August 1966
WGSF is unable to come up with enough money to purchase the loaned cameras; at the end of August, the cameras are returned to the Cincinnati ETV Station.

Undaunted . . .
the students and their faculty advisors push ahead. They borrow an old lantern slide projector from Audio/Visual Director Janice Greider, and produce twelve weekly Reviews and Previews programs using slides projected into that old, obsolete, Iconscope slide camera!
The Carnegie Commission on Educational Television and WJW ~To The Rescue!~

“WGSF was doing a terrific job but had only a lantern slide and two audio recorders for equipment.” George Condon, columnist for The Cleveland Plain Dealer.


WGSF was one of the first stations to benefit from a national survey of Educational Television stations made in 1966 by the Carnegie Corporation. Cleveland ‘Plain Dealer’ columnist George Condon visited the Newark, Ohio, station WGSF, Channel 28, to ascertain the stations’s capabilities and needs.  Mr. Condon was amazed to find that the station had no television cameras capable of taking pictures, but was using an obsolete slide pickup camera to originate programs. Mr. Condon wrote that the station’s total operating budget would hardly “keep a commercial station in mimeograph paper and nothing else.”
Mr. Conlon wrote in his ‘Plain Dealer’ column about the WGSF station and their efforts of produce locally originated programs for the community in spite of the lack of television cameras. James B. Flanagan, TV-Radio Station columnist for the ‘Plain Dealer’ described Mr. Conlon’s article as a “distress signal.” Kenneth L. Bagwell, General Manager of Cleveland station WJW-TV, Channel 8, assigned his Chief Engineer, Gilbert Anderson, to investigate. He found two ten-year old cameras that were not being used, and arranged to donate them to WGSF.
WGSF Chief Engineer Leland Hubbell and Newark High School teacher and Faculty Advisor for WGSF, Robert DeBenedictis, are shown in photos in the 1963-1966 WGSF GROUPS folder, examining the cameras with Chief Engineer for WJW, Gil Anderson. The data on education television stations in the United States collected by consultants like George Conlon eventually resulted in the establishment of the ‘Corporation for Public Broadcasting’ (CPB) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS.) However, within two weeks of Mr. Conlon’s visit to WGSF in November of 1966, the station finally had two television cameras of their own. Mr. Flanagan noted in his column about the donation, headlined ‘WJW Rescues Newark TV; Answers Condon’s Plea,’ that “A two hour visit here by Mr. Condon did WGSF more good than anything since the station began. All of Newark is indebted to WJW-TV.”