By 1952 this new world of television was really taking shape. The Auntie Dee show, the first of our children’s shows, had moved to national distribution as had Fred Wolfe’s Motor City Wrestling. By the end of the year the top six shows on television were Howdy Doody, Kate Smith, Perry Como, Auntie Dee, Strike It Rich and the CBS News with Douglass Edwards, who had also started out in Detroit.
In the 50’s, Channel 7 would also launch into a series of extraordinarily popular local shows: Rita Bell on the movies; Ed McKenzie, who had been Jack the Bellboy on radio, did a nighttime show; and later Johnny Ginger would spin records and appeal directly to teenage girls. By 1953 WXYZ was selling more advertising and making more money than any station in the ABC chain. In his book "Beating the Odds" about the history of ABC, former president Leonard Goldenson says that the network was in such bad shape that it started dipping into WXYZ’s bank account almost weekly to pay bills. New York did it so often that eventually Channel 7 general manager James Riddell just kept $50,000, the amount needed to run the station, and sent everything else to Goldenson in New York.
In the summer of 1953, Production Chief John Pival, the man who had created most of the programs at Channel 7, began looking for a new children’s show to air across the lunch hour. He landed on a young comedian from Cleveland named Milton Supman who had been working under the name Soupy Hines. Soupy had applied at WXYZ Radio, as well as other radio stations, and been turned down. When Pival saw him, he quickly hired him, renaming him Soupy Sales. According to Bill Bonds, Soupy had a kind of magic that no one had ever seen before.
With the success of Soupy, Channel 7 moved to try to hold the audience by following the show with another hosted local kids show. They found a stand-up comic, Marv Welch, performing very raunchy shows in nightclubs. Pival renamed him "Wixie Wonderland" and put him on the air. Marv’s penchant for the bottle, by his own admission, caused him to nearly melt the microphone when said, "Good morning, children!" Viewers, of course, were none the wiser.
Channel 7’s innovation and influence were becoming legendary across the fast-growing world of the TV broadcasting.
The summer of 1954, however, was a watershed. Word leaked to the Detroit newspapers in May that a deal was about to be cut for the Lone Ranger, which had played weekly as a WXYZ Radio production for more than 20 years. Within a month, the creators of the masked man had sold the entire image and rights to Hollywood, thusly ending his radio career. That same summer, Riddell saw an opportunity to get Soupy Sales onto the ABC network as a summer replacement for Kukla, Fran & Ollie. Soupy’s show, produced from Detroit and featuring the "Soupy Shuffle" dance and his sidekicks, became an instant success. Within months, Soupy was on his way to Hollywood where his routines with custard pies made him a national celebrity.
As success for Channel 7 grew, the Macabees building had become too crowded. Riddell began to search for a new home for Channel 7. Studio space was needed for wrestling and boxing as well as other locally produced shows. ABC was doing much better, but it still wasn’t a network capable of sending its own programming to its stations and affiliates. In 1958, Riddell found what he wanted: a new home for WXYZ radio and television on a 200-acre farm owned by a recently retired doctor. Located at 10 Mile Road, this desirable real estate was adjacent to where the Lodge Freeway was to be extended.
Broadcast House opened in 1959 on land that was then miles outside the city’s suburbs. It was the most modern, technologically advanced and efficient television station in the country. It was the first station anywhere to use a camera in a helicopter.
One of the biggest breakthroughs in television history, however, was the invention of videotape. Before then, almost all programming was shown on film or performed live. John Pival saw the advantage of videotape as an advertising tool. It could instantly show advertisers what their ads would look like. They held demonstrations for Campbell Ewald, Ross Roy and other ad agencies, all of who were enthused about the new technology. But ABC in New York was reluctant to adopt videotape. In 1960, there were not many color sets in America, even though RCA was developing them. But RCA owned NBC, which consequently became the first network to broadcast in color. And videotape technology was essential to advent of color TV. At the time, ABC had a deal with Disney to supply them with programs. But NBC approached Disney and offered them a better deal utilizing color TV: Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. Walt Disney himself called ABC president Leonard Goldenson and gave him the opportunity to match the deal, but ABC was nowhere near ready to move toward color and was forced to pass.
By the mid 1960s the relationship between Pival and ABC in New York was becoming strained over programming differences. In early 1966, Pival resigned, saying that he would form his own production company. Sadly, that never happened. Later that year, at his home in Naples, Florida, Pival apparently tripped at the end of his dock, hit his head, fell into the water and drowned. It was truly the end of an era.
Pival’s departure coincided with the slow decline of locally produced television programs. The economics were obvious. It was cheaper to produce a show in one location and repeat it all across the country than for individual stations to produce shows seen only in their area. This signaled a huge shift for WXYZ, Channel 7.
