Outdoor Talk
By Vance Polton
After just getting back from the Walleye spawning operations at Rathbun I like to kick back and relax and watch a little TV. Now here at Wayback Wednesday, we aren't in the age of streaming services and the internet. We're just a little more, what you might call retro. So let's warm up the old TV and adjust the aerial. No, a little bit more to the right..... a little bit more.......... now a little bit back to the left ..... There it is. (For those interested this is a Philco 21" floor model from 1953, the one with the nice cabinet doors).
Back in 1954 when TV was still new in Iowa, the first TV station was WOC in Davenport in 1949, the second was WOI in Ames (1950), there came on the air a program produced by the Iowa Conservation Commission called Outdoor Shop Talk. The series was the first in the nation outdoor television show that was produced by a State government. It was hosted and produced by Jim Harlan, the Conservation Commission's superintendent of public relations, and was filmed by Jim Sherman, the Commission's head photographer. The series ran from the spring of 1954 through the spring of 1957 and included 49 episodes during its run. And the series wasn't just broadcasted over one or two TV stations. At its peak, it was broadcast from 20 stations across Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Missouri, and Illinois.
I have attached a little write-up on the "Outdoor Shop Talk" series which was later shortened to "Outdoor Talk" so you can read more about the series and see what episodes were produced. This copy also has listed the episodes that I had digitized a few years ago. Many of you have seen at least a few of these. Some of you actually own a whole set of the digital copies. My house turned into a little production studio after I would return from the "Put It on Video" store over in Clive. They are the ones that were transferring the shows from the old 16 mm film reels to a digital format for me. I ended up from each trip making about 20 copies from each master dvd that I came home with. The copies then got mailed out or in the case of the copies to the State Historical Society research centers and the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting up at Wartburg College hand delivered; I wasn't about to ship out the film canisters themselves.
There have been some recent "developments" in the lives of those old film reels. The first is that the State Historical Society of Iowa has applied for a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to get funding to have the rest of the "Outdoor Talk" films digitized as well as the rest of the films from the Jim Sherman collection donated to the Society by his daughter a few years ago. One of those film reels from Jim's basement is titled "Fish Fare" which dates back to 1947 and was a "fishing tour around Iowa" produced by the Conservation Commission. So fingers crossed that they get the funding for that project. Another development is that after I sent out that Wayback Wednesday email on Iowa Fisheries on Film a few weeks ago, Andy Fowler mentioned that at the next annual AFS meeting there was going to be a Film Festival with the theme: "Conserving Fishes and Traditions Through Knowledge". After contacting the organizers of the film festival to see if the "Outdoor Talk" films would work in their film festival, I entered three episodes: Trout Hatcheries (the Backbone Hatchery), Propagation of Northern Pike (Spirit Lake Fish Hatchery), and the episode on the Study of Catfish (early catfish research). So with a little luck, a film on the Spirit Lake Fish Hatchery's spawning of northern pike in early spring will be playing in Honolulu, Hawaii later this year. That ought to be a temperature shock to the old system.
