find the public station on their dial.

MARSHBURN: And we also had to spend more money on the technology itself.

Film was gone.

Tape came in.

That made a difference, and the whole idea of just this wildness was no longer accepted.

JOHN DAVIS: In 1978 Warren Park brought me in and said, "Okay, come up with a couple of ideas for a new series."

I had this idea in the back of my head that I really wanted to bring the automotive magazine to TV.

I'm from the Carolinas.

I grew up with cars.

They were in my blood.

I was an engineer.

So, that's what I came up with.

And so we did a pilot, and I was the host of the show because I couldn't afford to hire anyone.

And basically, the general reaction was, "Don't quit your day job."

WEBB: MotorWeek: Television's Automotive Magazine.

JOHN DAVIS: Over the next 30 minutes, we'll have the latest in automotive news and information for you, as we try to make your daily life with the family car a more enjoyable one.

JOHN DAVIS: So, it sat on the shelf until we heard that another station was going to do an automotive series.

That was on July 5, 1981.

Warren Park called me in his office, told me somebody else was going to do a public TV car show.

Could I get MotorWeek on the air in six months?

I said, "Warren, I'll have it on the air in six weeks."

It didn't quite make that, but we did go on in October of that year.

MIKE ENGLISH: John Davis, you know, sort of the genius behind MotorWeek.

I mean to come up with that concept in the 1980's, to think that people were really interested in that, and they were, and it was a television's first automotive magazine.

And of course, you know, America's love affair with the car is embodied in that entire series.

JOHN DAVIS: Pat Goss, who has been on the show since day one, was willing to come on and do our car care segments.

Craig Singhoss was one of our feature reporters from day one.

We all thought this was going to be great fun.

We'd sit around and play with cars for four or five years, and have a good time.

JOHN DAVIS: Well, you can probably tell by now that we think the 1984 Corvette was well worth waiting for.

JOHN DAVIS: Probably the biggest challenges that we faced with starting MotorWeek was getting people to trust us.

The stations who were going to carry us, and of course car companies, they looked at TV, particularly public television, and weren't quite sure.

But when they found out that we were a, enthusiast, but b, fair, that generally melted away.

WEBB: MotorWeek was another completely different style of announcing.

They're cars racing and tires screaming and motors running, so I get involved and it happened.

It was, MotorWeek: Television's Automotive Magazine.

Here's your host, John Davis.

JOHN DAVIS: I think the most important thing that can be said about the folks that work on MotorWeek, a long time ago and today, is they understand the importance of what they're doing, how important the audience is to get the kind of information they need, and they work very hard and get it done.

(tires screech) RODMAN: I knew I wanted to do camera.

Just thought it was really... the opportunities were a lot better.

That's always been a challenge, being 5'2 and 3/4.

If you wanted to be a camera operator, you auditioned with Tony Guiffre, who was the lighting designer at the time.

He set up these columns in the studio, and you had to truck and dolly and rack focus, and then there was another one we had, I forgot what was hanging, but he would move it around and you had to follow focus.

And I actually went through the audition three times.

It was finally on my third time, I was hired.

♪♪ RODMAN: Back in the early 80's, we did Good Earth Garden with Tina Nield.

She was amazing, because she was the first person that I knew did organic gardening, and she would actually take the dirt and eat it to test the acidity.

I mean, she was hardcore.

TINA BENEMAN: Jean Worthley, who was known for the wonderful Hodgepodge Lodge that ran for so long, was looking for a new project.

She had the idea of an organic gardening series.

I had gotten into gardening after I got out of college, and was very passionate about it.

Certainly, at the time, I was just thinking of having an opportunity to work on it with Jean.

And then she turned to me and said, "Well, why don't you do it?"

And I was like, "Me?"

I was a researcher/ writer at the time.

I'd had no on-camera experience.

But that really speaks to the way that Maryland Public Television took advantage of different people's talents and skills, and created something with that.

"I want to tell you about another organic insecticide called insecticidal soap."

When Good Earth Garden started, it's hard to believe, but we were using studio cameras.

There weren't really handheld cameras at the time, and so there were three studio cameras out in the garden, and you're outside.

The sun is your key light.

So, you're talking with your face in the sun.

It was going to be in season for Maryland gardeners.

So, we started in June, and then we went through the seasons.

Every week, it's, "Here's what's happening in this garden."

So, that was really the format of the show.

The first part of the season, it just rained and rained and rained.

So, everything was muddy.

And then it stopped raining.

It didn't rain again for like two months.

And that's one of the things I always loved about gardening, is it's not who you know, it rains or it hails on everybody.

SUZY SHAW: I got an internship with Maryland Instructional TV, which was in the same building in 1984.

It was my senior year of college.

First I logged tape.

I logged tape, I logged tape, and logging tape means that you write down every time code, everything that went on in that shot, and I did such a good job, that after I logged 220 30 minute tapes, they said, "That's really great.

Now you can type it up."

This is the value of an intern, and I was the only person who had seen it all.

So, I got my first job because I was the only person who knew what was on these 220 B-roll tapes.

So, I was a production assistant, and then assistant producer, an associate producer, and then a producer.

In the end, I was producing fundraising and pledge drives, and I loved that live television experience.

FEIKIN: Pledge is one of the main live things that's on MPT.

I think it's really important that we do live... TV, and I feel like when I'm doing it, I'm not only trying to get people to support a particular program.

I hope, that because they might like me, they might like the fact that I represent MPT, and realize that we need them.

And we're all part of this great, big, wonderful thing called Maryland Public Television and we're all in it together.

SHAW: Live television is very different than documentary style of television.

It is all about pre-production.

So, because everything is going to change, it's going to change at lightning speed, you have to lock down as many things as you possibly can, so that you reduce the number of things that are going to go wrong, because they will go wrong.

FEIKIN: One of the volunteers said, "There's someone on the phone who says that he's going to give a lot of money if you'll take his pledge.

So, I go over, and the camera's on me, and I say, "I understand that by talking to me, you're going to give us a really nice pledge."

And the guy started talking in the most obscene way that you can believe, and the camera's on me.

I just remember I said, "Well, thank you so much for that generous pledge.

I'm glad you watch Maryland Public Television."

Bang.

SHAW: Ad-libbing is not an easy thing, and the queen is Rhea.

And Rhea can talk about a blue MPT mug for a couple of minutes with nothing written in the teleprompter.

And I'll tell you, the phones would ring.

FEIKIN: Who was married to who?

Now did you know that... LONG: 30 seconds.

Wrap it up, please.

FEIKIN: It really isn't brain surgery.

When you're on camera, I think you've got just a couple things you have to remember.

One, you have to really be yourself.

FEIKIN: All we wanted to do was say thank you.

FEIKIN: And two, you got to hope they like the who you are, because that's it.

That's what you got going for you.

STU KERR: At MPT, getting an audience...

I better watch myself.

Getting an audience has never been our primary objective.

It's keeping safe on the stairs, that's our main objective.

KEN DAY: I was living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, working for a big corporation.

I have an MBA, of all things, and realized I hated corporate business.

So, I started doing informational interviews.

I came to Baltimore, and I kind of liked it, and I said, "Boy, this would be great.

And what a fabulous facility."

I found out they used interns, and I said, "Can I help out?"

"Absolutely.

Show up here every Tuesday at two o'clock, and we'll put you to work."

I came back for about a year, and kept doing this.

One of the executive producers down here was Michael Styer.

He was from Lancaster.

Finally, he said, "You know what?

We've got a new show that we're starting up called Weeknight Alive.

Why don't you come down and interview for it?"

So, I did, and I got the job in 1985, when Weeknight Alive launched at MPT.

SUGAR RAY LEONARD: Hi, I'm Sugar Ray Leonard.

Stay tuned for Weeknight Alive.

DAY: Weeknight Alive was the idea of a new president that MPT had just hired, a fellow named Steve Kimatian.

They'd hired him from Channel 13, WJZ, the big show that was very popular in all of these Westinghouse stations, of which WJZ was part, was Evening Magazine.

And when Kimatian came to MPT, he said, "I want to bring this idea to public television."

One of my first stories on Weeknight Alive was a family that actually had robot children.

I spotted this in a Sunday New York Times article, and the dateline was Baltimore, actual operating robots.

And they would put them to bed, put them at the dinner table and I said, "Wow, this is too cool."

WOMAN: Well, we are what we call a techie family, in that we are human parents with robot offsprings, and we feel that this is the way a lot of families are going to live in the future.

DAY: And the problem was, when we launched our show, we were way understaffed, and so everybody worked like fools.

But this was such a cool opportunity that everybody was young, we were all in our twenties and thirties.

Everybody just busted their tail to make this happen.

And it really was quite a cool show.

STYER: With our new signal coming out of Annapolis, which gave us coverage into Northern Virginia, all of Washington.

I thought, "Well, maybe we could make an arrangement with Wolf Trap."

BARTO: For me, a real highlight at MPT was the 1980's, during all of the the performance shows, the concert shows at Wolf Trap.

I got to record Bernadette Peters.

We did a show on ASCAP where anybody you had ever heard of in music was performing.

Andy Williams, Peter, Paul and Mary, Oscar Peterson.

♪ Moon River... ♪ JOHN POTTHAST: On stage at Wolf Trap put MPT on the map, in terms of national production, outside of news and public affairs.

It was very prestigious, all of a sudden, to be working in a nationally recognized venue, doing a national show.

I mean, it was MPT's main entree into producing for prime time.

STYER: It was quite a big production.

We didn't have remote facilities, so we would rent a big truck from some other company that did these kinds of things.

Sometimes we had two trucks.

POTTHAST: I think our first episodes involved like six, seven, eight cameras on location.

Now, we think nothing of going on location.

To take eight cameras on location, at that point, was something we hadn't done before.

STYER: One of the really great opportunities was the Kirov ballet was coming to America, had not been here in many, many years, and they were only playing in a few venues.

They were going to be playing at Wolf Trap, and they were going to be doing Swan Lake.

POTTHAST: We immediately said we wanted to do it.

The challenge was, we shot the show on two nights in June, and aired it, two and a half hour show, two and a half days later.

It was round the clock.

I think the lay back occurred a few hours before we fed it.

♪♪ And it turned out to be a huge success.

STYER: So, we're up for a national Emmy, the first in the history of public television, but all of our competition were for programs out of WNET in New York, and here was little Maryland Public Television, with their little Kirov Ballet show, and we thought we had no chance of winning this award.

And all of a sudden, they announced that we won, and the people from New York were sitting over there.

They went, "What?"

STYER: We thank the academy, of course This is a first for Maryland Public Television.

POTTHAST: Kirov proved to be just a stepping stone to other huge programs.

STYER: In 1985, while we're in the midst of doing On Stage at Wolf Trap in the summertime, I became aware of the fact that public television never did anything on New Year's Eve.

For years and years, it had been Guy Lombardo, and that now had gone off the air.

So, there was no real entertainment show on New Year's Eve anywhere.

I thought, "Well, this is something we should do."

POTTHAST: Then came Happy New Year U.S.A.

Compared to what we had done at Wolf Trap, it was enormous.

To do Happy New Year USA, we had four video trucks and over 20 cameras, and we were doing it live on New Year's Eve.

STYER: All these shows take intense planning.

You have to always have an A, B, C, and D plan, especially if you're doing things live.

So, you have to almost plan for everything going wrong and that's what good producing is.

POTTHAST: We discovered that nothing is inexpensive on New Years Eve, and from the producing standpoint, you realize that you have two on air deadlines.

If you're doing a live show, you go, "Okay, it's a 60 minute show.

I've got to fill 60 minutes."

For a New Year's Eve show, you've got to make sure you hit midnight at the right time.

You can't have a song that's going to run 30 seconds past 12 o'clock.

It's sort of got to end.

Make way for midnight.

RODMAN: What I remember most of the Happy New Year USA, was with Harry Anderson and Mel Toreme, and we did it from Ethel's Place, and we had multiple cameras all over the city.

Right before we were going live, the lighting board went dead.

STYER: This is a live show.

We're hitting the air, the network, everything, at 11:30.

We actually started the show without the lights on, with Mel with one portable light on him, saying hello.

He said, "I'll see you at the symphony hall."

RODMAN: And our lighting designer was on the phone to New York with you know, technicians and whatever.

POTTHAST: We got the lights back on.

Michael Styer: But I'm producing.

I'm saying, "This is the end of my career.

This is the end of my career."

(rooster crows) ♪♪ THOMS: My first job as a producer, I was assigned to Up on the Farm, and Up on the Farm, meaning being aware of what's going on, on the farm.

And I thought about this for a while.

I thought, "You have no background."

But I was a brand new producer, which was pretty intense.

And they also gave it a new executive producer, Everett Marshburn became the executive producer.

MARSHBURN: Donald had never lived on a farm.

But he became a good producer.

And you know that was sort of the beauty of public television in the early days, we wanted producers who could produce, and we figured if you were a good producer, you could produce anything.

THOMS: But he knew nothing about farming either.

But we became this great pair.

Well, we got to talk to great farmers.

And we would do these personal stories of how they were surviving.

We were everywhere, and farmers actually knew us.

And so we must've done it for four more years.

And then we turned Up on the Farm, a weekly live show, to Farm Day, which was a daily 15 minute farm show.

♪♪ CHARLOTTE NICHOLS: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to a new Farm Day.

I'm Charlotte Nichols.

ENGLISH: In the early 80's, I was a newspaper reporter covering Congress, House and Senate Ag committees down in Washington, and I really liked public television, because when I'd be out covering a story for the paper, I'd run into these people from a show called Up on the Farm.

It was pretty interesting stuff.

In 1985, the job opened up for a writer for a show called Farm Day.

It was a 15 minute national daily economics farm show, and I got it.

Farm Day, we covered live cattle, pork bellies, corn, soybeans, that kind of thing, the futures market.

THOMS: The show actually hit the air at 5:30 in the morning.

So, I would leave my house at 2:30 in the morning, and would get to MPT, making sure that everyone who was involved in the crew was up, and it was like this phone tree, just to make sure everyone was going to show up.

That schedule, just, it was crazy.

♪♪ F.J. BATAVICK: Located where we are, we're very fortunate, because we're near Goddard Space Flight Center, and we're near Washington, so it wasn't unusual for NASA to come to us and ask us to produce products for them, which we thought was pretty neat.

They came to us, and they said they had this idea of doing teacher in space on the space shuttle, and she was going to do demonstrations for kids.

They asked us if we would produce a series of television programs based on those demonstrations.

And we said, "Absolutely."

I produced the pilot.

We called it Drop Shots.

It was nationally tested.

It went over really, really well, and we were really excited by that.

They picked the teacher to go on board, and we all watched in January, 1986, as the challenger took off with Christa McAuliffe and other astronauts, and within two minutes, it blew up.

We were in an office at ITV, watching around a little TV set.

We all looked at each other.

So, there goes all those wonderful lives.

There goes, Christa McAuliffe, and God bless everybody on board.

We all looked at each other and thought, "There goes our dream of doing a national series."

It was just a horrible day.

We were just really beaten by that event.

♪♪ RON CANADA: Over the course of the next 15 weeks, we intend to be your eyes and ears at the 1982 session of the Maryland General Assembly.

MARSHBURN: You know, in the 80's we hit our stride with long form information about public affairs.

We felt it important that people know who was running for office, because very often, all people know is the name.

We gave people who were running for office an opportunity to take their case to the public, so people could see who you were, what you stood for, or what you didn't stand for.

MARSHBURN: One of the things that Maryland public television news and information has been about is about not taking sides, and making sure that we cover all the bases.

That's the thing that I learned while working here, is that we have to give voice to everybody involved.

JOHN GRASSIE: As many as 4 million illegal aliens, will have a chance to become citizens.

WOMAN 2: Yes, my husband is not... yet but I think this is a big problem, you know, because I have three childrens.

MARSHBURN: It's not enough that we just have the people who make the decisions to talk.

We have to talk to the people who are being affected by those decisions, because, very often, there's a disconnect.

♪♪ MADELEINE CAMMAN: Hello, everybody.

Welcome to "Madeleine Cooks."

I'm Madeleine Camman.

Today, I would like to give you the whole fish story.

POTTHAST: As far as I know, cooking began here in the mid-1980's with Madeleine Camman doing "Madeline Cooks."

That was followed by the first Pierre Franey show, "Cuisine Rapide."

RODMAN: I had the privilege of working on a lot of cooking shows.

I did in studio, was "Cuisine Rapide" with Pierre Franey.

These were national shows, as well.

I did a location shoot with Jacques Pepin in his house.

I did all the "Coastal Cooking" with John Shields, "Chesapeake Bay Cooking" with John Shields.

We had a blast.

It was such a good time.

POTTHAST: The staff loved those shows because the entire building smelled of good food.

I mean...

When Pierre was cooking, oh boy, everybody from the business office to the people making coffee were running down here just to smell the aromas coming out of the shoots.

RODMAN: They're long days, but when you work with talent that's nice and doesn't have an ego, it's fun.

You forgot you're working.

POTTHAST: Raymond Ho talked to two producers who were bringing Julia Child back to public television after a long absence, and got them to partner with Maryland Public Television.

We were one of probably five stations in the country that was doing them.

It's a great little cottage industry.

JULIA CHILD: This is Julia Child.

Bon Appetit.

F.J. BATAVICK: If somebody came up with a neat idea, we often times could green light it ourselves if we had enough money, and we could produce fairly cheaply in those days.

So, I guess it was in the fall, somebody came to me and they said, "Let's do something special for Black History Week in February.

Let's do something on the Underground Railroad."

And I said, "Fine."

So, Joyce and Scott Davis wrote this script.

I said, "Let's go ahead and do this."

So, they went and did casting for it, and they went to the Baltimore School for the Arts.

And there was one young woman who just stood out from all the other actors and actresses, and it was Jada Pinkett.

And they came back and they said, "Boy, did we find the star of Freedom Station."

(thud) JADA PINKETT: I know there'll always be a promised land.

And when you get there, everybody be free.

Nobody be a slave.

F.J. BATAVICK: The whole thing, believe it or not, takes place in the basement of a cabin.

And if you're a fan of old time radio, a lot of it was audio that you heard that- you heard the slave catchers coming in upstairs, knocking on the door, demanding if they could search everything.

You heard them walking across the floor upstairs, but all the action took place in the basement.

That's where all the drama was.

(dogs growling and barking) SLAVE CATCHERS: We'll get us that certificate, Mister.

Then we'll be back with the sheriff, and we're going to tear this place apart.

F.J. BATAVICK: We were very, very lucky to give her, her first onscreen performance opportunity at Maryland Public Television.

GLENN TOLBERT: Hello, welcome to Up on the Farm.

I'm Glenn Tolbert.

THOMS: Glenn Tolbert and I had worked together on Up on the Farm and Farm Day.

And Glenn wrote a treatment.

I think what astounded me about it was Glenn's writing.

You know, he was a good writer for Up on the Farm, but for this, he was... released, to write the most beautiful words that I've ever heard, celebrating the natural history of the state of Maryland.

ENGLISH: Glenn Tolbert and Donald Thoms sort of put together this idea.

They called it Outdoors Maryland.

So, the show began as four, one hour programs each year.

The pilot aired in the fall of 1988.

It got a lot of critical acclaim, and viewers loved it.

Maryland Public Television and the Department of Natural Resources decided, "Hey, let's make this a regular thing."

MARSHBURN: One of the shows that I think I'm most proud of was Other Faces of AIDS.

I don't know that I worked harder on any other show than that.

The AIDS epidemic hit in the early 80's.

We did Other Faces of AIDS in 1988-89.

People were really afraid.

People were scared.

They didn't know what was going on.

I knew that it was disproportionately affecting the African American community.

MARSHBURN: In the 80's, the time from diagnosis to death for a white person was two years.

For a person of color, it was six months.

Well, why is that?

What's going on?

And that's what the program looked at.

LAVERNE HODGES: It goes to show that you're not- the disease have... no particular person.

MARSHBURN: We can't control how people feel about it.

We can control the fact that we need to give them honest information.

And that really is what public television does.

I was at one of my frat brothers houses Sunday after the show aired, and his mother came in from church, the father there had seen the show, and as a result of seeing this show, had asked the church to start an AIDS awareness campaign in the church, in the hopes of saving somebody's life.

I mean, if we can do that, then, you know, yes, we've done something.

T. BENEMAN: I left MPT in 1988 or 89.

I loved working on a team, and everybody having a part to play.

JOHN DAVIS: It was a big decade of change, but I think it was a maturing process.

DAY: It was a very good time to start in public television.

They had had some early successes, but they were sort of finding their way.

ENGLISH: It's interesting to look back at the 1980's and to see all the creative energy come together to produce these programs, and it sort of set the stage for the 90's.

MARSHBURN: Many people don't realize that as public television was really creating itself, cable television came in too.

LEO EATON: Cable was beginning to make fairly major inroads at that point.

Discovery had just started and was beginning to make documentaries much more sort of accessible to a public beyond just PBS audiences.

POTTHAST: We were all scared of cable when cable came on board.

Everybody was like, "Oh, it's going to kill public television."

And it didn't.

F.J. BATAVICK: Viewership used to be tremendous in the days when there were four channels to choose from.

But as cable encroached, viewership started to dip.

But the ironic thing about that is the people who were in charge of cable were stealing all the ideas from public television.

We would put on a cooking show.

They'd do a whole cooking channel.

We'd put out a history show.

They'd do a whole history channel.

It's fine.

It's a free country, but I think people have to realize where all these ideas emanated from and that's from public broadcasting.

MARSHBURN: We still do the best cooking shows.

We still...

Even though other channels do it, we still tell the best history.

Our documentaries are still above what we see anywhere else.

So public television knows how to do it right.

That doesn't mean that others aren't going to do it.

It does mean that we need to still do it and that we still need to let people know that we do it.

And that's what they support us for.

(horns) ♪♪ JEFF SALKIN: The one area where we have less competition than we used to is down the middle news because the media environment is fragmented.

Anybody can start their own streaming service.

How do they get noticed?

Well, they go loud.

They go partisan.

They go to the extremes, meaning there's very little in the middle, and that's where we are.

F.J. BATAVICK: Since 1971 there has been a Frank Batavick working at Maryland Public TV.

I started then, and my son continues to work there.

FRANK S.

BATAVICK.

: I'm actually Frank S. Batavick for Steven.

He's Frank J. for Frank John.

And every once in awhile he would take me to work, and I'd visit and get to walk around that big TV station on the hill.

F.J. BATAVICK: Frank first stepped into MPT when he was three years old, and his first job there was actually mowing lawns for the grounds people.

F.S.

BATAVICK: Eventually I got a full time job as an assistant producer, and the first project that I worked on was called Mini Dragons.

The boss of the department was Leo Eaton, and he spearheaded all these big international co-productions, Mini Dragons being the first one.

ANNOUNCER: South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, these are the Mini Dragons.

BARTO: In the 1990's I sort of got to do the sound man equivalent of jumping out of an airplane.

I'd worked in a studio all of the time, and I got this opportunity to go on location to South Korea to do location sound.

I'd never done that.

I got assigned to Mini Dragons, and then I got to really experience what happens out on location because I had never really done that work at all.

It's very different from working in a studio.

Sounds come from every direction, and you're asked to do things that you don't have any time to prepare for.

You just got to do it.

It's a lot like being in combat.

EATON: Raymond Ho, the then president, was very ambitious to build MPT up into a major, major center.

We had three quarters of $1 million in an R&D fund, and we could use that money that the R&D fund gave us and some surpluses from Wall Street Week, which was a huge plus in those days, to really kind of do some very interesting work.

Except for GBH, nobody else was really doing major national and international productions at that time.

MICHAEL WOODS: But even now in the TV age, kings and presidents and popes use the vast array of visual aids invented here which we see all around us to boost their authority.

EATON: And by two or three years into my tenure as Senior VP, we were the fourth biggest producing center in the country for the system.

Initially we were almost laughed at.

What do you mean?

You're just this MPT.

Timeline, because it was the first, didn't really make too much of a dent.

Legacy and After the Warming did, so after that we were taken much more seriously.

JAMES BURKE: The greenhouse effect scare forced them to make decisions that would radically alter the way we run the world and that would give us the life we lead today in the second half of the 21st century after the warming.

EATON: Also at that time, costs were going up, and it became almost a matter of survival.

You couldn't afford to do it all yourself, so you had to find projects big enough to interest both PBS, the BBC, Australia, NHK, whoever it might be.

And yet we're able to, by bringing these international partners together, make something which any one station, any one network couldn't do on its own.

EATON: Michael Tobias had- and Raymond had cooked up these ideas of Mini Dragons and Sea Power.

Sea Power was a very interesting example.

Sea Power was something that predated me in a way.

It was just a beautiful brochure.

There wasn't anything much beyond it at that time.

But when I became Senior VP, Raymond, one of his instructions to me, "Well look, we've taken these brochures around so much.

We have to make this real."

It was a fantastic success.

LEONARD NIMOY: For it is here that the northern fleet hides some of the most powerful and feared elements in the Russian Naval Armory: it's nuclear attack submarines.

EATON: It exceeded PBS's expectations.

That helped kind of solidify MPT's position as somebody who delivers.

They were trusting us.

They were actually coming to us with ideas and projects and beginning to say, "You're now one of the people we rely on."

WOODS: It is the human duty and the human interest to understand.

♪♪ ENGLISH: So we're still out there making- making Outdoors Maryland.

Around 1992 the show went to 13 half hour episodes.

Long form documentary.

Production on location.

It became a much more difficult process to do that many stories in a year because these are really unusual kinds of programs.

For instance, let's say you're out fishing on a river.

Well, are they going to catch anything?

Maybe they will.

Maybe they won't.

Sitting in a blind waiting for a bird for a day, two days, three days, whatever it takes.

If you're going to do a story that has an underwater sequence, what's the visibility going to be?

And so you're going to hope.

You're going to cross your fingers.

You're going to spend some money.

And I'm going to send you down.

I hope you come back with something, you know more than 10 inches from your face.

SUSANNE STAHLEY: I came to Maryland Public Television back in 1996.

I was hired for Outdoors Maryland and spent more than a decade producing Outdoors Maryland segments and half hour specials.

I grew up with a creek running along the backyard, and I would explore tadpoles and fossils.

And I think it was a perfect set up for Outdoors Maryland.

It is pulling up the chest waders and going out into the mud.

Meanwhile, you're chasing a critter that isn't standing still for the camera, and you are just trying to stay upright.

RODMAN: I've done a lot of Outdoors Maryland shoots, and I'm not really an outdoors person.

It's a lot of walking.

You're climbing up rocky areas.

And with gear.

You've got your tripod, your kit with your batteries in it which aren't light, and your camera and trying to make sure you don't fall over.

But once you got these shots, I mean, it was worth it.

STAHLEY: The process of production is not over by any means once you have done the shoot.

For every day of shooting, there is probably five days in the edit suite at least screening all the footage, writing the script, laying out the story, puzzling over whether to go one frame forward or one frame back to capture that exact perfect cut.

Many late nights in the edit suite.

ENGLISH: Stories that really seem to live on in our viewers' minds.

One would be the Hell Bender.

Hell Bender is a a large salamander.

They live in very unusual habitat up in mountains streams and things.

Its got little fingers and sort of a flat head.

Took one of them around the bucket to people and they didn't know what the heck... You know, what is that?

And so I think that's part of the appeal of the show.

We're there to capture the stories, the pictures, the sound that they won't see on a regular basis.

STAHLEY: I think Outdoors Maryland is so popular because it is an adventure story.

It's an immersive experience, and the goal is to bring the viewer into that experience so that they know that place, they understand the human stories.

These stories affirm and illuminate the richness of our environment and the need to protect it.

F.S.

BATAVICK: Back in 1991-'92, there were very few women on television in terms of talking about the news.

So a woman named Bonnie Erbé brought an idea to Maryland Public Television to have an all female public affairs program talking about news and politics.

It was the first of its kind.

I mean, you see a lot of programs today like The View which you think, oh, that's been on a long time.

Well, To The Contrary, was the first program, and that was Bonnie's idea.

F.S.

BATAVICK: Some of our commentators were people like Arianna Huffington, who at the time was a conservative commentator, and she since kind of changed her stance.

But she was a very high profile person.

There were people like Kate O'Beirne and Linda Chavez.

One of the points Bonnie Erbé was making when she brought that series to us was that there weren't enough female voices on television.

And she really wanted to make that happen, and she did.

BONNIE ERBÉ: Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbé.

Welcome to our first broadcast of To The Contrary.

In the weeks to come we'll feature a wide variety of views from a woman's perspective.

F.S.

BATAVICK: And she brought a lot of interesting opinions and thoughts in this round table discussion program that you didn't typically see at the time.

COMMENTATOR: An African American is three times as likely to be declined a mortgage loan.

F.S.

BATAVICK.

: And public television, I think for a long time, was an innovator in that realm.

LONG: Financial difficulties required that the State Department of Education make difficult decisions and eventually eliminate the division of instructional television.

At the time that ITV was no longer functioning, MPT's management at that point under the auspices of Raymond Ho was the executive director then, determined that they wanted to continue our activities in K-12 education.

LONG: So Raymond created an education division.

We very quickly began the process of seeking additional funding.

We had some success.

We got money from PBS to do a... what we called then a live electronic field trip.

It was celebrating the anniversary of Maryland's founding.

MAUREEN BUNYAN: Welcome to the first ever Maryland Electronic Field Trip.

Voyagers of the Ark, the Dove, and the Pride II.

It's a field trip back in time to find out more about the people who first traveled to the Maryland colony on the Ark and Dove.

WOMAN 4: We're going to go to a question we received from the internet from Matt Winer.

He would like to have you answer this question for us.

Did anyone ever threaten mutiny on the real ship?

CAPTAIN: Well, nay.

I treats me crew well.

If that were to happen, why, you see I keep control of all the items on board.

There's cutlasses and gunpowder and muskets and such in me own cabin under lock and key.

I keep control of that, and so there's none will threaten me as long as I do control them.

MARSHBURN: Life here in the 90's was very interesting.

While the technical revolution, moving into computers, getting ready for that was one challenge, we also started paying more attention to what was going on in the state legislature because that became increasingly important.

JOHN: Well, many of the money programs are on track, Jeff.

But it will take an enormous effort and a frantic last week to avoid a huge train wreck.

SALKIN: I got here at the very end of 1991.

I had worked as a street reporter in the Baltimore market at two commercial stations for about seven years.

I was at the very, very end of my twenties and wound up here to work on State Circle.

At the time, State Circle was a partial year show.

It only ran from January to April when the legislature was in session, but later it expanded to year-round.

Because really the same issues that we were talking about for four months could be examined the rest of the year as well.

It didn't make a whole lot of sense to build a franchise, run it for four months, and then shut it down and then go into hibernation.

SALKIN: Now there's just over a week left before the legislature adjourns for the year, and it's still unclear what your tax rate will be or where big chunks of tax money are going to be spent.

SALKIN: My whole career I had trained to- and I think I was pretty good at boiling down complex things into 90 second stories.

But to do that, you're cutting some corners.

You're shortening sound bites, maybe inadvertently sometimes taking somebody out of context.

The difference here is we have more time.

Still try to ask the same questions, the right questions, but the guests get longer to respond and seldom if ever feel like they'd been taken out of context.

FEIKIN: Hi, I'm Rhea Feikin on location for MPT at the Potomac hunt races, and we are celebrating Preakness week.

Now this is one of the most beautiful tailgate banquets I have ever seen.

FEIKIN: One of the things I love most about my job, I love talking to people.

I love interviewing people on the street.

MPT on location was really a lot of fun because we went all over this state.

I was a city girl.

I had never been out of the city much, but going to western Maryland, to the eastern shore, I had a different feeling about parts of our state because of that.

I grew to have such a wonderful respect for the people who lived there.

And we were so welcomed wherever we went.

We recognized that we were not Baltimore Public Television.

We were Maryland Public Television.

F.S.

BATAVICK: MPT has always thought kid's programming was important because kids start learning at a very early age.

All of the educational children's programming that MPT has ever done is all about teaching young children how to grow up, how to learn about their environment and surroundings and how to behave.

We tried to do all of that with Bob the Vid Tech.

♪♪ F.S.

BATAVICK: In the early 1990's it was decided that MPT needed to connect with children more on a personal and a local level, so they created a kid's club and they needed a kid's host.

And that kid's host became Bob the Vid Tech.

SHAW: We had this idea for a kid's club, and the first talent that we hired didn't like it, didn't want to do it.

So then we were suddenly in the need of a new host very, very quickly.

We had already built the set, we had graphics, but the host backed out.

BOB HECK: It was the fall of '92.

I was already working in D.C. in a political comedy show.

So I remember coming into the studio.

There was a prop table, and there was a teleprompter.

SHAW: And in the middle of Bob's audition, the teleprompter broke, and it didn't phase Bob at all.

He just rolled with the punches.

HECK: And I just kept going and made it up.

SHAW: And that was exactly what we needed, and that is the- really the beauty of, of Bob Heck.

HECK: Later that day I got the phone call.

"You're our new vid tech."

F.S.

BATAVICK: He did short interstitials, which are short little bits that would have been in between the PBS Kids programs.

HECK: A lot of vid kids would like to work for a newspaper.

What should they be doing now?

JOURNALIST: Start writing.

Write anything.

Write about your day, an event at school.

SHAW: That expanded into such a fabulous Emmy Award winning kid series.

F.S.

BATAVICK: Television is expensive, and the producers really wanted to have Bob have other characters that were with him.

HECK: That seems like way too much trouble.

F.S.

BATAVICK: Instead of hiring other actors, Bob just acted them all out.

HECK: All this racket.

F.S.

BATAVICK: It was a riot.

It was kind of like very old school television, but really new to young children.

(instruments playing) HECK: We have a meet and greet event at MPT for new employees.

It was a very busy time.

Lots of people working there.

And this new fellow arrives by the name of Larry Unger.

Turns out he's going to be the chief financial officer.

Very important job.

When he comes up to me, he goes, "So who are you?"

And I'm like, "Bob Heck.

I'm the children's show host.

I play all the various characters on the show.

Bob the Vid tech the host, Biff my brother who's always jealous and wishes he had his own show, Pop Quiz the station janitor, my mom, Mama Vid Tech, and the voice of Sid the Vid Fish."

And he says, "You do all of those characters and we just pay you one fee?"

I said, "Yeah."

He says, "You're a good guy to have around here."

LARRY D. UNGER: I had spent almost 30 years in the financial services industry, had absolutely no background in entertainment or television, much less public television, but we had sold the last bank that I was with.

Was kind of looking for a little something different.

And the CEO they brought in needed some help, and I came in as a three month contractor.

And that was about 22 years ago.

UNGER: Rob Schuman came to Maryland Public Television at the end of 1996.

He had just sold the Learning Channel.

And when he came in, I'd say he brought an entirely new discipline.

And he also really emphasized education.

PORTER LONG: PBS had created something called Ready to Learn.

Stations were finding ways to help childcare providers use high quality children's programming in- in their childcare settings.

So we began early activities in that arena.

There was no bigger supporter of MPT's education mission than Rob Schuman.

He looked for ways to showcase our efforts and found ways to make sure that opinion leaders were aware of what uh MPT was doing in education.

ROB SCHUMAN: Hello, I'm Rob Schumann.

You're used to seeing TV signals looking like this, but with the new digital signal, you'll really get the big picture.

UNGER: The other thing that I particularly coming in when I did was concerned with was the digital conversion.

It was huge.

We needed $40 million in order to do the digital conversion.

We did build a second tower here.

Four of our six towers had to be redone.

They were tubular steel instead of solid steel, and therefore they couldn't hold the weight of the new antennas, which is why our conversion cost so much.

We'd get some looks because WBAL for them to convert it's one stick.

We have six.

But I have to say looking back on it now, as concerned about it as we were and the time that we put into it, it all went really well.

MARSHBURN: The Morgan Choir, the 1990's, I will never forget that.

We did a 90 minute show on it.

We taped Dr. Carter's 25th anniversary program.

Dr. Carter was a musical genius, and what he brought out of that choir was just exceptional.

There is a beauty in his mastery of the art and in those voices.

I mean, there's just no way to explain that except if you hear it, you're touched by it.

We tried to get the critic at one of our local newspapers to review the show.

A critic declined.

♪♪ ♪ (singing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy") ♪ MARSHBURN: The reviews that came in came in from the public.

The show aired on a Wednesday night.

When I got to work Thursday morning, we had over 300 phone calls about the show, every last one of them positive.

The beauty of the Morgan Choir program is... not just that it was music and good music.

It was that.

But it was also local good music.

It's ours.

It was home grown.

That was the thing that I think made it different.

(orchestra playing) (applause) F.S.

BATAVICK: I think the 90's were kind of a transitional phase for MPT because there was a youth movement from people that had worked there for many years, and some of them went on to other jobs.

And some young people came in, so we saw a lot of new faces, myself included.

There was a good energy there.

BARTO: Some people refer to their first job at Maryland Public Television was kind of like their graduate school.

If you were in one category of work, you could always look at what your friend was doing in another area and maybe learn some of that.

EATON: It was Maryland Public Television which really gave me the platform to develop my craft, my abilities as a producer, and my knowledge of how to get shows on the air.

And so for me, when I think back to my MPT years, I am eternally grateful for the opportunity that gave me.

UNGER: Well you know, I'll run into someone in the grocery store, and they'll recognize that I'm with MPT.

And the first thing out of their mouth always is, "Oh my God, I love Maryland Farm and Harvest or Motor Week or Masterpiece Theater."

It's always the same.

And in almost 30 years of banking, no one ever came up, put their arm around me and said, "Larry, I love your checking account."

♪♪ BATAVICK: In the 2000's MPT was forced to become more entrepreneurial because there wasn't quite as much support for public television as there had been in the past.

So outside funding from different sources was more necessary than ever.

STEVEN SCHUPAK: Cable was eating the lunch of public media.

So it had to make that up through creativity and it stuck to its guns and stuck to our genres and I really think that's made all the difference.

LONG: When things really began to... explode was 2000.

JOHN DAVIS: You had to be more creative about funding and more creative about how to get the show out to the most people.

You knew that public television was still your core.

You could get into 85 percent of the households in the country or whatever the number was, but you had that other 15 percent or so and you wanted to make sure they could be exposed to the show as well.

LESTER: Are we past the novelty stage with the hybrids.

That where we're going now.

JOHN DAVIS: I think so.

You're going to see them not only in SUVs but also in city buses.

There's some already being tested and you're going to see a lot more of it.

LESTER: John Davis, thanks very much.

Good to have you here.

JOHN DAVIS: My pleasure.

LESTER: Coming up next, what we've all been waiting for.

We're going to hear from- FEIKIN: One of the greatest joys of mine at MPT is doing the program called Artworks.

DAY: When State of Mind ended I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do, but I had heard that one of the producers had proposed an art series and Rhea Feikin, she always has had a love for the arts.

And I love the arts.

You know, who doesn't?

FEIKIN: Originally it was a half an hour of local artists, music, dance, pottery, literary people, you name it.

♪♪ FEIKIN: I loved that show.

DAY: I put together a team of about six or seven producers.

All of them extremely talented.

FEIKIN: Everybody worked so hard on that show because everybody loved doing it.

And we got to realize the number of artists of all kinds in the state.

(applause) FEIKIN: Ultimately it went off the air because we just didn't have enough money to continue to produce it.

DAY: It was great fun.

I loved that.

Doing that from 2002 through 2008.

♪♪ FEIKIN: Then it got resurrected in a sort of different way.

STAHLEY: In 2012 I became the producer of a series called Artworks.

The difference is the segments are artists from across the country who we would never meet otherwise.

FEIKIN: There are stations just like us and we all produce some art segments and they all go into the pool.

We are now part of a consortium and people can choose ones from all over the country that they want to put on the air.

STAHLEY: Art allows us to connect with people across any barriers whether it's physical, political, racial, or cultural because it speaks to our emotions and it expresses our needs as human beings to connect.

♪ Don't cry for me Argentina ♪ ♪ The truth is I never left you ♪ WEBB: I was there at the beginning of Wall Street Week and stuck with the show all the way through.

The show was around for a long time and it was a mainstay and it meant a lot not only to the viewers, but also to the folks who helped to put it on the air.

UNGER: The show was must watch television for Friday nights for a large segment of the American population.

Went all over the country.

I got to know Louis a little bit.

He was one of the most amazing speakers I think I have ever heard.

RUKEYSER: Tonight we're going to be talking about two subjects that might conceivably interest you.

The subjects are money and sex.

WEBB: Louis Rukeyser was so supportive of me through the years.

He was a tough taskmaster, but he was very kind to me.

POTTHAST: In the late 90's PBS was starting to look at it's Friday night.

Stations were starting to get weary of the W's.

Washington Week and Wall Street Week had been the anchor to Friday nights for decades.

They proposed this project called Public Square.

They wanted to incorporate Wall Street and Washington Week into it.

Wall Street and Washington Week didn't want to become part of it.

G. BENEMAN: Certainly Wall Street Week defined my Friday nights for 30 plus years and I got to travel the world doing Wall Street Week.

It was truly a family.

Louis was a friend.

WEBB: I can remember the fun we had in New York when the show was done live from Carnegie Hall.

That was just amazing.

WEBB: Live from Carnegie Hall.

Friday, November 3rd.

Ladies and gentlemen, Louis Rukeyser.

(applause) RODMAN: My camera was on stage and we had a live audience.

When I had to get to my camera I had to walk across stage.

And as I'm walking across stage the audience starts applauding.

And I'm thinking if my father was only alive.

His dream was for me to be a concert pianist and here I am getting applause at Carnegie Hall which was a trip.

It was fun.

JOHN DAVIS: We had just finished celebrating our 30th anniversary up at Carnegie Hall in New York City and we didn't' realize that would be the last big anniversary for the show with Louis at the helm.

POTTHAST: It still had a very devoted audience, but here in the building we started to feel that it's time slot and life was being threatened.

RUKEYSER: Looking back on three incredible decades in which tens of millions of Americans came to realize that money matters were not just a plaything of the super rich.

POTTHAST: If we didn't do something, we could lose our time slot.

And if we lost our time slot we were gone.

RODMAN: I was running camera on the last Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser.

It was a sad night but, Louis was waiting for everybody in the front office to leave to go home and we went live that night.

And when he walked in the studio he said, "You ain't seen nothing yet."

I still have the script from that night.

RUKEYSER: Well a funny thing happened to me on the way to the studio this week.

I got ambushed.

By the time I completed the journey of hundreds of miles from my home that I've been making for 32 years to bring you this program, I half expected to find the door bolted, the furniture padlocked and my swiveling arm chair up for auction.

DARLINGTON: And Louis of course was offended and he said so on camera, on air and that is a no no.

Louis should not have done it.

If I had been there I think he wouldn't have done it.

Cooler heads might have prevailed.

But I understand his feeling.

RUKEYSER: Meanwhile this has been Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser.

Good night.

WEBB: When the show came to an end it was upsetting to all of us.

We realized that there were a lot of moving parts to it and I was sorry that the show had come to an end.

Especially in a way that had resulted in a very argumentative kind of an end.

That was- that was a great shame to me.

G. BENEMAN: People changed.

The audience changed.

Something to have a run that long in network television is quite remarkable.

The first night was exciting.

The last night was exciting.

POTTHAST: Losing it was a major blow in many ways.

It was a major emotional blow.

It also was a major financial blow.

RODMAN: It was painful.

It was just really painful after that, after Wall Street left.

JOHN DAVIS: It was a very sad day for me since I had been around for so long on it.

And it was the end of a television era.

Looking back on it, it probably also was about the time that all the rest of financial TV that sprang from that series took flight.

WEBB: The real tragedy was Louis dying a few years later.

That was very upsetting to a bunch of us, too, who had worked on the show.

POTTHAST: Once Wall Street was gone I think MPT started re-evaluating who are we?

What is our purpose?

What should we be doing?

Okay.

This has happened.

What do we do now?

And it took a few years to figure that out, quite honestly.

WEBB: I can remember seeing a recording of the last show.

I was holding the reel and thinking this is history.

It really was the end of an era at MPT.

POTTHAST: One of the challenges when Wall Street Week with Louis Rukyeser ended was creating the follow up and creating it quickly because we were still on the air every Friday night at 8:30.

We partnered with Fortune Magazine.

We hired a new producer.

We hired additional on air talent.

We had to book guests.

I mean, we created a new set.

All of this was happening very quickly and the PR fallout was huge.

KAREN GIBBS: I came to Maryland Public Television to co-host Wall Street Week with Fortune with Geoff Colvin who was the editor at large, I believe for Fortune Magazine.

That was in June of 2002.

I knew of Maryland Public Television through the show's predecessor Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street Week.

Appointment viewing.

My father and I watched it together every Friday night.

I was actually a guest on February of 1991.

RUKEYSER: Karen, let's cut to the bottom line.

Who should be trading financial futures and who shouldn't?

GIBBS: Institutions and companies that have some sort of risks that should be hedged should definitely be involved in the market.

GIBBS: I was the first woman that they had that was a commodities guest because my background started in the commodities market.

I was the first woman that they hired on the trading floor in the Chicago Board of Trade back in 1970.

GIBBS: Because of our collaboration with Fortune Magazine we were able to get some of the best financial journalists and investigative journalists.

Really you could bring home some of the... examples from the outer world right into your living room.

(bells ringing) GIBBS: I'm Karen Gibbs.

COLVIN: And I'm Geoff Colvin.

Welcome to the first edition of Wall Street Week with Fortune.

GIBBS: It was one of the most dramatic weeks Wall Street has seen in months.

The SEC charged WorldCom with massive fraud.

G. BENEMAN: The times had changed.

The days of if you want to know what the stock market did you must watch Wall Street Week, to my phone is telling me what the value of my portfolio is by the second.

That's technology.

And it's difficult to compete against that.

GIBBS: They had Bloomberg.

They had CNBC.

They had MarketWatch or Yahoo or AOL and I think that was the shift that put the nail in the coffin for Wall Street Week with Fortune.

ANNOUNCER: From the historic Green Briar Resort in the smoking Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, it's Barbecue University with Steven Raichlen.

BATAVICK: A terrific MPT personality is Steven Raichlen.

Steven is a world renowned barbecue master and in the early 2000's he came to MPT with his program Barbecue University.

RODMAN: In the early 2000's I worked with Steve Raichlen on Barbecue University.

And we ate really good.

I mean it was just a lot, obviously, a lot of meat.

When I came home I couldn't look at a piece of meat.

BATAVICK: With any cooking show you have to order all these things in.

So when we do a cooking series with Steven Raichlen and we bring in pallets of charcoal.

And it's hard lump charcoal.

It's the only kind of charcoal that Steven will use.

But we will bring in tons of it.

RODMAN: Everything's time consuming with cooking shows.

We had to set up a whole area there and the lights every day and then the prep for all the food.

You're working in dark in the morning and then it's just, you know, a long day with smokers.

We're using grills and you're over it all the time.

So my coat and my gear smelled like we just came from a fire.

I could not get that smoke smell out for months.

BATAVICK: It's in every pore of your body.

It's in your clothes and it smells good for a while, but then after a couple of weeks you're ready to get rid of it.

RAICHLEN: Amazing.

Something so simple could be so delicious.

LONG: When you're talking about broadcasting you're looking at long form resources and it was not as easy for teachers to customize what they wanted and needed.

They could find the place in the tape to start playing it, but that wasn't nearly as easy as being able to call up a digital file.

We were looking for ways to integrate the changing digital, the coming digital technologies into education.

That is what eventually led us to Thinkport.

Thinkport was designed as a portal.

The idea was to find ways to make educational resources more accessible to teachers and to make them more clearly aligned with the curriculum.

So a teacher could logon and say I'm a third grade teacher and I'm teaching science and find the particular standard that had been developed by the Maryland State Department of Education.

And then under that standard could find resources that were aligned to this.

We developed very robust websites within Thinkport focused on Edgar Allan Poe, the Chesapeake Bay, the underground railroad.

(woman singing) ♪ Steal away ♪ ♪ Steal away ♪ ♪ Steal away ♪ WOMAN 5: You know you're going to have to make up your mind, too.

You think and think all night.

By dawn you must decide.

(heart beats) LONG: Thinkport in no way was a change in MPT's mission.

Our mission was still to deliver curriculum resources to the schools and to help teachers find ways to integrate those resources in the classroom.

And we continue to do that.

♪♪ HECK: Howdy, vid kids.

BRIANNA: All set Bob.

HECK: Whoa.

F.S.

BATAVICK: There was a moment in the early 2000's where Bob the Vid Tech was actually syndicated on multiple stations and we started getting emails from as far away as Canada because kids in Canada were seeing the Buffalo TV station airing interstitials with Bob the Vid Tech.

HECK: In the early 2000's my producer gets the okay for a new program for Bob the Vid Tech called Blast into Space.

I went to astronaut school in Florida and they put me in this thing that turned all different directions simultaneously.

So I get strapped in and then all of a sudden it was like, Okay, vid kids.

Here we go.

Whoa... Wow.

Am I still alive?

HECK: Everybody has a run.

You know, the Beatles lasted eight years.

We had an 18 year run.

So it was a success.

ANNOUNCER: From our home... to your home.

You've made the Direct Connection with Jeff Salkin.

SALKIN: Hi everybody.

Welcome to the Direct Connection on MPT.

We'd like to hear from you.

SALKIN: Frankly my favorite show to do is Direct Connection.

It's live.

We take viewer calls.

No matter how hard I prepare for a guest or an interview the viewer calls in with a question I hadn't thought of.

I just love doing that.

SALKIN: With Barack Obama's election in Illinois he becomes, I think, only the third African American since reconstruction to be elected to the U.S. Senate.

Why so few?

SALKIN: I like to think we were a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of interactive media.

The coolest interview we ever did was live from the space station.

There was a Maryland astronaut aboard the space station and NASA patched us through to the space station.

There was a delay, long delay between the question and the answer.

It's definitely the longest distance interview I've ever done.

SALKIN: Commander, thank you for speaking with us.

ASTRONAUT: Jeff, it's great to speak to you and Owings Mills that's right down the street from where I grew up.

So it's great to know that's where you are right now.

♪♪ SCHUPAK: One project I'm really proud of is Chesapeake Bay Week.

On my second week here I got a number of the producers and some of the people from development together in a room and we talked about what our viewing area all had in common.

And I think it was Jeff Salkin who said we should do a program on the Bay, just the Bay.

And I thought about it and having just produced for Discovery Channel and their Shark Week I thought well, why don't we do a whole Chesapeake Bay Week.

UNGER: Chesapeake Bay Week probably never would have gotten off the ground without the generosity of Irene and Edward Kaplan.

At the time they made the largest ever gift to Maryland Public Television of one million dollars to establish the new initiatives fund.

This fund allowed us to do things we never could have done without it.

Including most of the most popular Chesapeake Bay Week programs.

ENGLISH: In 2005 a really interesting thing happened.

We decided that we were going to begin really what became an on air film festival during the week in which Earth Day falls.

ENGLISH: The Chesapeake Bay is important for a lot of reasons.

Number one it's North America's largest estuary.

Number two, it's one of the major economic engines of Maryland.

Number three, just because it's an ecosystem that needs to be kept as clean and as healthy as it can be.

SCHUPAK: We've produced our own programming on the Bay both serious and lighthearted, but we've also solicited works from the community.

ANNOUNCER: A tidal wave of terror from... ENGLISH: Things like Eatin' Crabs, Eatin' Crab Cakes.

NARRATOR: This is going to be one tasty road trip.

ENGLISH: Eatin' Oysters.

Eatin' the Chesapeake.

The entire Eatin' series.

Chesapeake Bay by Air.

Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Spanning The Bay.

♪♪ We've done the concert for the Bay.

We've done the Chesapeake Bay Summit hosted by Frank Sesno, which looks at very important issues facing the health of the Chesapeake Bay.

FRANK SESNO: It does not matter where you are on the political spectrum.

If you're paying any attention you've noticed that the weather is changing.

ENGLISH: The average public television viewer is very wired into things like this.

And the idea was to put together this week which would foster discussion and action.

SCHUPAK: After our first Chesapeake Bay Week somebody wrote in and said, "So glad you've been doing Chesapeake Bay Week for all these years."

And it was our first year.

It was one of those things that felt like even though we were just invented it, it's been around forever and it just seemed so right.

WALTER CRONKITE: I'm Walter Cronkite and you're watching Chesapeake Bay Week on Maryland Public Television.

ENGLISH: At Maryland Public Television our focus is the people of Maryland.

We're here to serve the citizens of Maryland as we try to find the best stories to tell around the state so people have a better understanding of their world.

PORTER LONG: One little boy went up to a teacher and said, "this has all been great, but when do we do math?"

The fact that they were doing math and didn't know it was very gratifying.

SALKIN: We have to maintain things that we've earned over 50 years, which is a reputation for quality, reputation for impartiality.

And if we defend those things and build on them, whatever the technology is going to be, whatever the program is going to be, we'll have an advantage.

SARAH SAMPSON: One thing that is really unique about working in public media, and media in general in this decade, is the variety of tools that we have at our disposal.

We use GoPros which are small cameras that you can put pretty much anywhere, and we put them anywhere and everywhere that we can think of.

And one of the other things that we use a lot in recent years is a drone, and a drone is a spectacular tool because you've got these beautiful sweeping landscapes that we're able to show from the air.

We can get the same kind of footage that has been gotten in years past only by renting a helicopter or doing something a lot more complicated, where, for us, in ten minutes we can put the drone up, we can get a great aerial shot, it's got great stability, and it really helps us tell the story in a way that you just can't capture from the ground.

DAVIS: It was very apparent that the car companies, when they would take you on a trip, they wanted to see something on the internet pretty fast.

So, I came up with the idea that when one of our staffers, who usually had some kind of a portable camera with them, would go on an event, that they would come back and do a capsule review of what they just experienced.

GREG CARLOSS: Here I am, finally in the Supra.

This is a long time coming.

DAVIS: People love that kind of unfiltered material.

Get it up on the internet within 48 hours, and we would have much more media and content only for the internet than we ever had before.

You never overlook any way to get the show out to all the possible audiences you can.

SCHUPAK: We are using digital media, some of it which is social media, which is Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, to target messages, first, to tune in and tell them what's going on MPT's main channels.

But we also deliver content specifically to them in different regional areas that are smaller than our broadcast footprint.

Digital lets us target specific zip codes or even a particular one-block area.

We can geotarget content, in the healthcare space, like on the heroin and opioids initiative.

We find out where the overdoses are taking place or where high doses of fentanyl are being mixed into the drug supply, and we can send messaging just there.

It gets really exciting.

It's personalized.

FEIKIN: Coming up on Chesapeake Collectibles.

DAY: I believe it was 2011 was our first show.

I mean, one of the great things is that Maryland was one of the colonies.

So we have stuff that's been sitting in some of these houses for several hundred years.

STAHLEY: Chesapeake Collectibles is a unique animal, in the sense that it is 90% produced in two days.

One long weekend in which almost the entire station takes part.

We have close to 1,000 people; 500 collectors bringing an average of 2.5 items into the studios.

We have twenty-something appraisers who all have different expertise.

We have three camera units running all day long, and it's a huge enterprise to make that into a 13-part series.

FEIKIN: Welcome back to Chesapeake Collectibles.

We tape 13 shows over two days, and I have to appear with 13 changes of clothes I have to bring with me.

That means at home, I have to try them on...

Does this jacket fit?

What to wear with it?

Do I want to wear this necklace?

What earring?

So I have to have 13 outfits ready to go with a little- I have a little envelope and I put in the earrings.

It takes me forever to get ready.

That's the hardest part of Chesapeake Collectibles for me.

DAY: Rhea is a delight to work with.

She's a trooper, she loves the show, she meets so many fascinating people.

They love her.

It's just been great.

STAHLEY: One of the benefits of working on Chesapeake Collectibles is that you can bring in your own mystery object to find out what it is.

FEIKIN: My husband had this piece of art that was in a box, a wooden box, and inside the box was this portrait, oil portrait, of a woman in a very ornate, gold frame.

STAHLEY: My husband's attached to several rocking chairs that we have from his mother's house.

So I brought one in; the appraiser said it's worth about five dollars.

FEIKIN: The appraiser looked at it and he said, "The frame is worth more than the picture."

STAHLEY: But I still have not been able to use that as an excuse to get rid of that rocking chair.

♪♪ ♪ o say can you see ♪ ♪ by the dawn's early light ♪ SCHUPAK: Around 2009, we started getting smoke signals from the state of Maryland that they were going to explore stories about the War of 1812 and the writing of the Star-Spangled Banner, and that that was going to be a two and a half year celebration.

And MPT began developing ideas to capture some of this excitement.

BATAVICK: One of the biggest things we did in recent memory was our big Star-Spangled Spectacular in 2014.

It was the 200th anniversary of the writing of the Star-Spangled Banner.

So the tall ships came to Baltimore.

We did a Great Performances Special with PBS where it was performed at Pier 6, and we did a local co-production with WBAL TV celebrating this momentous occasion.

YOLANDA VAZQUEZ: Well tonight promises to be a spectacular evening in every sense of the word.

SCHUPAK: But we also wanted to fill in all the time in between 2012 and 2014 with programs that explore the history, and the anthem, and it kept building, kept building until we created a vision for a massive, two-hour live program on PBS.

An enormous audience for the program, and it was a huge success.

ANNOUNCER: Live from Baltimore, Maryland, Great Performances presents Star-Spangled Spectacular, Bi-centennial of our National Anthem.

(orchestra playing music) ♪♪ JOHN LITHGOW: ...and here's some more fireworks.

JOANNE CLENDINNING: All right, it's time to test your agricultural expertise.

This is our thingamajig of the week.

Now here's a hint: it's not a dog collar.

You think you know what it is?

Well, give it some thought and we'll have the answer at the end of the show.

SAMPSON: I first came to Maryland Public Television in the summer of 2013, and I joined about halfway through the first season of Maryland Farm & Harvest.

After a little bit less than a year, I took over as the series producer and director for the program.

♪♪ UNGER: I still don't kid myself, even though I've been here 22 years, that I'm the filmmaker.

When they came to me and said, "We want to make a film about farming."

And I'm going "Really?

We're going to watch corn grow?"

Well I have to tell you, they made an absolutely terrific series.

I have learned so much about the technology of farming, probably more than I ever wanted to know.

FARMER: We spread chicken manure last week.

SAMPSON: Maryland Farm & Harvest is definitely part of a legacy at MPT, as far as agricultural programming.

It's something that MPT does that nobody else does.

It really does seem to resonate with people, I think.

Whether they grew up on a farm or whether they know someone who grew up on a farm, or even if they grew up nowhere near a farm, people are really interested in where their food comes from.

ENGLISH: It's sort of a surprise for a state this size, that there are that many agricultural operations.

There's more than 12,000, and they run the gambit.

Anywhere from large grain farms, dairy farms, livestock operations, all the way down to little mom-and-pop operations like goat milk, small orchards, that kind of thing.

SAMPSON: In the same episode we might have a tractor-pull, we might have a vineyard, a winery, and we might have alpacas.

So there really is something for everyone.

ENGLISH: The objective of the program is to help people understand where their food comes from, and who's growing it, and what kind of challenges do they face?

SAMPSON: Well we put together an episode on climate change for season five, which was really challenging because there's a lot of science that goes into that.

There's actually impacts being seen in Maryland right now.

FARMER 2: The weather patterns definitely have gotten more erratic as time went on.

SAMPSON: On the lower Eastern Shore there's sea level rise.

It's making the groundwater saltier which is making it more challenging for them to grow crops, more invasive species, that typically weren't found in this area that are now being found here.

So that was an episode that definitely stands out.

CLENDINNING: Our thingamajig, did you guess what it is?

This is a cattle horn straightener.

It was used on prized bulls to make sure their horns looked just right.

(dramatic music) DAY: In about 2012, Larry Unger, our president, realized that the 50th anniversary of Vietnam was coming up, and that we should do something.

UNGER: The Vietnam project was still probably the biggest project that's ever been done here at MPT, and it's really the type of community thing that I wanted to do.

We spent four years, virtually all hands on deck doing this project.

SCHUPAK: We did a three hour documentary that told personal stories from veterans while they're still here and can tell their stories, and they're getting older.

It's really important to hear from them firsthand.

DAY: To find all those men, those hundred soldiers that were really on camera, we had to go through listening sessions all over the state.

Western Maryland, Eastern Shore, Southern Maryland, told them what we were doing, and I was straight with them, I said, "Look, we know it's too little and too late," so I listened and I said, "Each one of you, tell me a few minutes of your story.

Where you were, what you did."

And some of them were pretty intense.

It's very painful for them to remember a lot of the stuff that went on.

SCHWEIZER: Only way you'd know they were dead is if they fell out of the tree or dropped their weapon, because they'd strapped themselves up.

VETERAN: This is where we had the hardcore regulars up here.

SCHUPAK: By having a live event that veterans can come to free with their families was important, and we celebrated with music, and with food, and with artifacts, and camaraderie.

It was really a special weekend event.

UNGER: And we had lots of memorabilia of all kinds, right up to helicopters and the trucks that were used.

I can still remember one of the vets sitting in the helicopter.

You know, feet dangling out and crying.

The emotions that we got from the veterans were...

I think that's really what it's all about.

VETERAN 2: Thank you very much for finally welcoming us home.

It's about time.

Speaker 21: Thank you, sir.

DAY: One of them one said to me, "You did a hell of a job on that, I'm a Marine and we don't normally do this but, when we all get to heaven we're making you an honorary Marine."

(laughs) So that was cool.

ENGLISH: One of the differences in Outdoors Maryland between 1988 and today is that we don't just track animals anymore, we track issues and policy.

MAN 3: ...And then from here we move into this incredibly intact mosaic of marshlands.

ENGLISH: Our viewers are much more sophisticated, and they expect us to explain things to them that we didn't have to back in the eighties.

And quite frankly, it really wasn't on the radar back then as much as it is now.

The health of the Chesapeake Bay, air pollution, it all's part of it now, whereas before the stories were a lot simpler.

SCIENTIST: It's always exciting to see that these animals are doing so well.

Good for everybody.

Whoo!

WILEY: When I started at Maryland Public TV, we were recording programs on two-inch tape.

This big, reels.

Then we went to one-inch, smaller reels, thinner, one inch thick.

Then we went to three-quarter inch that made noise when you played it in the machine or when you recorded.

And playback, always a challenge.

From that we went to beta, smaller.

Then digi-beta.

Then DV.

Now we are shooting on cards and disks, or, in many cases, just recording to hard drives.

So it's amazing how fast technology moves.

RODMAN: The way I just remember it is the crews got smaller and smaller.

That's how I saw technology.

We used to go out with a F.R.U.

truck, and you had an engineer, the audio guy, the tape guy, and these were all big, two-inch tapes.

Then, by the time I became a videographer, the tape was in the camera, it was incorporated into the camera so then you were a one-man band.

So it transitioned from a crew of maybe eight, to one.

F.S.

BATAVICK: I remember early on in my career, one of the graphics engineers who was designing a 3D sequence for us...

He bought a hard drive that was one gigabyte.

Ooh, a gigabyte.

That was a lot of space when they first came out.

They were very proud of it because it was time for the computer age.

So it's kind of cool to have been part of that transition.

SAMPSON: I think one of the biggest changes is the emphasis on digital media and social media.

And that's something that's really fun, because you do get to interact with viewers in a way that you're not able to, just by broadcasting on television.

We hear from a lot of people via Facebook or via Instagram.

When we go out into the field and we're shooting, they're also gathering pictures, they're updating Facebook from the field, they're updating Instagram, we're on Twitter.

And we have a lot of followers.

Hopefully that translates to some new viewers on MPT.

That's just sort of the reality of working in television this day and age.

You can't just say I'm working in television, you're actually working in public media.

F.J. BATAVICK: What television is all about is telling stories.

The technology keeps changing, but the challenge is to continue to tell those stories.

STAHLEY: The mission of public television is a journey of discovery.

We need to continue to showcase the audience as part of the productions.

In this way they become part of the story.

That's how we bring our audience with us on the journey.

MARSHBURN: I am a firm believer in the power of public television to make a difference in the lives of people.

And we explain to people what's going on with other people they may not understand or know, in a way that only we can do.

SHAW: I think Maryland Public Television is kind of an incubator of creativity and great ideas, and really great people.

BARTO: I think it's important that there be something like public television to continue the process of inventing television.

I have faith that the public television will come up with the next iteration of itself.

FEIKIN: People are excited about what we're doing.

I am encouraged by the atmosphere and by the possibilities for the future.

UNGER: Things are changing.

This industry is going to get thrown up in the air.

I kind of like that.

When it comes down, maybe I'll be in a better place than before it got thrown up in the air.

I think if you're quick enough, and smart enough, that's the way this works out.

WEBB: One of the things that always had a profound effect on me was walking into the master control room, and I could look up at the wall, and I could see a whole bunch of different sources.

There was a little sign above a larger monitor saying, air.

If I would push one of those buttons, it would make a change in hundreds, thousands of homes.

The way it looked, the way it sounded, and that always had a profound effect on me.

The same way when I was a kid, watching the broadcast, if somebody did something wrong, I'd probably notice it.

Now, whenever anybody asks me what did I do in my life?

I can say, "I was a television announcer."

And I can feel good about it.

Lot of wonderful, wonderful memories.

♪♪