Video Vault: Signing off with the Singing Angels

CLEVELAND - Let’s travel back to a time when TV stations signed off the air.

There were no movies or sitcoms playing overnight. There were no infomercials selling slicers, dicers, car buffers, weight loss devices or the Best of the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts (my favorite by the way and I do own a set), TV stations turned off their transmitters.

Some stations closed their broadcast day with an announcer in an audio booth reading the top news stories of the day over a slide of the station’s call letters.

A pre-recorder voice would detail the station’s proud history of service to the community and also offer the technical specifications of the transmission signal and say something like, “WEWS now ends its broadcast day.”

Our video player contains what aired on WEWS just before the national anthem, Cleveland’s Singing Angels with The Lord’s Prayer.

This rendition was taped in 1973 here at WEWS. I kept the countdown slate on the front of the clip showing the date recorded and the director’s initials MB (for Mike Bachmann I believe).

Please enjoy 2 minutes of William Boehm’s Singing Angels.