KTBC anchors Stephanie Williams and Neal Spelce, as seen in the late 1980s. Image: Broadcast Blast
First broadcast out of the Driskill Hotel in 1952, Austin’s longtime local television channel KTBC was the city’s first TV station, holding down channel number seven and owned for many years by none other than Texas royalty Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. The station, primarily a CBS affiliate until its switch to Fox in 1995, is an essential background element of the city’s past for many Austinites — and thanks to the extensive home television recordings of an area YouTuber going by Broadcast Blast, who should have way more than 31 subscribers, we’ve got a fascinating window into the day-to-day appearance of Austin’s network TV during the 1980s.
The KTBC broadcast station at 119 East 10th Street in downtown Austin, as seen in 1960. Though the station’s affiliation changed from CBS to Fox in 1995, the building still serves as the station’s headquarters. Image: Austin History Center
In the last three months, the anonymous account has uploaded collections of short clips, network bumpers, and commercials both national and local — with three extended videos from KTBC, one from KVUE channel 24, and one from KBVO channel 42, adding up to more than an hour of vintage broadcast footage. If you’re more of a radio type, the account has also uploaded over an hour of music, bumpers, and station IDs from former local top 40 radio station B93 FM circa 1987:
Though all the videos are fascinating for anyone who either grew up with local television from this era or wasn’t around to enjoy it, for our money the best of the collection is the video below, a collection of KTBC clips taped, according to its description, between 1985 and 1989. Feel free to watch it all the way through, but we’ve annotated some of its more interesting moments with timestamps below.
Right out the gate at 0:05, we’ve got the classic CBS Special Presentation identification — lots of people have some serious nostalgia for this one.
Next at 0:18 is a local ad for the Austin Mardi Gras Parade, held in 1990 on February 24. This event, which included decked-out floats in downtown Austin and ran for several years in the 1980s, was sponsored by the local Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
A photo of the Fabulous Thunderbirds filming their “Don’t Mess With Texas” commercial, from an Austin American-Statesman retrospective of the campaign and its creators at ad firm GSD&M in 1998. Image: Austin History Center
At 0:32 is one of the best bits of this whole clip — a classic “Don’t Mess With Texas” anti-littering PSA featuring none other than Austin blues rock legends the Fabulous Thunderbirds. This one’s famous enough that it’s been uploaded to YouTube a few times before, and regularly makes the rounds on “Old Austin” Facebook, but it’s especially fun to see it here alongside the other clips. For what it’s worth, the video was allegedly filmed on FM 1836, which stretches roughly from Oak Hill to Driftwood.
At 1:32 we have an appearance from late KTBC meteorologist Connor Vernon, which is mostly interesting due to the low-resolution 3D weather radar.
At 2:18 is a notice that the Austin Nature Center, still located in Zilker Park, needs volunteers to help with its “robotic prehistoric mammal exhibit” — if you’re wondering what that was all about, take a look at this Austin American-Statesman article from December 1989 describing the “wild and wooly” displays at the center from defunct robotics company Dinamation International:
Click for a larger view. Image: Austin History Center
You’ll find the news bumper at 2:59 surprising in the context of 2021 — KTBC anchors Stephanie Williams and Neal Spelce discussing a CBS interview between journalist Connie Chung and none other than “one of the world’s richest men,” Donald J. Trump. Trump would later describe Chung as a “disaster” over the contentious interview. Anchor Neal Spelce, for the folks that just got here, first found fame for his gripping live coverage of the 1966 UT Tower shooting, as seen in the archival footage below:
A brief news bumper at 10:32 features reporter David Swofford mentioning a debate over the state’s water plan — that happens a lot around here.
Davis also had great campaign ads in print — this one’s from his 1985 run. Image: Austin History Center
Finally, at 12:00 is an incredibly memorable local ad for the 1987 campaign of Austin City Council hopeful Terry Davis, running for the Place 6 seat that was once traditionally reserved for African Americans under a so-called “unwritten agreement.” Davis, a lawyer and engineer, ran for council unsuccessfully a few times in the 1980s, and his son Terence, also an attorney, now runs the Davis Law Firm in Cedar Park.
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