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The First Sign Of Trouble At RCA…

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Eyes Of A Generation.com

The First Sign Of Trouble At RCA…

Thanks to John Schipp, here is a great photo of Joe Garagiola and painter Leroy Neiman with Art Parker behind the camera…a Norelco camera!

In 1964, RCA stopped production of the RCA TK41C and was switching over to the TK42. Fred Himelfarb was head of NBC Labs at 30 Rock and had been involved with the testing of the 42 and he, along with his bosses, was not thrilled with the results. About this time, NBC was stepping up it’s game in sports coverage and something had to be done to put more color cameras on their new mobile units.

In 1965, Fred had Norelco deliver a couple of cameras to his lab for testing. Over the course of a year, he made some modifications and changed a few specs which Norelco incorporated into all of their cameras. Fred also added a little “secret sauce” and had Norelco incorporate those changes into 35 special order cameras.

This was a big deal. Here is NBC, the child of RCA refusing to buy RCA’s big new cameras and going to a competitor. This made a lot of waves in Camden and Princeton, but it did force the secret TK44 development team into the lead. The cameras began to come in around September of ’67 and the World Series was coming up, so it was determined that the Norelcos would get a baptism by fire and there is a funny story that goes with that event.

The NBC and Norelco brass were at the first game and had their own special trailer with 4 monitors. Fred was in the control trailer and after the game he went to the Norelco trailer where there was a lot of backslapping. The most praise went to the shot from the left field camera. That’s when Fred told them he’d brought along a TK41C for comparison…guess where that was! Yep…left field.

Fred told me the whole story the year before he died. Just so you know, Mr. Himelfarb started with RCA as an engineer on the TK40s in Camden. When the first ones were shipped to NBC’s Colonial Theater in late 1952, Fred came with them as the direct link back to RCA and made many improvements in the TK41s over the years, including designing the single cable. Now you know. Enjoy and share!

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15 responses to “The First Sign Of Trouble At RCA…”

  1. Savo Lukic

    neiman that’s classic

  2. David Kintzele

    TK44’s at KMGH in Denver, at the time a CBS affiliate. We did have an old ’42 in the newsroom for news teases.

  3. Chris Stune

    Joe G was an a-hole

  4. James Shea

    Based on the handle design, this appears to be a PC-70. Did only the PC-60 have the dual-cables? It is interesting that the PC-60, which was introduced at the 1965 N.A.B. Convention, was on the market for only a year before the PC-70 was introduced at the 1966 N.A.B. (though the PC-60 was also displayed alongside the PC-70 that year).

  5. Alan Maretsky

    I remember in the late 60s seeing a remote of KNBC’s Sunday Show at Griffith Park. As I recall, there were about 3 or 4 Norelco’s shooting the show.

  6. Steve Dichter

    Old enough to have worked w/the TK-41’s. They provided beautiful pictures due to the KTLA engineers that kept these beasts running.

  7. Clifford Whitney

    And I was in a two week camera school at RCA in Camden, NJ when they pulled the plug on all broadcast equipment. That was for the TK-47ep.

  8. Dave Johnson

    Aren’t we lucky to have been part of that era…..and remember what it took to do live TV.

  9. John Schipp

    Two RCA TR-800’s prototypes were delivered to NBC Videotape for operator feedback. If I recall correctly, they were way over engineered — with too many tiny buttons for functions rarely used. They were fast – too fast. One of NBC’s desires was to be able to rewind and set for playback Nightly News and Today using just one set of VTRs. The 2″ VTR was too slow to record Nightly and then rewind and play back the 30 minute show for 7 PM airing. RCA made sure their machines could accomplish this, however the VTRs were so fast operators would overshoot the beginning of the show.

  10. Terry DeCarlis

    Oh yeah…TV-81…wasn’t that a joy to string out at 150-200 ft or at one time we had PC-70 with mini dual that was 250-300 which took 3 people to load in the truck…we nicknamed “The Widow Maker”

  11. Alan Rosenfeld

    Dave, RCA developed and made the TR800 as well as rebranding Sony 1100’s.http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_C_videotape

  12. Val Ginter

    We moved to NYC in 1968, and I walked over to the Thanksgiving Day Parade where they had all the equipment at 77th Street (we lived on 76th) and they were dismantling everything. And this engineer yelled: “Hey, Freddie, hand me that SONY monitor.” I thought: “Uh, oh!”

  13. Chuck Maye

    I worked for a station in the ’60s that was torn between buying the Norelco the engineers wanted & GE cameras for the directors when they went color. They decided to buy one PC-70 & two PE-350s to keep the peace. Almost immediately, they knew the PC-70s were superior. The GE rep finally agreed to give them a third camera just to get that Norelco out of the studio.

  14. Dave Perrussel

    I’ve heard this story a while ago, and yes you can see it as the beginning of the end. I also heard that NBC ordered their 1″ Type C VTR from Sony in the late 70s. Did RCA make a 1″ Type C VTR?

  15. James Stanley Barr

    I often wandered what NBC’s engineering did when they had to order those Norelcos….I thought “did they use an assumed name to avoid the fact that they weren’t ordering RCA cameras?” Norelco’s publicity department must have had strong willpower to keep from making a point in their sales literature that the network owned by the company that pioneered color television was ordering cameras from a competitor instead of “in-house” from their own parent company. 😀

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