Channel 28 Is Given a History Lesson at Its 25th Anniversary Celebration

It was a night of nostalgia for KCET-TV Channel 28, a time for friends and celebrities to take a fond look back on the Los Angeles public television station’s 25 years, to tell through film, on tape and in person of “glorious, glorious evenings of excitement and culture,” as one early speaker put it.

However, not everything went according to script.

A parade of friends came to praise the station, among them Jean Stapleton, Taylor Hackford and Steve Allen, and Esther Rolle from “A Raisin in the Sun” and Rosana de Soto from “Stand and Deliver,” both presented by KCET’s American Playhouse.

And a pride of programs were represented. There were clips ranging from the bygone dramatic series “Hollywood Television Theatre” to the 1980 blockbuster award-winning science series “Cosmos,” the $8-million epic whose narration at times sounded like poetry (and which helped drive the station into severe fiscal debt); from “Visions” to a special showing Zubin Mehta wielding his baton like a rapier as he conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl.

Yet some rain fell on the parade. Actress Jayne Meadows surprised the audience Wednesday night at the Directors Guild in Hollywood by soundly scolding the Museum of Broadcasting, a host of the event, because its 20-minute promotional film on the highlights of American television failed to include her husband, Steve Allen. The film, which concentrates on myriad stars and shows of commercial TV including Edward R. Murrow, Lucille Ball and Johnny Carson, opened the program.

Meadows herself began routinely enough, saying that she and Allen had been invited to attend a PBS convention in San Francisco about 15 years ago--”as members of the KCET family” because of their 1970s show “Meeting of Minds”--and that on the last night she was asked by Larry Grossman, then PBS president, to speak at a dinner. At the time she was busy studying lines for “Loveboat.”

“I went down and I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to know that I have been upstairs learning junk ,’ ” Meadows said, “ ‘so that I can afford to aspire at KCET to do something worthwhile.’ KCET, this whole evening, is about truth. Nowhere, no network would have done ‘Meeting of Minds.’ ”

Then, her voice quavering, Meadows plunged in.

“You are my friends--most of you,” she said, and went on to say how upset she was by the museum’s “piece of film.” “Steve Allen alone created ‘The Tonight Show.’ The first year he had no writers. He went from local to network. . . . It was what Steve created in this town, and he was not represented on that film at all.”

Meadows said she hoped the broadcasting museum would “make this old bride of 35 years happy by putting him where he belongs in that film of people with all those shows.”

Allen got up and quipped: “Well, you journalists who are here this evening, there’s your lead. Hell hath no fury like a woman whose husband has been scorned. I’m sure it was actually just an oversight and not an intentional slight. There did after all have to be room for Fred Flintstone.”

Later, Bob Batscha, president of the broadcasting museum, said there was no intention to slight Allen, noting the museum honored Allen with a festival of his work in March. Asked whether the highlight film would be amended, he sidestepped with a “We’ll see.”

Meanwhile, Allen said the “dominant emotion” he and Meadows wanted to convey was their gratitude on being able to work on “Meeting of Minds,” their “labor of love.” It was of that lovely labor that one way or another virtually every participant spoke.

Film director Hackford, who went on to do such movies as “An Officer and a Gentleman,” said he got his first job at PBS in the late 1960s working in the mail room. He went on to become a reporter and producer on “28 Tonight” (a half-hour local news program that aired in the late ‘70s) and a producer.

KCET was “my film school,” Hackford said, “an opportunity for learning my craft. We had no money. We put together programs with spit. We had passion.”

Director Lynne Littman (“Testament” and “Number Our Days”), who met Hackford, her former husband, at the station, spoke with equal fervor of her KCET days in the 1970s. “We were very stubborn. . . . We stole, we cajoled, we lied, we did everything immoral to get moral programs on the air. Almost everything. . . .

“It was a life. There was no separation between our lives and our work. . . . We really liked each other. It was an era when blacks, Chicanos, whites and Jews were not necessarily automatically friends. And we lived together in a tiny bungalow, which we later practically chained ourselves to to get the station not to tear it down.”

Recalling the days of KCET’s fiscal crisis, Norman Lloyd, who had been an executive producer of Hollywood Television Theatre and who plays headmaster Nolan in the film “Dead Poets Society,” noted that the anniversary celebration is “doubly significant” because the station is now solvent.

“In my time at KCET, things were not so good financially,” Lloyd said. “Our celebrations were at the end of every week when the paychecks would arrive.

“So hats off to the management of KCET for having delivered that miracle of stability,” he said. “Within that stability lies the imposing creative past of the station. And if KCET has been saved, might it not have been saved for a purpose? And might not this purpose be to carry on in the tradition of ‘Hollywood Television Theatre,’ ‘Visions.’ . . . And if that tradition is carried on, will it not become a presence in national television as well as jewel of this town?

“Here in Los Angeles is a rich pool of talent waiting to go to work. What a glorious opportunity for KCET.”

Stapleton, who will be featured this fall in an episode of KCET’s acclaimed comedy series “Trying Times,” which skipped a year of programming for lack of financing, said simply: “As I’ve said to the other TV stations who are here tonight, most of my hours of watching are on Channel 28, and that’s the truth.”