Photo by Jim Coit

Julian Kaufman: "XETV has voluntarily complied” with rules that American stations must follow.

On this evening in the summer of 1953, Lionel Van Deerlin was late again. The newsman sat at his desk in the Channel 6 office on Park Boulevard and frantically finished marking on sheets of paper in front of him. He stole a look at his watch; in just an hour he’d be reading these words over the airwaves. Van Deerlin scooped up the pile of news copy and UPI photographs. and threw on his jacket, then he dashed out to his car and sped south on Highway 101.

Van Deerlin in studio. “They felt that every dime that was being taken out of San Diego was being taken out of their coffers.”

Photo by Jim Coit

Once across the Mexican border, he roared over the unpaved streets to the foot of Mt. San Antonio, then rocketed up the steep grade; at the peak he screeched to a halt. Breathless, he checked his watch again as he rushed out of the darkness into the single tiny building next to the 1000-foot-tall transmitter — 9:42 p.m., just three minutes to go. In the southeast comer of the room, a camera pointed at the latest model Frigidaire refrigerator while Bill Mesmer, one of the station’s two announcers, read its praises.

Ron Fortner: "We were a pimple on the backside of broadcasting in San Diego."

Photo by Jim Coit

One of the Mexican crewmen grinned at the tardy newscaster, and Johnny Downs, the other announcer, sidled up to him. “Some day you’re not going to make it, you know,’’ Downs remonstrated gently.

Johnny Downs, the other announcer, sidled up to him. “Some day you’re not going to make it, you know.’’

Photo by Jim Coit

“Hell, I’m here, aren’t I?” Van Deerlin whispered back. He scooted into his seat in the news set in the northeast comer of the room and waited for his image to crackle onto the thousands of new TV screens north of the border. Sure, we cut it close, he said to himself. But how could anyone not do so, working for the most extraordinary station in North America in the infancy of this extraordinary creature, television? Broadcasters everywhere were like excited children, and there was no wilder, no more slapdash playroom, than this Tijuana studio.

Photo by Jim Coit

Van Deerlin (who finally left the station to become a U.S. Congressman) faced a few of the challenges posed by the station in those days, but no American has shouldered more of Channel 6’s unique burdens than Julian Kaufman, vice president and general manager of the company that runs the station. For twenty-seven years Kaufman’s life has commingled with that of Channel 6. He has lived the saga of XETV, and the best way to recount that story would have been to start out with Kaufman at the top of Mt. San Antonio, reliving those frantic early days.

Photo by Jim Coit

I would have liked to drive with him down the precipitous Tijuana summit, then to head north to the current American headquarters on Ronson Road in Kearny Mesa. The journey would have symbolized the station’s evolution — from the mad beginnings to the polished present. But Kaufman has grown reclusive over the years; at first he refused to grant me any interview. Only when his second in command (to whom he had referred me) grew ill, did Kaufman relent — and then he only agreed to provide written answers to a list of written queries. When I asked him why, he apologized and said that the decision was “self-serving.” He was busy, and an interview could take hours, if not days, he believed. Besides, he himself was thinking of writing a book. But I learned that there are other reasons why Channel 6 now strives to be discreet, if not secretive, about its identity — and those reasons are to be found in the station’s history.

That saga began before Kaufman’s arrival in San Diego, back in the earliest days of television, in the late 1940s, soon after the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doled out the first VHF (very high frequency) television assignments. At that time, the U.S. worked out an agreement with Mexico regarding the frequency assignments along the border. Negotiations must have been touchy, for while the populations of the Mexican border towns then didn’t approach those of their U.S. counterparts, the Mexicans commanded a strong bargaining position. Had the two countries failed to reach some agreement, both would have faced the possibility of constantly stepping on each other’s electronic toes — a broadcaster’s nightmare. In the case of the San Diego-Tijuana area, the compromise awarded channels 6 and 12 to the Mexicans and channels 8 and 10 to the Americans. Channel 8 went on the air in 1949 and the eventual start-up of Channel10 was a certainty. It didn't take long for someone to eye one of the Mexican VHF frequencies as a third source of programming for the growing San Diego metropolis.

The first American with that idea was a man named Al Flanagan, who at times worked at Channel 7 in Los Angeles and Channel 8 in San Diego. By 1950 Flanagan had begun talking about his vision- with Jorge Rivera, the owner of Tijuana radio station XEAK. It took three years of haggling for the appropriate permission from both governments, but by early 1953 Rivera found himself supervising the construction of a transmitter atop Tijuana’s Mt. San Antonio and Flanagan began hiring an American staff.

One of his first recruits was Van Deerlin, a former city editor of the San Diego Daily Journal (which folded in 1950) who had run unsuccessfully for Congress in 1952. When Flanagan offered him a job with XETV. the aspiring politician figured television was as good a way as any to gain visibility with the city’s voters. As things turned out. his first tasks were off-camera — he handled public relations for the newborn station. Today Van Deerlin recalls that the first colorless glow of XETV’s existence was a test pattern accompanied by music. “And my first public relations problem was the business of placating all those viewers out there who found the signal obliterating the signal on the adjacent Channel 7 out of L.A., on which they were used to hearing Lawrence Welk. You can imagine all those middle- and over-middle-age viewers suddenly unable to get the bubble man because of a lousy test pattern! ”

Although Flanagan had first dreamed of establishing live studios in San Diego and sending shows across the border via microwave to the transmitter, that plan didn’t materialize. Instead, Channel 6’s first programs were almost entirely old films. To introduce them. Flanagan hired two announcers. Bill Mesmer and Johnny Downs, a former “Our Gang’’ child star and vaudeville graduate who had worked with Flanagan on television in Hollywood. At XETV, Downs soon developed a specialty for children’s shows. (When he left Channel 6 after fifteen months, he went on to a seventeen-year tenure as a children’s show host at Channel 10.) Downs recalls that in those first days the station didn't even come on the air until the late afternoon, and Downs would try to snare juvenile viewers at five o’clock with old Flash Gordon film segments. For that show, one of the Mexican technicians even contrived for him a reflecting cap with a hole in the middle of it. through which an electric lightbulb flashed on and off. “It gave me an outer-space image.” he recalls. At eight Downs would return to introduce an early movie by tap-dancing to the music of “Are the Stars Out Tonight?” Then at ten, Mesmer, smoking a pipe and seated in an armchair, would introduce more sophisticated movie fare. Van Deerlin squeezed his fifteen-minute news show in between, at 9:45, and he says, “I would come off this early movie with a rating of sixteen to eighteen — the highest ratings I ever got in my life, and for the lowest-budget news show that could ever have been produced anywhere! I didn’t even have a cameraman out shooting film. But the absurdly high rating didn’t fool the ad agencies downtown for a minute. They referred to it as ’Van Deerlin’s flush rating’; people were relieving themselves between movies or making sandwiches or doing whatever else you do.”

Not that those early newscasts weren’t diverting. To compete with the San Diego media. Van Deerlin hunted for stories the then-complacent newspapers ignored. One day, for example, he received a phone tip from someone at the Navy commissary alerting him to an incident which had occurred out on Thirty-second Street. Sure enough, the newscaster confirmed that a woman hit-and-run driver had fled the scene, only to be chased down by a young cop and revealed as the wife of a local judge. Newspapers didn’t touch the report. so Van Deerlin used it as his lead that night, and he says the switchboard lit up with viewers asking, “If this really happened^ why wasn’t it in the papers?”

At times the physical plant on the Tijuana mountaintop also contributed to the show’s drama. Videotape didn’t exist then, so all commercials had to be done live (except for national ones available on film). “Usually, they would have three commercial sets set up at a time, one in each comer, and most nights my news set would go up in the fourth,” Van Deerlin recalls. “But on Thursday and Friday nights, business was so good (and of course the most important thing was what was being paid for) that they would occasionally displace my news set and set it up out-of-doors. That was all very good unless the fog was rolling in or a strong wind was blowing, in which case the backdrop (a skyline of the City of San Diego) would wobble in the wind. It must have been very sickening to the viewers.” Other distractions also intruded on the open-air news room. “1 recall one night seeing this cat crouching, ready to leap. I thought to myself, 'If that goddamned cat jumps up on the desk, I’m just going to get up and walk away!’ ”

Mexican law required that all technicians working at the station be citizens of that country, so most came from Mexico City and few spoke English, just as none of the on-camera Americans spoke Spanish, another source of complications during the newscasts. “You’d have these people working slide machines who didn’t understand English. If they had the wrong picture up. they had no inkling that it didn’t match what they were hearing on the air,” says Van Deerlin. He remembers getting out of sync on the pictures one night while reporting on an Atlantic City beauty parade. As Van Deerlin described the winner, the renowned visage of Senator Joseph McCarthy scowled down at him and the viewers. Another memorable linguistic foul-up occurred during Downs’s on-the-air birthday party, in which the staff members presented the announcer with a cake. “They were all in the picture with him, and Johnny wanted the cameraman to dolly on the cake,” according to Van Deerlin. “He [Downs] motioned to the cameraman, ‘Come in! Come in!’ So the guy took off his headphones and walked into the set, leaving the camera untended. This is the delightful informality with which things used to proceed.” Another time. Van Deerlin concluded reading his nightly commentary, but “the light remained on and the camera remained on and I had this steely smile, waiting for the goddamned thing to go off so I could relax. Finally, the light went off and the cameraman took his headphones off. He said. The producer and the director are having a feest fight.’ This had been going on in the next room. Nobody had been directing the program!”

Downs, who now lives in Coronado and sells real estate part-time, fondly recalls that “it was the most hectic thing you could imagine. We loved it up there. It was a great challenge. We were like the lost battalion.” And soon the station acquired a new American commander in Kaufman, the product of a New Jersey newspaper family, who’d worked as a publisher and reporter before switching over to the new medium. Kaufman was running a Phoenix television station when he caught the attention of Emilio Azcarraga, the Mexican media magnate who had acquired Channel 6 almost immediately after its inception. Azcarraga’s chief aide flew up to interview the American as a possible replacement for Flanagan, and Kaufman took the job six months after the station went on the air. Downs says, “Flanagan was the type of guy who’d wear a shirt with his sleeves rolled up. If something wasn’t right, he’d either yell at you or get in and fix it himself. Whereas Mr. Kaufman worked more on the executive plane. He was a little more of a management man.” Certainly the station was in need of firm guidance at that juncture. It was as if the chaotic Tijuana studios were one platform connected to a tightrope stretching into America; on this end was a newly established American corporation called Bay City Television. The chief balancing artist between them was the youthful Kaufman. Bay City had been set up to run all the programming and handle all the U.S. sales for XETV; it never has owned any share of the station itself, but merely contracts with Channel 6’s Mexican corporate owner, Radio-Television S.A. Thus Kaufman has worked only for Bay City as its vice president and general manager. In those first years, however, he had a variety of roles to play. One was as international shepherd. The live commercials required the presence of all the products being sold on Six’s airwaves, and Kaufman took responsibility for ushering everything from lamps to living room sofas through the tedious customs inspections. “We were in the export-import business,” he says. Car commercials were the station’s steadiest source of income, and Kaufman often felt like John Wayne, herding his shiny caravans up Mt. San Antonio. The hill itself posed a formidable challenge. Winter rains would turn the vaulting unpaved surface into muck perilous to anything but snow tires. On the American side of the border, Kaufman battled even stickier traps — namely, suspicion and hostility from San Diego broadcasters. And there was the independent station’s omnipresent problem of unearthing broadcast material in that prehistoric era before the existence of reruns of “I Love Lucy” or the “Beverly Hillbillies” or “The Honeymooners.”

One of Kaufman’s innovative responses was to develop educational programming, which he claims was one of the first such efforts regularly broadcast in the world. Instructors from Cal Western University (now USIU) drove down to Tijuana five days a week to lecture for two or three hours a day on topics such as “American Culture.” Other live programming experiments ranged from a half-hour nightly “magazine,” which Kaufman says was a forerunner of today’s “PM Magazine,” to live coverage of the jai alai games at the Tijuana fronton. The latter event even went into syndication, and to promote the shows, XETV fielded a jai alai team which challenged broadcasters across America to play. Sadly, the station had no takers. In the mid-Fifties, however, the station's staple continued to be movies, an alternative to the network offerings, if often a fairly indifferent one.

San Diego TV viewers twenty-five years ago on this date, for example, chose from the following menu of electronic delectations. At 6:30 p.m. on that Sunday evening they could watch “Lassie” on Channel 8 (the CBS affiliate), “Roy Rogers” on Channel 10 (which had started broadcasting NBC offerings just a few months after XETV went on the air as an independent), or something called “Rocky Jones” on the Mexican station. The 7:00 p.m. showings were “Private Secretary ” (8), “People Are Funny’.’(10), and “Secret File” (6). Then at 7:30 XETV cranked up its first movie of the night (in this case Sally in Our Alley, starring Gracie Fields), countered by such shows as “What’s My Line” and “Toast of the Town” on Channel 8, and “Showcase” and “Hall of Fame” on Channel 10. Some loyal Channel 6 viewers may have stayed tuned for the half-hour offerings of “Guy Lombardo” and “Florian ZaBach” between nine and ten — but probably not very many, because the competition aired such television classics as “TV Playhouse” (this evening featuring Paddy Chayefsky’s, “The Catered Affair,” with Thelma Ritter on Channel 10) and “Stage 7,” more live drama on Channel 8 at 9:30. By ten, XETV bounced back with another movie (Powers Girl, with Carol Landis) to contend with such network programs as “Loretta Young,” "Appointment with Adventure,” “Bob Cummings,” and “Beat the Clock.”

Avid TV fans on that night in 1955 would have noticed something else — that they couldn’t receive any of the programs on the fledgling ABC network, a fact which really rankled ABC. (Channel 8 then was picking up an occasional ABC show, but only running it at odd hours not covered by CBS, KFMB’s main network supplier.) The obvious alternative, and one which delighted the Mexican independent, was an ABC/XETV alliance — but FCC rules required American broadcasters to seek permission before beaming material out of the country for the purpose of rebroadcast into the United States. However, the third network’s dissatisfaction finally drove it to plead with the regulators for an exception. The FCC granted it, and the affiliation began on election night, 1956.

But trouble materialized right away. It came principally from Channel 8, which immediately beseeched the FCC to disallow the affiliation on the grounds that Eight would lose money as a result of losing some ABC programming material to the Mexican competitor. The warfare was nothing new; observers of Channel 6 in those early days say the station encountered a near-universal hostility from TV people on this side of the border. “They felt that every dime that was being taken out of San Diego was being taken out of their coffers,” says Van Deerlin. At the FCC hearings in Washington, ABC rebutted the economic arguments by pointing out that the loss of XETV’s new affiliation would cost the network $10,000 a month. XETV faced an insidious but entrenched anti-Mexican sentiment, and those racial innuendoes took the proceedings through a more bizarre twist. To support its contention that Mexican programming was inferior, Channel 8 introduced one witness, a hapless chap Channel 8 management had installed in the El Cortez Hotel for eight months under orders to monitor every minute of the Channel 6 programs. Kaufman says the hearing reached such a ridiculous level that the man was even grilled about how he could have kept his eyes glued to the set while performing “certain necessary ablutions.” (The witness responded that his television swiveled so he could follow it from all points in the suite.) For all that conscientiousness, the witness’s ignorance of Spanish disqualified him; XETV then was broadcasting several hours of Spanish programs a week, the nature of which the TV prisoner could only guess at. (Once he judged that a commercial in which the Mexican actors wore white coats was a dairy ad; in fact it was a public service message.)

The ABC network and XETV won that battle, and San Diego viewers who tuned their TV sets to Channel 6 started receiving the likes of such ABC stars as Walt Disney. About the same time, the channel dropped all the Spanish-language programming, an interesting move. It was a Mexican station, using a frequency designated to serve the Tijuana area. Furthermore, Van Deerlin says that Mexican law at least at one time required (and may still do so) all Mexican television stations to repeat every hour of foreign-language (i.e., English) programming in Spanish. “Somehow that law has never been enforced with regard to Channel 6,” the congressman (one of XETV’s staunchest admirers) says mildly. He supposes it was for the same reason that he and the other Americans working at the station were allowed, for a forty-dollar fee, to return home nightly, even though their work permits required them to stay in Mexico for six months at a time. I asked Kaufman about the Spanish-language programming, and he responded (in writing), “I am aware that the Government of Mexico has granted authority to XETV to conduct its broadcasting on a commercial basis in the English language. Whether the authorization constituted a waiver of a statutory provision or was merely the exercise of routine administrative discretion, I am unable to say. However, the Ministry of Telecommunications is fully aware of how XETV has been operating all these years and were anything amiss, I should think they would have intervened by now.”

If XETV has been granted any special exceptions, it wouldn't be surprising, considering the station’s owner. People who knew Emilio Azcarraga — Don Emilio, he . was called — speak of him with awe. He was a poor Basque who singlehandediy had risen to rule an empire, a multimillionaire media mogul on a par with David Sarnoff, RCA’s founder. Don Freeman, the San Diego Union's television critic, visited Azcarraga’s dominion in Mexico City in 1955, and described it in subsequent columns. At the time. Freeman wrote, Azcarraga owned all three television channels in the Mexican capital, plus two others which beamed programs out over the mountains encircling Mexico City. He also ran the two most powerful radio stations, including one which employed 300 musicians to provide live music for eighteen out of every twenty-four hours. Most Mexican TV shows were live (compared to the early XETV fare), and they included such Latin adaptations as "Adivine Mi Chamba” ("What’s My Line”) and the "64,000-Peso Question.” Of Azcarraga, Freeman says today, “Pride and strength were his dominant characteristics. And great, surpassing intelligence. ”

Kaufman met the telecommunications giant eight months after he had joined Azcarraga’s employ, and the encounter dazzled him. Among his adventures with Azcarraga, one anecdote Kaufman has widely recounted relates to that first visit. After being wined and dined lavishly for days (with no mention of business), Azcarraga turned to Kaufman and his wife at one point and asked if they’d ever visited Acapulco. Less than a half hour after answering no, they found themselves heading for the resort in a chartered plane. Only ten days later did Azcarraga broach the subject of business — and then only briefly. Today a portrait of Azcarraga (who died seven years ago) hangs in Bay City’s conference room; even the picture conveys nobility and power. Kaufman’s characterization of Azcarraga is simple. “He was a man among men,” he says.

Whether or not Azcarraga’s puissance bent any Mexican broadcasting rules for XETV, one thing is clear: the station has gone out of its way to respect American broadcasting dictates. “The United States and its Federal Communications Commission has no authority whatever over the operation of XETV,” Kaufman points out in his written replies. Instead, the Mexican Ministry of Telecommunications controls communications within that country, and while regulation in the two countries is similar, Kaufman adds that "because of its position on the border, serving audiences in the United States as well as Mexico, XETV has voluntarily complied” with rules that American stations must follow but which aren’t strictly required of Mexican stations.

Kaufman writes, “For example, it is lawful to advertise hard liquor products on Mexican broadcasting stations. XETV has never done so because it realized that such advertising is not acceptable within the United States." The station has generally complied with American programming standards, he continues. “By the same token, we think that it is to our best interests not to exploit our position, for example, by selling advertising time to political candidates without making time available on equal terms to their opponents [the provisions of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine requirement]. To do so would be unacceptable to our audience on either side of the border.”

Certainly the last thing the station needed in the late Fifties and early Sixties was to antagonize any potential customers on this side of the border. “We chose to operate in the same manner that the American stations operate in order to be competitive,” asserts Ted Millan, who served as Channel 6’s advertising sales director from 1960 to 1974. “We had to assure our advertisers we were of the first leather. We had to fight like a son of a bitch to get there. Our integrity was on the line. We had to work harder than anyone else. ”

Today Millan runs his own ad agency. He’s a boisterous, flamboyant man who parted with Channel 6 on a bitter note, but he wouldn’t discuss that rupture with me. He was glad to describe his warm, early association with the station, however.

Millan had come to the station from a radio sales job, and he says if television was young then, commercial time still sold as fast as underpriced diamonds. “There was a glamour, a glitter to it. that everyone wanted a piece of.” But Millan nonetheless discovered that Channel 6 suffered two handicaps. One was the American distrust of Mexicans. “It wasn’t so much that the station was singled out,” Millan says. “It was just the attitude of the times. It was North American arrogance. ’’ So he says the sales force compensated by trying that much harder to overcome the doubts. “We were obtrusive. We were abrasive. We had to be in order to survive.”

He tells, for example, how SDG&E then was sponsoring the weather five days a week on both channels 8 and 10, but wouldn’t deign to buy any spot ads on XETV. So Millan did a study which proved that advertising five days a week was inefficient (he found that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday ads reached eighty-five percent of the TV audience then), and he called a meeting with SDG&E and its account executive, to accuse the latter of mishandling the utility's advertising funds. Millan boasts that not long after that encounter, SDG&E stopped the five-day-a-week buying. Soon after that, it started running spot ads on Channel 6.

Millan says the other major headache suffered by Six in those days was that — despite the 100,000-watt VHF transmission beamed from Tijuana directly at San Diego — many San Diegans had trouble receiving the station in the early Sixties. “The problem was that most people had their antennas oriented to the north and east, since they were used to receiving KFMB and KOGO.” The solution was simple: to add a “one-bay,” an extra rod which facilitated reception of the Tijuana transmissions. Millan says he urged Kaufman to advertise that advice widely, but the general manager resisted doing so. So instead, the station quietly sent out technicians to callers who complained about the poor reception. “You have no idea the money we spent,” Millan says. “It took the station a long, long time to tell people they were getting a signal from the backside.” But as new residents swelled San Diego and ABC grew more popular, the problem gradually eased.

Just as it receded, however, a far graver threat was looming in the gestation and birth of UHF Channel 39, an event which Millan recalls with some sourness. He says, “The perceived awareness that Six was vulnerable to an American flag station” marked KCST’s 1965 advent. And indeed Channel 39’s cofounder, Larry Shushan, confirms that he and his partners from the outset looked forward eventually to capturing Channel 6’s ABC affiliation. Shushan (who then owned KPRI radio and today works for KSDO and KEZL radio) started Channel 39 with Atlas Hotels owner Charles Brown and Paul Corrier. the founder of Corovan Moving and Storage. But their timing was off. “Nobody knew what UHF was about in those days.’’

Shushan recalls. Most antennas required a thirty- to forty-dollar UHF converter to receive the ultra-high frequencies, and “there just weren’t enough viewers,” Shushan says. The trio lost money “hand over fist” for about a year, then sold their electronic offspring to a Texas outfit named Bass Communications. Bass kept the San Diego UHF station dormant for a few years, recommenced programming in 1968, then a year later leveled the big artillery: a challenge to the permission the FCC had routinely granted ABC for thirteen years to beam its package of shows to Tijuana.

The battle was a long and arduous one. On the one side were not only Channel 39 (which claimed that it had lost $650,000 in 1968) but also the cable TV stations. Mission Cable and Pacific Video. Essentially, they charged that Channel 6’s local programming was defective, and that by allowing ABC to sell its products to the Mexicans, the FCC was not acting in the best American business interests. Throughout the years of hearings, both ABC and Channel 6 fought back with vigor. Says Millan, “We went at it tooth and nail. We thought we were operating in the public interest and convenience, and if the commission’s decision was to be based on merit (and we thought it would be) we were very optimistic.” Kaufman argued that since pockets of San Diego couldn’t receive the UHF transmissions at all, XETV’s loss of the affiliation would rob more than 26,000 San Diegans of the ability to get ABC programs. But after a few initial victories, the final decision went against ABC and Channel 6. In the spring and summer of 1973, ABC reluctantly started sending its shows to the Channel 39 transmitter on Mt. San Miguel in San Diego.

Today Van Deerlin looks back on that decision and judges flatly, “It was an example of the regulatory apparatus of our government caving in to commercial interests.” Bill Fox, now the general manager for Channel 39, declined to be interviewed about his station's long-standing feud with Six. At the Bay City offices in San Diego, the ruling came as a shock, according to Millan (then still Channel 6’s sales manager). “If you had all the best columnists in the world and one day they all quit, how would you feel? Take a network from a station; rip the guts from it! There goes “Charlie’s Angels” and everything else. Suddenly it’s emptysville. You’ve got an awful lot of half hours to fill. It isn’t easy. It’s very, very tough.” Yet even at that bleak hour. Millan says, “I felt the station could really succeed in the market. We’d endured an awful lot. We’d annealed as a team; we were mature enough. I really thought we could handle things.” Indeed, independent status even offered a number of advantages, which Millan and Kaufman quickly began to appreciate.

The main one is that independent television stations possess more of the thing that actually brings, in the money: air time which can be sold to advertisers. Of course, all broadcasters live with the same twenty-four hours, but affiliated stations (like channels 8, 10, and 39) sell a big chunk of their time to their respective networks, usually the hours from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. and the evening slots from 8:00 to 11.00. The networks in turn fill that time with programs and national commercials mostly beamed out of New York, leaving the affiliates usually just the few minutes on the hours and half hours to sell to local and regional advertisers. Naturally, the cost of commercials usually relates directly to the ratings generated by the surrounding programs, so commercials on network shows, which draw the biggest audiences, cost more. In contrast, an independent station must buy programming material to fill all its time, but it also reaps all the commercial profits. The canny independent broadcaster juggles the cost of the shows he must buy against their potential for luring viewers — and he knows they don’t have to top the ratings. Says one local TV ad salesman. “The general rule in town is that if you give a salesman anything more than a “five” [meaning commercial time on a show which attracts five percent of the county’s television watchers], he can sell it.” And again, the independent has more to sell.

In the six years since it lost the ABC affiliation. Kaufman has proven himself a master of that juggling, today commanding about nine percent of the total market share. The lures he’s tossed into the airwaves have generally been the independent’s standard fare: heavy doses of children’s programming, syndicated reruns, sports (for seven years the station was the only one interested in broadcasting the Padres games), and that oldest stock in trade, movies.

“Prime time” for all independents has always been the late aftemoon/eafiy evening hours from three to eight, the period when most affiliated stations don’t carry network programming. In a real sense, all stations are independents during those hours, and they compete on equal ground. “Generally, from five to eight is the big battle, with everyone counter-programming everyone else,” says Chuck Dunning, Six’s marketing director. It’s a ground where Six has fought particularly successfully. In January, for example. Six attracted an average of fourteen percent of the local viewing audience between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., compared to only fifteen percent for Channel 39, twenty-six percent for Channel 10, and twenty-eight percent for Channel 8. The record for Six’s recent five to six o’clock offerings (“Leave It To Beaver” and “Gilligan’s Island”) has been even more eye-opening. To compete against the two old programs, Channel 39 first tried a ‘ ‘Chico and the Man ’ ’ and “Rhoda’ ’ combination, and when that bombed, it substituted “Mary Tyler Moore” and “Bob Newhart” reruns. Beaver and Gilligan clobbered them, too, and now Channel 39 has thrown “Starsky and Hutch” into the fray. Channel 39 still has to pay for the syndicated programs it has pulled off the air, and a relatively new show like “Rhoda” can cost a breathtaking figure. In contrast, an ancient product like Beaver probably costs a few hundred a week. “Yet Kaufman sits there with his little ‘Beaver’ and his little ‘Gilligan ’ and he does nothing but generate numbers,” one Channel 6 insider said smugly.

The question of just how profitable those numbers have been is one that can only be answered broadly. Bay City is a closely held corporation, which releases no earnings figures and need not report anything to the FCC. But Millan (the former sales manager) points out that the communications industry as a whole has been in a “demand market. . . . People are making incredible profits, incredible.

Against that backdrop, industry sources add that San Diego has had no better outlet for a television ad salesman than Channel 6. One such source elaborates that the three affiliate stations each have from seven to ten sales people, and “there’s probably three or four total who make more than $50,000. At Six there arc only five salesmen and they all make more than that, some much more.”

Of course, the kind of shows they’re selling — the Beavers and the Gilligans — open the Mexican independent to the kind of criticism usually leveled at the networks; namely, that XETV panders to the basest programming desires. Although Van Deerlin isn’t quite that harsh, he does say of his esteemed friend Kaufman. “He’d be the first to recognize that no one ever went bankrupt underestimating the intelligence level of the American people. He’s always programmed for that common denominator. He’s a very fast guy to recognize a buck and to recognize ways of saving money. ... He’s not the kind of person who would waste a minute trying to upgrade the level of programming.” Kaufman’s written reply to my query about this was stiff. “The consistently large audiences which regularly watch XETV suggest that such programming provides a valuable and accepted service to the public,’1 he declared. His station manager. Marty Colby, offers a far more spirited defense, however. A suave, smooth-talking seven-year veteran of Channel 6, Colby admits that the independent tradition was built on sit-com reruns, but he contends independents now are on the verge of becoming television’s “creative leaders.” “I don’t think the American people want their time wasted with trivia any more. I think the days of Laveme and Shirley are the dead past. I think people want to be treated with a higher degree of intellectual respect,” he preaches. Colby’s alternative is movies. “The American public is willing to pay a great deal of money to be entertained by feature films, ” he says. Recognizing that, he says Channel 6 now is undergoing conversion to “more and more of a movie channel.” To get better films, one venture Colby proudly points to is something called “Operation Prime Time,” a four-year-old attempt to create an alternative to the networks as a source of additional prime-time programming. Channel 6 was one of thirty-two network and independent stations to inaugurate the consortium, whose members aired the first miniseries (“Testimony of Two Men”) in May of 1977. This year 118 stations helped fund nine different offerings: three miniseries (including Harold Robbins’ “The Dream Merchants”) and six other specials, which range from dramas to a pop music “extravaganza” to a children’s Christmas special. Another of Colby’s babies has been Channel 6’s reduction of the number of commercial interruptions of movies to three per film (compared to an average of eight interruptions of network movies), an innovation XETV plunged into last October 19. So far results of that experiment have been mixed (although Colby claims the station got 640 letters of appreciation on October 20). But Colby vowed to me in early March, “This is an investment that the station is prepared to make for a year. At the end of the year I’m convinced that XETV will be the most popular TV station in the marketplace.”

That March morning, Colby expressed to me confidence in another of the station’s programming experiments. When 1 asked about the place of Channel 6’s faltering news show, he replied. “I think there’s a real need for a ten o’clock news show. But once again we find this is a long-term investment.” Three weeks later the news was canceled. As provocative as that abrupt policy change is the insight into the station the ill-fated show provided. It was a fluke, a major, live, local programming effort at a place which for years had tried no more complicated live broadcasts than the Padres games.

The idea for the news show was hatched about four years ago. Inside sources contend it was never an idea Kaufman liked. “Colby pushed him into it,” one told me. “Kaufman saw more profit in running the Benny Hills or whatever else was available at that time.” However, if Kaufman wasn’t wild about offering news, he certainly gave it his blessing, insists Bob Richards, the local ad man who sold the program concept to the station. “It wouldn’t have happened without Kaufman’s support.” he says.

Richards’ first idea was a simple, if offbeat, one. He proposed to serve Bay City as an independent contractor, taking full responsibility for producing the program. At first it was to consist of threc-and-a-half-minute news updates to be broadcast twice nightly, between nine and ten, from the Tijuana studios. Richards hired Lou Waters, a former Channel 39 anchorman, who premiered the “Up To Dates” in the fall of 1976. Less than a year later Waters took a broadcasting job in Arizona, so Richards replaced him with Ron Fortner (who, ironically, had replaced Waters as anchorman at Thirty-nine, and like Waters, had gotten fired there.)

When Fortner took the job, he saw it as his last hurrah, a blessed chance to escape the notorious transience of the news anchorman, which had cycledbim through a half dozen cities in a dozen years. He saw it as a chance to settle down at last. But Richards fired Fortner last October, and today Fortner is a man bereft of broadcasting bridges in this city. That’s one reason he agreed to talk frankly about his Channel 6 news experience. He’s a consummate talker. Words — elegant words, apt words — roll out of him in perfect sentences with vigorous cadences. He says he’s not bitter toward XETV, but many of his words are angry ones.

His early memories of the Tijuana news work echo Lionel Van Deerlin’s early romance with journalism at the top of Mt. San Antonio. Fortner cagily stretched his three-and-a-half-minute segments into variable spots of five, ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes. After nine months, by July of 1978, the operation finally expanded to a full half hour. Handling that were Fortner and one reporter named Jim Harrison. Their initial enterprise enjoyed a relationship with the other San Diego news teams which Fortner says was clearly estranged. “They really ignored us. We were a pimple on the backside of broadcasting in San Diego. We were an electronic headline service. And here I was doing my penance and plotting for the day when this lowly babe would rise up and smite Goliath in the promised land.” Every evening Fortner would monitor the San Diego stations’ evening newscasts, then head south to the border, listening to KSDO news radio along the way. On the Tijuana mountaintop, he would review the UFI wire, the studio’s one news contact with the outside world. Then he would put to paper his never-ending stream of beautiful words.

Today that Tijuana facility where Fortner toiled has changed dramatically from the days of Van Deerlin. The single cramped room has expanded to a jumbled complex of buildings; some house Tijuana’s Channel 12, which broadcasts exclusively in Spanish. Numerous transmitting towers now bristle from the hilltop like a metallic forest. But Fortner describes working in quarters little less primitive than those which served the 1953 newscast. The anchorman occupied a tiny old announcer’s booth half consumed by record cabinets. The news show shared with the station manager a single San Diego phone line, which the journalists wire under strict orders not to use before 5:00 p.m. “It was the most ill-equipped expedition since Scott went to the pole,” Fortner says today.

Four months into the start of the half-hour show, he threatened to quit, a move which prompted some action. Within twenty-four hours, a long-delayed newsroom was operational. But the irritations soon chafed again. Fortner says the pay not only was low, but also fluctuated weekly. A satellite receiver which collected material from the Independent Television News Association was installed behind a trucking terminal in a San Ysidro basement room which had served as a toilet. Fortner claims trucks occasionally banged into the morass of equipment, and, "We didn’t know from one day to the next if we would have the satellite service.” Furthermore, the news show’s ratings seemed stuck at a lowly "three.”

The show nonetheless expanded to an hour in July of last year, a change which temporarily brightened everyone’s spirits. Fortner’s optimism was short-lived. His deteriorating relations with Richards and the Bay City management continued to worsen, and finally, one Wednesday in October, he received a certified letter firing him immediately.

The day before, Richards had gone to a former radio disc jockey named Rick Martel and asked him if he could anchor Channel 6’s ten o’clock news show that very evening. Martel, a friend of reporter Jim Harrison’s, was an insurance salesman whose only television news experience had been to cover an entertainment beat for Channel 10 in 1969 and 1970. But he was game to try the new challenge, although he protested that he couldn't start until the next day. Martel says he soon settled into the routine of leaving his insurance office early, at three or four, then heading down to the Tijuana facility. Weekends, he continued to sing at Antonio’s Cocktail Lounge in National City. In January the news show was clipped back to a half hour. Martel says he offered to pay the rent on a teleprompter out of a concern to improve the show’s quality, but the management wouldn’t go for the idea. There were other frustrations. "If there was any moisture in the air, the phone and then the UPI wire went out. Many times we had to rewrite our shows from the daily newspapers. ” As the dismal ratings slipped still further, Martel says news of the ultimate cancellation didn’t shock him. "I don’t think they ever really wanted it,” he says.

That cancellation came just days after Colby was hospitalized, fueling the rumors that Kaufman long had been sharpening his knife for the show. Channel 6’s official press release gave this explanation: It said that Richards for a year had been seeking permission from the FCC to produce the news show in San Diego, then beam it by microwave to the Tijuana transmitter. Kaufman’s prepared statement said that FCC permission for such a "microwave link” didn’t look imminent, and in its absence a viable newscast couldn’t be sustained. It was a story which convinced few of the ten o’clock news’s skeptical observers, least of all Fortner. "If one has to list on the autopsy report the cause of death of the ten o’clock news, incontrovertibly it should read. Myopic malnutrition. Lack of vision. Lack of support for its life.’ ”

Although Richards’ contract with Bay City to produce the news only brought him about $120,000 a year (compared to annual news budgets of between a million and a half and two million for the three San Diego stations), Richards sticks by the microwave explanation. "I don’t think the problem was money. ... We didn’t have any fat in our organization, but everyone hustled.” Kaufman also continues to lay the blame for the show’s demise at the need for the microwave link. The FCC actually authorized such a facility, effective April 30 (nineteen days after the ten o’clock news signed off the air permanently). Kaufman now points out that the show actually was canceled back in December. "It’s ironic that (the FCC approval) would have occurred a short period of time after our cancellation.”

More significant than any such postmortems, however, are the broader implications that Fortner argues can be drawn from the news show experience. He charges that the cancellation proves that XETV lacks any sense of public responsibility. "I think at this point their programming reflects an arrogant contempt. ... If you accept the somewhat naive principle that television stations operate in the public behest, that they’re only timekeepers of the public’s airwaves, then you’ve also got to accept the notion that they owe the public something, that they’re responsible to them at least as a conduit of information. And in this case I don’t sec much evidence to contradict the yarning fact that that total process has been abrogated by the Channel 6 management hierarchy.”

Fortner further charges that the news threatened XETV’s management. "They’re able to control and manipulate syndicated film and reruns. You just roll the film and collect the dough. But with the news, they were having to deal with a highly complex, unpredictable animal. They didn’t know how to saddle him, much less ride him. And they were afraid he was going to run away from them.” The ex-anchorman says the live Tijuana operation threatened something else very basic to the station. "I discovered that one of the fundamental tenets was that the masquerade as an American independent will be upheld at all costs.”

Fortner says, "It was very common practice for the (Channel 6 people in San Diego] to ignore the fact that it was a Mexican station. When anyone asked where the station was, the typical response was Kearny Mesa.’ ” Fortner says when the news program undermined that illusion, the management intervened. One of the most blatant examples involved the news show credits shown every Friday night. "It was first suggested to me that we incorporate a few more gringo names into the program, those of people from Bay City who had nothing to do with the program,” Fortner states. He claims that eventually the credits were dropped altogether because the station didn’t want to display "all those Mexican names,” an accusation two other Channel 6 employees confirm.

In my written questions, I asked Kaufman about that accusation and other seeming indicators of a conscious effort to suppress the station's heritage and ownership: the dropping (six years ago) of the "Ole!” jingle; the discontinuance of an old slogan, "The International Station.” Kaufman’s (written) replies didn’t address any of those specifics, but he declared, "Like all of the stations in the San Diego-Tijuana market, XETV has changed the manner in which it has advertised and promoted itself several times over the years. I do not think it is fair or accurate to seize upon such changes as evidence of a desire to downplay the Mexican connection.”

On the contrary, the station still emphasizes the "X” feature of its logo, and Kaufman asserts, "Anyone who has lived in the border area for even a brief period of time is aware of the fact that stations in Mexico . . . have call letters beginning in ‘X’ and stations in the United States have call letters beginning with K’ or ‘W,’ ” Furthermore, he suggests, “a visit to the Bay City Television, Inc., offices ... on Ronson Road would indicate the extent to which all concerned with XETV emphasize, and are proud of, the Mexican identity of the station. We believe the building is one of the finest examples of Mexican colonial architecture in the area.”

I returned to that headquarters last week to pick up Kaufman’s answers, and once again it struck me that few buildings express their occupants’ personalities as well as that one does. Channels 8 and 39 are just a few blocks away, yet a vast aesthetic distance separates them. Compared to their slick ostentatiousness, XETV’s three-and-a-half-year-old bastion resembles some discreet private villa. Only a small sign bearing the rainbow-colored "6” identifies it. Visitors enter from the side, through heavy wood doors. Inside, they find themselves in a reception area as hospitable as a living room. A handsome television set is tuned to the station’s offerings, heavy tiles cover the floor, and comfortable furniture forms intimate groupings. Only past the receptionist does one realize that the building surrounds two inner courtyards filled with flowers, fruit trees, and splashing fountains, obviously designed to delight those inside rather than to impress the outside world. The whole place feels like a sanctuary, and Julian Kaufman occupies the heart of it.

Although he had warned me over the telephone that he wouldn’t answer any questions beyond the written ones, Kaufman graciously bid me to be seated in his office, a spacious Spanish-style salon suited to a man reputed to be not only the highest paid television executive in San Diego but possibly one of the highest paid in the entire country. At 62, Kaufman is slim and quite tall. He has wide, full lips, short, white hair which caps the back of his head, and eyes long practiced at keen, intelligent observation. In an unusual and formal request, he made me initial every single page of his written responses. And yet his gentle charm still disarmed me.

Despite his resolve, he had a hard time stopping himself from talking about the station’s evolution. "After all, it’s my favorite subject next to my family,” he said with the sincerity that springs from the work of a lifetime. And he couldn’t restrain himself from explaining his reclusiveness in a way that finally made sense to me. "There was a time when people in town did nothing but throw rocks at Channel 6,” he said. At base, much of that venom was “pure prejudice,” a thing which initially shocked him. And then gradually he began developing a certain "sensitivity”; with it came the decision “to maintain a low profile.”

With the low profile has come the community acceptance. Pockets of hostility toward XETV still remain (chiefly concentrated in Channel 39’s executive halls), but most San Diego broadcasters now seem to regard the station as an equal. "They handle themselves very well, ” one programming director told me with hearty approval. "They operate as if they were an American station.” Today Kaufman can mention that he’s the only local broadcaster to win the prestigious Peabody award (the industry’s highest honor); that Bay City is a member in good standing of San Diego’s best established civic groups.

Sitting in that office, looking out on his lush courtyard, Kaufman told me that the one accomplishment which makes him proudest is the unique international cooperation XETV’s history embodies. Yet he acknowledged he still wished I wouldn’t write any story at all — even a story which might communicate such a marvelous accomplishment.