Here's a look at the olden days when TV stations were supposedly off the air after signing off for the night, here on WGN Channel 9.

(TECHNICAL NOTE: The reception for this recording was quite ghostly, as you can see, but we did the best transfer possible utilizing a timebase corrector.)

Includes:

The closing moments of Five Minutes to Live By (Presentation of WGN Community Affairs) (full segment can be seen within this clip:    • WGN Channel 9  Newsbreak, Five Minut...   )

Signoff with 1965 NAB Seal of Good Practice on screen and legalese (voiceover by George Bauer), followed by National Anthem with flag being lowered outside WGNTV building

3:20 into clip, EIA color bars with tone come in, last to point 4:04 when Gaussian white noise kicks in

Then around 14:35, bars and tone return (takes a while to focus), and at 14:52 we hear "This is WGNTV Channel 9, Chicago, testing" (voiceover by ??), and tone returns, continuing uninterrupted until picture scrambles around 17:58, and ~390 Hz tone is replaced by one an octave higher around 18:12 (unstable reception leads to fluctuation of tone in this period), then the lower tone returns around 18:20, and here and there the bars try to find their way through the static.

Bars come back again around 22:57, before disappearing again around 24:31; we then see black until 25:21 when the bars return yet again. This continues without any further incident until 1:08:31 when the uncredited engineer announces, "This has been WGNTV Channel 9, Chicago, testing," and the bars and tone remain until 1:09:11 when it once again disappears into the white noise and screen static / snow.

Lastly, I included the end of the recording at 01:42:20, where the timer must have clicked off and the previous recording of a newscast on WLS Channel 7 resumes playing. (the complete footage for which, before the tape ran out, can be seen here:    • WLS Channel 7  Eyewitness News at 6:...   )

This aired on local Chicago TV early Monday, April 23rd 1979 around the 3:20am to 5:03am timeframe.

About The Museum of Classic Chicago Television:

The Museum of Classic Chicago Television's primary mission is the preservation and display of offair, early home videotape recordings (70s and early 80s, primarily) recorded off of any and all Chicago TV channels; footage which would likely be lost if not sought out and preserved digitally. Even though (mostly) short clips are displayed here, we preserve the entire broadcasts in our archives the complete programs with breaks (or however much is present on the tape), for historical purposes. For information on how to help in our mission, to donate or lend tapes to be converted to DVD, and to view more of the 4,700+ (and counting) video clips available for viewing in our online archive, please visit us at:
http://www.fuzzymemories.tv/index.php...