Fort Worth’s first TV celebration of Christmas happened in 1948
Fort Worth citizens had a special holiday treat in 1948 – for the first time, they could watch Christmas programming on television. For that matter, that year was the first time DFW residents could watch any televised program.
To do that, they had to have a television set, and black and white was the only choice. Prices ranged from a Montgomery Ward’s portable set with a 4-inch-by-5-inch screen for $199.95 ($2,134 in 2019 dollars) to a Stromberg-Carlson set with a whopping 6.75-inch-by-10-inch screen for $470.20 ($5,018 in 2019 dollars). For that price some, understandably, chose to stand outside a storefront to watch the shows.
Our fair city boasted the first television station in Texas and the Southwest - Amon G. Carter’s WBAP-TV, which beat out Albuquerque’s KOB-TV by two months.
Carter’s television station used the same call letters as his radio station, which stood for “We Bring A Program.” The station’s first television broadcast took place on Sept. 27, 1948, when it presented a 49-minute live remote broadcast of President Harry S. Truman’s speech from the steps of the Texas & Pacific Railway terminal.
Two days later, WBAP-TV began regular broadcasts from its workshop (the main station was still under construction) atop Broadcast Hill in East Fort Worth. For its first few months, the station broadcast only during the evening for about 15 hours per week, but did put up a test pattern 15 minutes before programming began.
WBAP-TV began to build out what became a familiar lineup to television viewers: news, football, drama, and music, with a bonus of live wrestling matches from the North Side Coliseum. But the start-up was just in time for Christmas, and the station dove into Christmas programming.
The Flying X Ranch Boys (actually the Lightcrust Doughboys performing under another name to sidestep recording contract issues) performed a 30-minute version of the Christmas Story. Church choirs from Rosen Heights Baptist and Polytechnic Methodist sang carols, while students at the Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman’s University) enacted the story of the Nativity wearing costumes that were “authentic Biblical creations.”
“Santa Claus Chats” and “Blitzen’s Antlers” aired on Christmas Eve before more Christmas carols and midnight Mass from St. Patrick’s (the Catholic congregation in Fort Worth, not the cathedral in New York City).
The photograph with this column shows the sets for what has become either a beloved or loathed aspect of the holiday season – shopping.
WBAP-TV produced three “infomercial” shopping programs: Gifts for Teens, Dads, and Mothers in the living room set, as well as a program that featured chats with Santa Claus on the set to the left.
Fort Worth has always loved its holidays, and the fact that Christmas filled the air that first television broadcast season is no big surprise.
Over 100,000 items from the NBC5 archive are available for the public to view through the Portal to Texas History: https://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/KXAS/browse.
Carol Roark is an archivist, historian, and author with a special interest in architectural and photographic history who has written several books on Fort Worth history.