One of the biggest blunders in Boston sports TV history.

[Fenway]

Fred Cusick had worked hard in the 1960's to get the Bruins on TV. In early 60's, Fred would go to Toronto and Montreal and do audio over CBC video and edit the game to 60 minutes in Canada and then drive all night with the tape to WMUR-TV in Manchester which could be seen in Boston. Fans loved it.

For the 1966-1967 season Fred took a job with brand new WKBG-TV Channel 56 as sports director and Weston Adams gave Fred and 56 the TV rights.

Channel 56 also got the rights to the Celtics road games and hired 2 novice announcers to do the games who made Johnny Most sound objective. ( Tom Heinsohn and Red Auerbach) and at the end of the season WKBG-TV elected to drop the Bruins.

WSBK-TV took a chance on hockey and hired unknown Don Earle to do the games as Fred was under contract at Channel 56.

The rest is history. Channel 38's parent would buy the Bruins from Adams and 2 years later sell the team to a concession company from Buffalo.

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[WayneGreatzky]

Interesting bit of history

 

[Fenway]

Interesting bit of history

Hockey fans everywhere should be grateful to tiny WSBK-TV Boston as they kept a video archive of Bruins games starting in the late 60's and preserved them.

This hit home a few months ago when Jean Béliveau died and CBC/SRC couldn't find footage of one of Jean's greatest moments in his final season but WSBK-TV had it.



In the 1970's, there were more Bruins games shown on Montreal cable than Habs and Nords combined as tiny Channel 22 in Burlington, Vermont picked up every WSBK-TV game and back then the Bruins televised most home games and all road games and the Habs and Nords were on once or twice a week and never road games until the playoffs.

 

[mikelvl]

Hockey fans everywhere should be grateful to tiny WSBK-TV Boston as they kept a video archive of Bruins games starting in the late 60's and preserved them.

This hit home a few months ago when Jean Béliveau died and CBC/SRC couldn't find footage of one of Jean's greatest moments in his final season but WSBK-TV had it.



In the 1970's, there were more Bruins games shown on Montreal cable than Habs and Nords combined as tiny Channel 22 in Burlington, Vermont picked up every WSBK-TV game and back then the Bruins televised most home games and all road games and the Habs and Nords were on once or twice a week and never road games until the playoffs.

I wonder what became of the old WSBK broadcasts. I know NESN used to have some sort of archive show to play some of the old snippets of the CH38 games. I would love to see some of the older games.

 

[wetcamelfood]

I wonder what became of the old WSBK broadcasts. I know NESN used to have some sort of archive show to play some of the old snippets of the CH38 games. I would love to see some of the older games.

Yes, the holy grail for me

 

[Fenway]

I wonder what became of the old WSBK broadcasts. I know NESN used to have some sort of archive show to play some of the old snippets of the CH38 games. I would love to see some of the older games.

The Sports Museum has the tapes as CBS donated them when they bought Channel 38 and moved the studios to Channel 4.