It was an ordinary day. Going through some of my old photographs I have taken and saved over the last quarter of a century when I came across, once again, a photograph of the Jasper Yeates House which was located on the west side of the first block of South Queen Street in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
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| Historic Jasper Yates House on South Queen Street |
The house was originally built for Jasper Yates' father-in-law, President Judge of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It was a three-story, four bay brick townhouse built in the Georgian style of architecture. Jasper eventually moved into the house and it was eventually expanded to four stories and converted to commercial use. The house was later known as the home of WLPA Radio and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Jasper Yeates was an American lawyer and judge who was a justice of the state Supreme Court from 1791 to 1817. During his career he built a fine library of legal books in several languages totaling 1,043 volumes in all. Most were purchased in Dublin and London. Jasper was a Federalist who was appointed by the Washington administration in 1794 to serve on a commission sent to negotiate an end to the Whiskey Rebellion. He died in Lancaster on March 14, 1817 and was buried in St. James Episcopal Church cemetery along with his wife Sarah who died October 25, 1829. It was in 1949, a few years after I was born, that Lancaster's Channel 4 set up it's first studio in Jasper's dining room. Channel 4 smothered the elegant front facade of Yeates's mansion with some kind of plate glass, colored maroon and applied silver block letters spelling out WGAL-TV. One day, I'm not sure what year, this guy stops along the street to watch Channel 4's head producer, Paul Rodenhauser, who was also the 6 o'clock weatherman and the TV station's Santa Claus. Paul saw the guy through the window and opened the door and invited him inside. A week later the guy, whose name was Nelson Sears, was sitting in front of a camera reading the nightly news. Nelson was Channel 4's first anchorman. Then in 1952 the station changed their channel assignment number from Channel 4 to Channel 8. Now, I should tell you at this point that the information that you have just read was from a story submitted to The Lancastrian Facebook Page by John Earl Hambright.
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| An advertisement for WGAL-TV, Channel 4 |
Eventually John appeared on Channel 8 many times. He sat beside Dave Brandt on a show called The Knothole Gang which I remember fondly. Seems Dave was a perfectionist and memorized his scripts. Those early years for Channel 4, later Channel 8, were broadcast from that cramped studio on South Queen Street. One year, John remembered, his Ross Street Elementary School trumpet quartet blew "Lo, How a Rose is Blooming" for a Christmas program in 1951. Two years later John recalls appearing in a puppet show advertising Reynolds Jr. High's spring festival with Margie Walz who was the head majorette at Lancaster McCaskey High School.
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| An early photograph of Channel 8 on Columbia Avenue. |
One night on South Queen there was a fist fight in the control room when the sound man had his lights punched out by the husband of the cooking show lady, Carabelle Lounsberry, because he'd made rude remarks concerning her remarkable bosom. John told one last story about working slides and film on hot summer nights. They would prop open the rear door along the alley behind the place on South Queen Street to get a little air. One night a station worker was cranking back a big 30-minute I Love Lucy reel and forgot to put a little tab in place that held the reel on the rewind stand. The reel flew off the stand and Lucy, Desi, Fred and Ethel went unspooling down the back alley behind the newspaper office, Herr's Books and Troup's Music across Prince Street before ending up somewhere west of Water Street. Eventually the studio was moved to the West end of town along Columbia Avenue where it still sits today. And, Jasper Yeates House is still there, minus the special window that was placed on the front of the house. And, as you probably suspected, I have taken many photos of the building over my lifetime. Funny...but it still looks the same in every one of my photographs. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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