Another voice of the wisdom that comes with age is silent. Tom Roeser is a feisty Conservative Republican in Chicago, a city not known for being friendly to Conservatives.
Tom has been on WLS-AM on Sunday evenings and a regular panel member on the syndicated Beyond the Beltway show. He’s 82 and apparently having health problems. Beyond the Beltway is hosted by Bruce DuMont, the man behind building the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.
If you have an interest in history, the name DuMont and broadcasting go back a long ways. The Du Mont TV network tried in the 1950s to break through the NBC/CBS duopoly that controlled radio as it moved into the TV business – they ultimately failed. Bruce DuMont is the nephew of Allen DuMont, who ran the TV network.
Interesting side note… I was recently watching a Honeymooner’s rerun on the ME-TV network and noticed how amazing the sound and picture quality were for a 1955 television program. My first thought was that they must have been digitally restored (a la the original Star Trek episodes).
Digging around on the internet I discovered that the Honeymooner’s had been carried on the DuMont network (which I had not heard of, since 1955 was before my time). I then noticed that Dumont had used a superior, breakthrough technology that they called the “Electronicam” which recorded the show on Kinescope and Film at the same time. The film versions are what is shown in re-runs and thus explain the far superior quality of the sound and image to other network’s programs in the 1950’s.
You can read more about it here:
http://www.dumonthistory.com/a4.html
Tom Roeser died on Sunday.