From the Archives: KTTV 1950 election coverage from L.A. Times newsroom

On Nov. 7, 1950, television station KTTV-11 broadcast election results from the Los Angeles Times newsroom.

A story in the next morning’s Los Angeles Times promoted the coverage:

All the excitement of an election — as it develops in a newspaper office, at the headquarters of each major party and in a radio newsroom — was moved into thousands of Los Angeles living rooms last night by KTTV, the Los Angeles Times-CBS television station.

It was a five-point remote show and likely the most extensive telecast ever seen in the Southland.

From the Times-Mirror Auditorium, headquarters for the telecast, the televiewer was taken via KTTV cameras to the Times city room, to the Republican and Democratic headquarters and to the newsroom of CBS.

Over-all Emcee Bill Welsh held forth in the Times-Mirror Auditorium where cameras took fixes on a blackboard list of candidates with three pretty girls chalking up results of the various races as the figures were relayed to them.

There, too, was Ray McKelvey, dean of political science at Occidental College, and Gladwin Hill, New York Times Los Angeles correspondent, giving periodic interpretation of results in the local and national elections, respectively.

Glimpses of the Times city room caught the flavor of its controlled bustle on election night and included close-ups and comments by L.D. Hotchkiss, editor, and Hugh A. Lewis, city editor. Tom T. Hartmann, Times editorial writer, guided televiewers in the city room portions of the program….

....It brought to the average voter, for the first time, the inexpressible thrill of being in the “front lines” of a major election.

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Nov. 7, 1950: KTTV cameraman swings over audience in the Los Angeles Times auditorium during live coverage of the general election. Sitting front row from left are Shirley Britt, Noreen Enright and Carolyn Ames. The fourth woman was not identified.

(Los Angeles Times)

In the Nov. 7, 1950, elections, California Gov. Earl Warren was reelected to a third term, Richard Nixon won the race for the U.S. Senate, and Edmund (Pat) Brown won the California attorney general race.

This post originally was published on June 20, 2013.