August 1960, Boston’s Fenway Park
On November 20, 2013
- TV History
August 1960, Boston’s Fenway Park
This TK41 is shooing from center field in a test of their ability to colorcast Red Sox baseball. This is just after WHDH moved into it’s new all color facility and there is an RCA color truck here as well as a support unit just in case. This game may have been against the NY Yankees, with coverage sent to WNBC. It would be interesting to see a clip of this video to see how a night game looked. If you look up in the upper deck, you can see another TK41. From other photos I have of this night (that I’ll post soon), it appears that there are at least 4 TK41s at the game. Thanks to Maureen Carney for the photo and background.
Oh, my aching back. All I see are the hundreds of feet of TV81 cable that had be pulled to that center field camera!
I was able to trace this picture to a Red Sox/White Sox game in 1960.
Maureen found a Boston Globe ad for RCA color TV’s that listed the games that would be shown in color in 1960. There were a handful of night games.
The key was the auxiliary scoreboard that shows it is the second inning, no score, one out and #1 at bat. This boxscore is a match.
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1960/B08260BOS1960.htm
I knew WHDH-TV had tried TK-41’s at Fenway but never saw a picture until now. I was told years ago the lights at Fenway were not bright enough then and day games the 41’s could not handle the shadows in right field. They resumed color at Fenway in 1967 with TK-43’s.
From what I read on a site, Image Orthicons were used in the early color cameras because they had the sensitivity to overcome the inefficient prism splitters of its time period. That and they have very good low light sensitivity.
Did the picture lose quality due to the color process? Curious.
I remember watching WHDH in color in the late 50’s and early 60’s. As I recall, it looked a bit more saturated than what we saw from NBC via WBZ-TV. The pictures were quite good though.