It all starts in the early 1950s when, after years of dark industrial pollution and smoke.

Pittsburgh started to clean itself up and become a more modern city.

We call this era of local history the Renaissance.

And at that time, there was another idea going around.

The then mayor of Pittsburgh, David Lawrence, had an idea that maybe this new medium of television could be used to improve people's lives significantly.

And he enlisted the help of Leland Hazard from Pittsburgh.

Plate Glass, and a newspaper writer and media pioneer named Dorothy Daniel.

And together they started to assemble in Oakland.

This experimental TV station that we now know as WQED.

Im Rick Sebak, I work here at WQED.

It's the spring of 2021, and I've had both my vaccinations for Covid 19, Moderna, and I've been coming to the building here more often since I got vaccinated.

And I've been asked to put together a sort of scrapbook history of the 67 years of WQED history.

I want to call it a very quick history of an unusual television station.

Now, it's possible to put together a snappy history of WQED, even during a pandemic, because over the years, so many people have celebrated this station for anniversaries and other events, including one of the very first employees of WQED, a young man named Fred Rogers.

I remember the first neighborhood campaign, a group of volunteers pledged their energies to the conviction that this community television station would make a place in the world so important and so valuable that it would last and last.

Although tonight marks our first anniversary on the air, the movement started over three years ago.

WQED Pittsburgh began in 1953 as the first community owned educational television station in the nation.

In that sense, we were the first public television station.

This is WQED channel 13, serving metropolitan Pittsburgh and the surrounding ten county area, and an anniversary is a good time for reaffirming ideals as well as remembering months before we had the equipment or the staff for broadcasting.

Thousands of people gave us $2 on faith.

The dream of public television is to pursue the ideal of excellence, and to enlist the power of technology to help us to speak to each other and learn from what we say and hear.

The year 1955 saw the formulation of in-school programing, which led to the development of still another new technique in TV production.

You must know those over to the regular set.

Please.

And there were many dangers living in the wilderness.

And so for protection, these people tried to live together.

WQED will mark its 10th anniversary on April 1st.

This station pioneered in bringing basic studies to the classroom via the TV screen.

Generations of viewers have grown up watching and learning with WQED by looking at the millions of images that have been created by hundreds of WQED staff and volunteers.

Television by, for and about.

The community we serve has been WQEDs rolr on retro.

If retrospection is any gauge at all, it will continue.

It's the story of an idea that became an institution, both nationally and here in our own city.

Part of the fun of growing up is keeping track of progress and looking back at where we've been.

In those early days, Fred Rogers worked with a young woman named Josie Carey, and they co-produced a daily program called Children's Corner.

Everyone in Pittsburgh watched and met.

You never saw Fred, but he operated and voiced all the puppets.

We had this song that Josie and I had written called Why Hi.

Why Hi don't I, know you're the why hi, don't know you why hi, I'm sure I do.

why hi you know, me too.

why hi.

How do you do?

why.

Hi, I'm Josie why hi.

How do you do?

And then I was at the organ playing.

How come you ever feel like you've just got to do something?

Write a poem?

We could.

Or a song, right?

For me, children's corner was an astounding success and even aired nationally one summer from NBC in New York City.

Several of the puppets from that show would survive in later programs created by Fred Rogers.

So we said on one of our albums that in order to find the Children's Corner, you had to have 17.5 nice thoughts in a row.

As WQED celebrates its 40th anniversary of broadcasting to our community.

I like to think that the children's Corner left behind at least 17.5.

Nice thoughts.

But in the 50s here at WQED, people were working hard to create a wide variety of programs for classrooms at many levels and for many different audiences.

Starting in 1959, shows could also be aired on WQEX.

A second broadcast outlet for the educational station in the 1950s and 60s.

There were also important primetime interviews with national figures shot at WQED.

People at the station were learning how to make a wide variety of programs.

There were documentaries, public affairs programing locally and nationally distributed.

There were experiments with dramatic programs too, including one called Ofoeti.

that I remember watching as a kid the story of a boy who believed in trolls and so far left his home and his dog, and his mother and father, whom he really did love, even though they never seemed to be interested in important or exciting things.

And began his search for a troll in the late 1960s.

Fred Rogers began offering his program called Mister Rogers Neighborhood, to the whole country.

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood.

A beautiful day for a neighbor.

Would you be my.

Would you be mine?

There was significant quality and quantity of programs made at Q.E.D.

before the end of the 60s.

The station needed more space, bigger studios, and ground was broken for a new building just a few blocks down Fifth Avenue from the original home of WQED.

We don't need a new building.

We need a new building to make possible new programing.

We are not really here to build a building.

We are here really to build a philosophy and education and experience.

And in saying this, I would like to pay the motion tier tribute I can muster to a group of people whose compensation, more often than not, had been satisfaction rather than money.

And that's the staff for WQED.

Even then, not all programs were made in a building.

Don Marbury was a producer at the station in the early days.

Every August, the station would preempt its regular programing to broadcast live the events of the Allegheny County Fair.

The motivation, people and the Rich mixture of this area was so fortunate to have the station's enchantment, with the broad range of ethnicity in the area led to regular coverage of the international Pittsburgh Folk Festival.

But these specials only whet the station's appetite for more people oriented programing, and soon full fledged series were being aired.

This Is People, Pittsburgh, a new idea in making the medium of television an effective and informative tool for the people.

When racial unrest hit the community, WQED was well ahead of the game in responding.

Soul talk was already on the air eventually giving rise to Black Horizons.

Black horizons would become the longest running minority affairs program in America.

Chris Moore was its longest serving producer and host.

Black horizons was created in 1968, about a month after Doctor King was killed.

I think with the protests that they saw nationwide here and in Pittsburgh here, they decided that they needed to have a program on that addressed black issues, and they looked around and they didn't have anyone on staff who was black to produce it.

In fact, the first producer was a white woman named Virginia Bartlett.

But, to WQED management's vision concept, they had the foresight to start a program that would train people.

In 1969, as people began to move into the new building.

WQED purchased a local city magazine called Renaissance that soon became Pittsburgh Magazine, making WQED a multimedia corporation.

In 1970, Loyd Kaiser came to WQED as its new president, and he would hold that position for the next 23 years.

Always looking for new and innovative ways of raising funds, WQED in 1972 broadcast the first great TV auction, a popular moneymaking event that took over the station's studios and personnel to auction off some ordinary and some amazing items donated by local businesses.

This is table Bay that we're going to open.

Hold it, hold it, hold it.

I can't get them off here.

That's Elsie Hillman, the great chairperson of WQED board of directors for many years.

In 1973, WQED became more multimedia with a new radio station.

WQED FM begins its broadcast day.

It is an FM radio station devoted to the arts, to the music of the centuries, to the sounds and thoughts which move our souls.

The radio station has been proudly all classical, all the time since the beginning in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic.

Morning hosts Jim Cunningham and Anna Singer in the afternoon both set up Remote Radio Studios in their homes.

Gold shed 89 three gorgeous music and relaxing.

An oasis of calm sanity in a crazy world.

Wear your mask.

Stay healthy.

Stay right here.

The classics continue on radio and online.

In the mid 1970s, WQED partnered with the National Geographic Society to produce the much honored series of National Geographic specials for the PBS network.

This kicked off a new run of high quality national programs covering the world.

These documentaries gained WQED new respect and status in the world of American television.

WQED film cameras and later video cameras went everywhere.

No location was too far away or too difficult.

WQED covered the world each year, but there was lively local neighborhood coverage, too.

You'll often disagree.

True lovers always do.

And local news was often the specialty of Herb Stein, who came to QED.

from the Post-Gazette.

You remember good company.

I've just been looking at some of the public affairs programs from the WQED archives.

Or what about the chemical people or the turned on crisis?

How about newsroom?

Do you remember newsroom?

WQED was one of the very first public television stations in the country to develop a new concept of reporting on what was going on in our community.

Newsroom was a program in which working reporters told us about big and little events, not just the superficial facts, but the story behind the story and what was likely to happen next.

Through the 70s, WQED public affairs philosophy was to look for the dimensions and the context that would explain the big local issues.

There was a series called WQED weekly, which regularly took us behind the scenes of local events and showed views of people that we had never seen before.

4321.

Cue the talent.

Take one.

But since the earliest days of WQED, we've seen people making art of many sorts.

What WQED has done is testimony not only to its involvement, but to the richness of the local artistic invention.

There has been dance.

There's been folk music of chestnuts and acorns.

He's gathered a store, although he has plenty, he gathers still more.

And he has them for breakfast and lunch.

And tea, Young Angus McFerggus McTavish.

Dundee Young Angus McFerggus McTavish Dundee There was a program based on the autobiography of Pittsburgh painter John Kane, with actor Bingo O'Malley as the artist and former house painter who captured our city in so many ways.

When I was younger, I used to think that someday I'd use up Pittsburgh.

There'd be nothing left to paint.

But every day I find a new picture.

City doesn't stop.

I see it as God made it.

And as man has changed it.

Both are beautiful to me.

There has also been jazz.

Throughout our history, there's been a long relationship with WQED and the Pittsburgh Symphony.

That goes back to when conductor William Steinberg led the orchestra when it performed at the Syria mosque in Oakland.

Steinberg is in great demand as a guest conductor.

He has appeared with the London Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic, as well as conducting at the Metropolitan Opera.

He is one of the few established conductors of our time who knows intimately the glamor of the very large concert halls, as well as the small town gymnasiums, field houses, and high school auditoriums.

He knows places like Tanglewood, Salzburg, Zurich, Uniontown, Elkins and McKeesport.

While celebrating the arts, WQED from the late 1970s into the 80s created some outstanding dramatic films based on children's stories and books for the anthology series for PBS.

Once Upon a Classic and then Wonder Works that aired from 1984 to 1992.

In 1983, First Lady Nancy Reagan came to host the aforementioned Chemical People.

As we'll learn tonight, kids are becoming acquainted with drugs at a younger and younger age, and that's not a good prescription for growing up.

It's always got to be the same.

I start to change.

See something?

I have to do something.

Of course.

All this time.

Pianist Johnny Costa and the WQED crews were working with Fred Rogers, producing his programs in studio A. And building on the station's national reputation for high quality documentaries.

There were seven episodes of a series called Planet Earth for PBS, and from 1987 to 1991, 20 episodes of the science expeditions of the series, called The Infinite Voyage.

In 1987, I came to WQED, hired as a local producer in 1988.

One of my programs, titled Kennywood Memories, got a lot of attention and local affection.

And in 1989, we started calling all of my local productions the Pittsburgh History Series.

This program is part of WQED Pittsburgh History Series from 1991 to 95.

WQED partnered with WGBH in Boston to produce where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?

A national educational game show for kids based on a computer game.

It was fun and informative and unusual.

How did you guys and as you know, the one of you to catch a car, say, anywhere in North America, and that is not bad.

Ladies and gentlemen.

Then in the mid 1990s, because of local and statewide success with programs like things that aren't there anymore in Pennsylvania, diners and other roadside restaurants.

PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funded some national documentaries, including a hot dog program, a cemetery special, and a ride along the Lincoln Highway.

As recently as 2015.

National audiences have also enjoyed a few great bakeries and a few good pie places.

But when it comes to WQED and good food, you've got to love the work of my colleague and friend Chris Fenimore, who, along with Nancy Polinsky Johnson, has been sharing recipes and raising money with what they call cooking marathons on QED cooks, zucchini cheesecake and other ways to prepare.

Summer's Most Abundant Vegetable was the original local cooking show based on people sending their recipes in, and us sending those recipes and stories back out to the community.

I said, you know, this is so much more than cooking directions and food and and all of that.

I said, this is about family history.

It's about cultural history, ethnic history.

I said, this really resonates in a way that I hadn't thought it would.

Light and delicate and delicious.

Let me just make sure that it came out right.

I just want to give it one little taste test.

In 1994, George Miles came to WQED as the new president.

He would stay for the next 16 years while he was here.

WQED learned how much PBS audiences loved doo wop music.

In the year 2000.

A new nightly program called OnQ premiered.

It covered a wide range of topics, personalities, and two of its regular contributors, Dave Hallowell and Dave Rhodes, spun off a phenomenally popular set of goofy shows called Dave and Dave's Excellent Adventures.

In 2006, WQED taught the country a lot about the French and Indian War.

In a mini series titled The War That Made America around that same time, WQED production teams traveled overseas for several documentaries, including From Pittsburgh to Poland, from Pittsburgh to the Vatican, and in Country of Vietnam.

Story.

There were also several documentaries that had social impact and importance in various ways, including The Story of a Teenage Suicide, Losing Lambert.

A Journey Through Survival and Hope.

An exploration of post-traumatic stress syndrome in veterans called Long Road Home.

And One year in Brownsville looking at the troubles of one town along the Monongahela River.

Hi.

I'm Minette Seate And this is Filmmakers Corner.

Since 2009, Minette has been hosting this weekly series called Filmmakers Corner that celebrates local filmmaking and the people who do it.

Monette has made new episodes all during the pandemic, and we'll have some new shorts and an old favorite celebrating the gift of grandmothers.

In 2010, Deborah Acklin became the new president and CEO of WQED.

I invite you again to join us as a member of WQED.

More than ever.

And in 2011, before everybody got drones for Christmas, WQED camera people went up in helicopters and put together several popular specials showing Pittsburgh from the air.

As we moved into the second decade of the 21st century.

WQED continued to produce stories, specials, public affairs programs, and digital content for the web.

There were new local series including Pittsburgh 360, a set of documentaries called experience.

There was horizons with a wider multicultural focus and an educational series called IQ Smart Parent, and my own collection of stories called It's Pittsburgh and a lot of other stuff documentaries continue to.

Producer Dave Solomon put together portraits for The Home Front, the story of Elizabeth Black and Beth Doll in our produced The Great Ride, about the bike trail called the Great Allegheny Passage.

WQED won a lot of Mid-Atlantic Regional Emmys for much of that work, including five Emmys for overall station excellence.

In 2015, WQED, a documentary tribute to Pittsburgh playwright August Wilson, was broadcast as part of the PBS series American Masters.

Generally, I start with a line of dialog, and often I don't know who's talking or why they're talking, and then I will give the cards a name, and by probing them and questioning him, I begin to find out things I need to know about the character, and some of that will emerge a story.

Then in 2017, with a lot of help, I raised some money via Kickstarter for a new series of programs titled Nebby.

We made eight half hour episodes.

In the fall of 2018, after the terrible events at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill.

WQED produced a national PBS special titled Tree of Life A concert for Peace and Unity.

When the Covid 19 pandemic began in March 2020.

Activities in the building stopped for the most part, but people found ways to keep working.

There were short videos about all the things you could do while staying home with WQED.

Director of photography Frank Calero and his talented twins.

Hi, I'm Sam and I'm Sophia.

Made a cooking show called Family Style while staying home in the North Hills.

This month, Frank and many others also helped finish the PBS national documentary about European refugees to Shanghai, titled Harbor from the Holocaust.

Iris Simpson put together a Pittsburgh program about the air that we breathe.

And I was happy to make a trio of pledge specials on my front porch, including one for the holidays.

But the pandemic also meant a lot of attention to our original mission of education.

Because kids were staying home from school.

WQED put together special backpacks of supplies for students and also lots of new programs.

Today we are going to do an obstacle course with a driveway and chalk and other items around our house.

Who's been leading the education department through all this?

Cathy Cook and Gina Masciola.

What we've learned this year is that learning can't just happen in a school, because sometimes that opportunity won't be there.

And so it really takes a village, right?

It takes a neighborhood.

I think that goes back to our roots in Pittsburgh here, having Fred Rogers in Mister Rogers Neighborhood as what began as television, bringing education over the airwaves into folks homes.

I think that everything that comes out of this building has educational value, and the resources for teachers are incredible.

So it's being used in classrooms, in homes, and in the community.

When you come in this building, you feel the spirit of all people that have worked collaboratively to make QED.

what it is.

What WQED is, is a lot of things.

It's the results of many, many people who've worked here over our 67 years.

I said, God bless you.

I said.

I think we've always tried to do unusual and worthwhile things for education and for entertainment.

This is a lovely room to create programs that enlighten and delight our many audiences.

We couldn't squeeze everything into a quick history.

And as we move on in 2021 and beyond, we expect to make more history and to keep telling stories and sharing really good programs.

What looked like a pipe dream in 1954 became a full blown reality, which none of us can imagine the world without.

Very good, very good, very good.

Living in every city.

Dadidadi dong Yeah we ei.

We ei Eddie and and.

Dadidadi dong Dadidadi dong Hey, Eddie, this has been a presentation of the nation's first community television station.

This is WQED, channel 13, Pittsburgh.