Comments on: “Junior Council”: The Church Steps before the Television Camera

By: cathy hoskins

cathy hoskins — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:13:03 +0000

Although I am not a mormon, and I never attended any Primary sessions, I did watch Junior Council. We were lucky enough to have a little black and white television set, so we always watched whatever programming that was aired. Junior Council held a contest once to see how many words could be derived from a very short list of letters. Guess what? I won that contest. Here’s a little Catholic girl from a Catholic School winning a contest on a mormon show. I won a tape recorder and was a guest on the show. That was many years ago and I still remember the thrill of it all. Not only a new tape recorder, but being on T V !!! I am now 70 years old so you can imagine how long ago that really was. Nice memory that I have of something that happened so long ago.

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:01:39 +0000

Thanks kevinf. It’s nice that one of us actually knows what he’s talking about. (I was just winging it!)

By: Maurine

Maurine — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:59:42 +0000

I have never heard of this before. But then, my family didn’t have TV during that time. We grew up listening to children’s programming on radio. Thanks for the new information.

By: kevinf

kevinf — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:36:10 +0000

Mark, good point about recording. In those days, the only way to record a TV show was through a device called a kinescope, which was a film camera focused on a TV screen that was showing the broadcast. The film had to be developed and then stored in an environmentally controlled warehouse, which was all expensive. Most of the networks didn’t do a good job of it until video tape came along, and those old kinescope recordings mostly weren’t well preserved, often left in cans in hot storage closets, where the images deteriorated over the years or just plain got misplaced.

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:15:50 +0000

I don’t know when Bob Welti moved to KSL, but all my memory (for whatever it’s worth) puts him at that station, which was a CBS affiliate back in the 60s and 70s and then sometime became the NBC affiliate.

As to the recording of television shows, it was expensive and complicated and rarely done in the early days, and when it was done, the recordings were often destroyed soon afterwards. For example, there are several “lost” episodes of the Honeymooners–nobody had figured out that five decades later people would still be wanting to watch that. And you can be sure that the Honeymooners had a bigger budget than the Primary.

By: kevinf

kevinf — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:06:22 +0000

I don’t remember it, but it certainly sounds more fun than “Little Einsteins”. I do remember “Romper Room” from the 50s as a very young child.

By: Researcher

Researcher — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:26:14 +0000

I wonder if my mother was acquainted with the show. It’s not the sort of thing that would come up in normal conversation unless you were one of their “mouseketeers.”

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:04:59 +0000

Naw, I’m in that cake, about to jump out.

By: Hunter

Hunter — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:01:50 +0000

Is that you, Ardis, in the Donald Duck outfit? I knew it!

By: Edje

Edje — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:51:59 +0000

And Ardis scores again in the the category “Things I’d never even thought about.”