A multimedia history of Memorial Stadium by WILL and Illinois Public Media
College of Media at Illinois
WILL-TV’s Roots in Memorial Stadium
WILL-TV has a special bond with Memorial Stadium. The station’s first home was in the stadium’s gigantic West Hall under the stands.
In 1955, WILL-TV began broadcasting from makeshift studios under the stadium. Much of the programming was live, which was tricky when the athletic department’s four-wheel vehicles might be roaring up and down the stadium ramps nearby.
The station’s equipment was second hand, and its transmitter had a limited range, said Harry Cornell, who wrote and produced programs for WILL-TV in those days. And while the station’s stadium studio left a lot to be desired acoustically, it did provide enough space to do some innovative things. “All the lights were on grids, like in a theater. We could raise and lower them as we needed,” said Darrell Blue, another early employee.
“The studio was gigantic,” said Keith Page, the late WICD weatherman who was another of the early WILL-TV staffers. Scenery was often large and fairly elaborate. For one episode of an imaginative children’s series, “What’s New,” shown on educational stations around the country, WILL-TV built a huge model of a human ear that resembled a funhouse maze.
Another time, he had a guest who was terrified about going on television. “This guy said, ‘You’ve got to show me the questions before I go on the air.’ He was in such a state of apoplexy that we knew we had to do it. He had one of these dark, thick markers and wrote his answers on cards that he put down next to him. Well, the minute he sat down in the chair and the lights went on, he started sweating like an Amazon forest. He reached for the cards as if they were napkins and started blotting his face. He ended up literally black all over his face. If it had been somebody else, I might have made a joke about it or let him know what was happening. But I knew if I said one word about it and he recognized what he was doing, he would drop dead in the chair.”
Despite the nervousness of that guest, it wasn’t hard in the early days to find people to appear on live WILL-TV programs, said Blue. “People were so enamored of TV that they really did want to come out and take about astronomy or physics or whatever on TV. It was a novelty and kind of a big deal.”
One of WILL-TV’s station managers in the ’60s, Jack Crannell, was famous for going to great lengths to shoot a program. His major brainchild was a kind of local “Tonight Show,” done live from the University of Illinois Union. “He’d get all the sororities and fraternities to come by promising them they could sing their song on-air during a break,” said Cornell.
Often his schemes worked brilliantly, but even when they flopped, they could cause quite a commotion, said Larry Inman, who began working at WILL-TV in 1958 and eventually became chief engineer. Inman said Crannell once convinced a merchant to lend him a portable swimming pool for a shoot, and then talked the fire department into filling the swimming pool with one of its hoses. “All the water from the pool, about 10,000 gallons, leaked out and completely covered the U of I tennis courts,” said Inman.
Another time Crannell got the police to close off Green Street at 5 p.m. during a snowstorm so he could shoot a sequence. He sent a cameraman up in the bucket of a fire truck to film madrigal singers standing in the whirling snow in front of the union, said Inman.
“You had to be creative back in those days because you didn’t have anything,” said Inman. “Whatever you came up with had to come out of your mind. You had to scrounge whatever you could to pull off your idea.”