In post-World War 2 the consumer economy came roaring back
and Americans had the money to purchase discretionary items
like television sets. The TV industry had been stopped cold by
the war but broadcasters were newly able to invest cash in
launching TV stations. The problem, however, was that the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was flooded with
applications to build new TV stations and it seemed that all
available TV channel allocations would be exhausted before
anyone to determine that their geographic distributions served
the nation broadly. Thus, in 1948 the FCC imposed a freeze on new TV station applications while it
considered the problem (which ultimately resulted in the establishment of the UHF band of
channels 14-83 when the freeze was listed in 1952).
The eastern US had more operating TV stations in 1948 but the western US had few and the only TV
station in the Pacific Northwest was Seattle’s KRSB-TV (which later became
KING-TV).
Switch to the Oregon coastal town of Astoria, which was named for John
Jacob Astor who had made a fortune in the fur trade in the early 19th century
and, as part of developing his business, has sent parties to the vicinity to
establish Fort Astoria. While his business and the fort later disappeared, the
community took its name from that heritage. In Astoria, Leroy “Ed” Parsons
was the owner of the community’s only radio station, KAST.
Parsons, accompanied by his wife Grace, attended the National Association of Broadcasters annual
convention in Chicago where television was being demonstrated.
In Parson's words, "My wife first saw a television demonstration in the basement of the convention
hotel. She informed me on the way home that she wanted a television. I explained that the only
television station was in Chicago; there was no station on the west coast. Television reception was
physically impossible. Television stations started to develop across the United States and at the
convention the following year, it was announced that there was to be a television station built in
Seattle by KRSC. She said, "Now I can have television."
Parsons tried to explain that wasn’t a simple matter, that Seattle was too far away for a signal to
reach Astoria, but his wife was adamant. “I want pictures with our radio,” she said. Because
Parsons was a technology kind of guy, and known as very inventive, she told him that if anybody
could solve that problem she knew that he could – and so he was commissioned to grant her wish.
Parsons ordered a 9” Howard TV set, which included a radio and phonograph, and had it shipped to
Astoria. It cost over $1,000 (“and we weren’t that flush. She had to
do
without other things to have the set.”) and he considered it a
wasteful expense in his view primarily purchased it for its radio and
phonograph component – and only the possibility of being able to use
the TV side. Grace was really determined to have television.
The Parsons lived at the top of a 2-story building in the center of Astoria, directly across the street
from the city’s tallest building the Astor Hotel and Parsons coincidentally had a friend, Bob Priebe,
was the manager of the Seattle KRSC, Channel 5, that was then under construction. Parsons
arranged for Priebe to keep him apprized of the time test broadcasts were to be conducted, and
working closely with KAST’s chief engineer, Jimmy Titus, Parsons checked KRSC’s signal throughout
Clatsop County by listening to its audio signal. Sometimes he used his own airplane to cover more
ground. Eventually, he concluded that an adequate signal was available on the roof of the elegant
Hotel Astoria, located on Commercial Street across from the
Parsons’ penthouse apartment.
In Parsons’ words: “Throughout the summer of '48 I had pretty high
phone bills in conversing with Bob Priebe but I was able [find] a
usable signal up on the top of the Astoria Hotel and got permission
to…put an antenna up there. With the initial installation, I picked
the signal up on Channel 5 and transferred it to Channel 2 for
transmission across the street to my penthouse.”
Thus, with his primitive efforts bearing success, when KRSC signed-on November 25, 1948, Ed and
Grace Parsons were watching in their Astoria apartment (photo left). Word spread that the
Parsons had television. For the next month, people converged on the Parsons’ apartment to watch
the marvel, something that Parsons hadn’t anticipated. Ed Parsons later recalled “We literally
lost our home. People would drive for hundreds of miles to see television. And when people drove
down from Portland or came from The Dalles or from Klamath Falls to see television, you couldn’t
tell them no.” With his home life in chaos, Parsons ultimately ejected all of his
visitors—reportedly on Christmas Eve 1948—and confronted the realization that he had to figure
out how to provide TV to others in order to preserve his own domestic tranquility. Puzzling about
how to secure, amplify and deliver a TV signal, he suggested to the Hotel Astoria’s manager that
placing a TV in the lobby might prove good for business. Securing consent, he ran a line from his
equipment located on the hotel’s roof to the lobby, where he set up a receiver. The Hotel
Astoria’s lobby became “a theater every night with two rows of chairs and divans drawn up before
the 12-inch television screen,” he recalled. Soon, the TV traffic became too much even for the
hotel, so Parsons next ran a wire across the street to Cliff Poole’s music store. There, even more
Astorians could watch television on a receiver placed in the store’s display window. Poole’s Music
Store had become the first official cable television customer in the nation. The attraction quickly
drew crowds, causing the police to complain over the impediment to street traffic.
Clearly, Parsons needed to establish more TV viewing locations, so beginning in February 1949, he
started running coaxial cables through downtown Astoria.9 Over the next three months, wires were
plumbed through elevator shafts and underground tunnels, across buildings and along utility
poles—all terminating in residences, taverns and businesses where TV could then be seen. One of
Parsons’ customers was the Elks Club, which set up a television set and published a schedule of
programs. Group viewing was possible at the Elks Club, although reserved solely for members, and
that location helped relieve some of the pressure on other viewing locations in town.
Responding to requests from friends that he “hook them up,” Parsons had about 25 subscribing
neighbors by the summer of 1949. Parsons treated the cables as common property of the “system,”
in which all the customers were essentially participants in a cooperative. Although the financial
arrangements were neither permanent nor precise, everyone connected to the system had become
Parsons’ cable customers. While not entirely certain that it was necessary to secure KRSC’s
permission to distribute its signal in this way, Parsons nevertheless
requested such authority as a precautionary step—because cable
subscriptions were growing. In a letter dated May 18, 1949, KRSC
manager Priebe authorized Parsons to relay KRSC’s signal to his
subscribers.
DEVEOPING THE ASTORIA CABLE
TELEVISION SYSTEM
Parsons’ system was primitive and suffered from bugs that required time
and money to resolve. At one point, he brought a friend, Tom Becker, into
the venture. Becker recalled: “I raised $50,000 and spent three months
trying to get the cable reception to work. At the end of 3 months, I gave
back all of the $50,000 to the friends of mine that had invested. The
problem was herringbone in the TV and we could not get the picture clear. We later found out that
the cable was not uniform and the line amplifiers were not uniform. I got out of cable TV but got
several others in the business that stuck with it and made millions.”
By May 1950, Parsons had sufficiently resolved the technical problems to begin operating on a
commercial basis as the Pacific Television Company. He had 150 subscribers. News reports about
the Astoria system began producing inquiries from across America, and Parsons established a
consulting business with Byron E. Roman to offer consulting services on community antenna
television installations, as well as sell associated equipment. The company helped design and
construct numerous cable television systems, including installations in Aberdeen/Hoquiem and
Centralia, Washington, and Lewiston, Idaho.
News of these installations began to filter across the country producing a great deal of newspaper
and magazine coverage – which only served to fuel interest across the country.
PARSONS INVENTS THE TV TRANSLATOR
Parsons’ initial cable TV approach had been to carefully locate a master antenna, boost the signal it
received and then redistribute it by wire. Since wires were hard to run in some locations, he
eventually constructed a device to receive KRSC’s channel 5 signal on-air and retransmit it on
channel 2 to receivers throughout Astoria. Parsons installed the device without notifying the FCC,
and for the time being both he and the commission more
or less mutually ducked the issue of whether his unit
required a license. Parsons had designed and built
the first television translator, a device that
eventually became critically important in extending
television—and later FM—signals to distant
communities.
PARSONS LEAVES THE ASTORIA CABLE SYSTEM
BEHIND
In the beginning, no one really questioned whether Parsons had the authority to run wires around
Astoria just as no one questioned whether his translator required a license. But later, the City of
Astoria was anything but clear about the propriety of the cable installation. After considerable legal
wrangling, Pacific Television was ultimately granted a city franchise to make “pole attachments”
to Astoria’s utility poles. All of these matters—the debugging of the Astoria installation, the
municipal franchise negotiations and the explosive growth of the cable installation consulting
business—took their toll. In March 1953, Parsons collapsed and was hospitalized with exhaustion. His
doctors ordered him to rest completely for a full 30 days, and ultimately were only willing to
release him from the hospital if he was removed from the community for 30 days to a place where
he could have total rest. The plan was for him to go to Grace’s mother – but he changed his
mind, got into his airplane and went to Alaska. He never returned to Astoria.
While Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania vies with Astoria for recognition as the founding location of the
cable TV industry, Astoria’s claim was recognized by the National Cable Television Association
(NCTA) in 1968 when it installed a monument at the base of the famed Astor Column on Coxcomb
Hill (where Parsons had located one of his system’s receiving antennas). Its inscription reads: “Site
of the first community antenna television installation in the United States completed February 1949
Astoria, Oregon. Cable television was invented and developed by L. E. (Ed) Parsons on
Thanksgiving Day, 1948. The system carried the first TV transmission by KRSCTV Channel 5, Seattle.
This marked the beginning of Cable TV.”
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