It was a great surprise to one who spent 21 years in and around the old broadcasting company. While writing anniversary shows for both WBT and WBTV, I had more than once turned the building upside down looking for just such historical information as this, but had never run across this particular publication. So when Ken Helms showed up at BT Memories world headquarters with a box of photos, memos, newsletters and odds and ends including this elegant, pristine document with a highly-detailed story and 51 photos and drawings describing our building at One Julian Price Place, it was as if Santa had arrived early.

Some of you old-timers (and you know who you are) will shrug and say, "Oh, that old thing," but we who had never seen this publication will pore over it with mouths agape, marveling at the depth of RCA's coverage. Apparently our company had created a broadcast center unique for its technology, efficiency and sophistication. And why shouldn't RCA be proud to tell the story? The building contained millions of dollars worth of new RCA products. Everything but the bathroom fixtures had an RCA logo on it.

When looking at the pictures think how excited the staffers must have been, to be in such grand quarters with so many new tools to work with. And our pride was still showing decades later. One day in the late 1960s it came to Mr. Crutchfield's attention that someone had been putting scuff marks on the aluminum kick plates on the radio studio doors. Imagine, some thoughtless doofus was kicking the kick plates! Crutch was having none of this, so he promptly issued a memo forbidding such a practice, and—just in case the doofus didn't get the word—had all the freshly-buffed aluminum kick plates covered with clear plexiglas .

The 28 pages of the WBTV story (and the magazine's front and back covers) have been scanned to a PDF file, requiring Adobe Acrobat Reader™. If you don't have a Reader, you can download one from free from Adobe's Web site. For those of you unfamiliar with the Reader: there are several controls that you can use for zooming and sizing to improve the focus.

Thanks to Ken Helms for this great contribution.

Click here to open the Broadcast News PDF file. Enjoy.