The White Columns brochure being handed out featured cover art by Atlanta artist Jim Schell.
ENTRANCE HALL & RECEPTION
THE LIBRARY
CONTROL TV STUDIO ONE
TV MASTER CONTROL, COLOR MONITOR ON RIGHT
KIDS AND PARENTS ON TOUR
POPEYE CLUB'S OFFICER DON KENNEDY WITH HOWDY DOODY'S BUFFALO BOB SMITH
TELEVISION THEATRE ABOVE TV STUDIO ONE
STUDIO ONE, WOODY WILLOW SET
RADIO STUDIO A
RADIO STUDIO D
COMMISSARY, WITH NOT A TELEVISION SET IN SIGHT
Atlanta’s Castle of the Air
by Bob Foreman © 2014
On a hill once fortified against Sherman ’s invading forces, White Columns on Peachtree (pictured here) was dedicated as WSB’s “fabulous new home” on Sunday April 8, 1956 in a quasi-religious ceremony where the music of Gone with the Wind was piped in lest anyone miss the point: TV had found its Tara , and this was no myth.
Special guests seated on the column-lined veranda were addressed by no less a personage than David Sarnoff, founder, chairman and High Priest of RCA. “This is an affiliation as old as the network itself,” intoned the General, a reference to WSB’s charter membership in his NBC radio web, begun in 1927 when the South’s first station was kindergarten age.
WSB had grown up to become a 50,000 watt clear channel, and its slogan “Welcome South Brother” ricocheted nightly across the Kennelly-Heaviside layer down to millions of listeners. NBC had adopted the WSB chime as their system cue.
Similarly, WSB-TV which had begun modestly by 1956 boasted the world’s tallest TV tower with an astonishing coverage of 300 miles, from Knoxville down to Florida, and from Birmingham clear across to Greenville. They had commenced color broadcasting as early as February, 1954.
Listeners and viewers alike were invited to visit White Columns “where the doors in every department stand cordially open” during the 37 free guided tours a week, a chance to see how these miracles were worked. A trade ad boasted 22,000 visitors in the first four months, with a photo of school kids clamoring for entry into the stately residence of Howdy Doody.
Entrance into the two story foyer found the visitor in a sort of Southern White House, where church-like solemnity was maintained by a solitary spinster at the reception desk, armed only with a smile. A soundless color television console tucked into a niche seemed slightly out of place.
“Carpet country” contained the executive offices whose elegance, charm and beauty reigned amidst Waterford East West Peachtree Street
But it was what was beyond the fancy façade that drew the visitors. An electrical kind of quiet pervaded the production facility, where behind double sound-lock doors hummed a total of seven studios, four for radio (AM and FM) and three for TV, where all telecasts were live because videotape was not yet invented and kinescope recordings were limited to network use.
TV Studio One (visible to the right side of the photo) was twice the size of the Driving Club swimming pool, and parents could view The Popeye Club from a 48-seat observation theatre, separated from their kids down below by thick soundproof glass. With its sea green floors beneath a panoply of pantographs, TV One connected to the exterior Terrace Studio “built for outdoor productions, from cattle on the hoof to sunlit fashion shows.”
The remaining TV studio was relegated to three daily 15-minute newscasts, except on the weekends when in a supreme display of good taste, there was no news at all.
Half a hundred production rooms completed the facility, including a windowed employees’ lounge which contained plenty of ashtrays and no television receiver.
Replaced by a building called “Death Star” by its employees and labeled an “overbearing behemoth” by its sister newspaper, in 1998 Atlanta
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