Placing a teleprompter or cue cards below a camera lens seems like old-hat to us - but our grandparents thought that it rendered an amazing affect for televised addresses:
"The new technique for speeches on TV - reading from larlge cards with lettering two inches high placed just under the camera lens - makes it possible for the speaker to look directly into the camera lens, giving the appearance of talking directly to the viewer." Although this article was written at a time when the television screen was a mere eight by eleven inches square, culture critic Gilbert Seldes addressed the question as to whether or not movies and radio will be voted off the island in favor of the television broadcasting industry.
The short-lived soap opera "These Are My Children" was the brain-child of Irna Phillips (1901 – 1973) and it is no matter that the "daytime drama" lasted less than a year on Chicago's WMBQ - the significance of the program rests in the fact that it was the first soap opera to be seen on American television screens:
"Last week television caught the dread disease of radio: soapoperitis... 'These Are My Children', however is no warmed-over radio fare. To make sure of this, Miss Phillips and director Norman Felton built the first episodes backward... Whether [a] soap opera on television can coax housewives to leave their domestic duties [in order] to watch a small screen was a question yet to be answered." He was the biggest television star of the 1950s - Milton Berle (1908 – 2002):
"An incurable extrovert of 43, Uncle Miltie is already a 36-year show business veteran and will probably go on forever. At the very least, his new 30-year contract with NBC will keep him in front of of the TV cameras until he is 72..." Before there was an HSN or a QVC - before there was an Adam Freeman or a Mary Beth Roe, there was "Your Television Shopper" and "Leave It To The Girls" starring Maggie Johnson and Faye Emerson, respectively. The programs were two of several such shows that aired during the prepubescent days of television broadcasting - and like the shopping shows that came along fifty years later, they, too, moved products off the shelves at a surprising pace.
Click here to read how Hollywood costume designer affected popular fashion... For reasons we are unable to fully comprehend, today's magazine editors are no longer asked to cast their ballots for a category titled "Most Photogenic Figure on TV" - but this was not the case in 1951, and Delores "Roxanne" Rosedale won hands-down. | 
