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Interview with Sid Pipkin of Clovis, NM October 20th, 2002 John Habbinga - I was inspired to do some research on a reception log that I found the in the Dub Rogers collection. What I had was a list of people that had called in channel 13 reception reports to KDUB prior to it's grand opening on November 13, 1952. Most of the entries were from communities surrounding Lubbock and seemed to be associated people that operated electronics or appliance stores. Dub Rogers had spoken with most of these people and had probably solicited these reports. I tried to look up several of the individuals that were listed in the 50 year old log, but I didn't have much luck until I found the entry for Mr. Pipkin of Clovis, NM. I figured that an individual with a television set in Clovis, NM in 1952 was unusual and that the person must have been an amateur radio operator. I looked up the name Pipkin in a ham radio callsign database. Incredibly there was a record for Sidney Pipkin, W5CXP, born in 1917. After finding a number in the phonebook I called Mr. Pipkin to ask if he was the same person that had received KDUB in 1952. Not only was this the same Mr. Pipkin, but he was willing for me to visit with him and do a videotaped interview. The numbers at the left are videotape timecode that shows hours, minutes, seconds and frames.
Part 1 - Pipkin’s Occupation: Farming and Retirement 00:07:07:08 Pipkin – Well, I’ve been retired for quite a number of years now. Our family operation is farming and ranching North of Clovis. I have three boys out there that take care of that. So I’m more or less retired. I’ve got an office building here in town that I look after. 00:07:25:03 Habbinga – I notice that you have a lot of ham radio gear here that you work on. 00:07:29:00 Pipkin – Yeah, I was licensed as W5CXP in June of 1932 and I’ve been a ham ever since. I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been very fulfilling to be a ham operator. I talked to the Philippines the wrong way around the world. You know, some things like that happen, that are real interesting and happen once in a lifetime maybe. Anyway, it has been a very fulfilling hobby.
Part 2 - Discussion about reception of KDUB-TV from Clovis, New Mexico. 00:00:00:00 Pipkin - When we were trying to pickup KDUB, because we were trying to get one set up for here (television station for Clovis), but what we were trying to do was find out how high the tower would need to be to pickup KDUB. The way we would do that is we would take a small airplane and take a pretty sensitive field strength meter and we’d take that up in the airplane and go up about a thousand feet, tune in on channel 13, and then we’d kill the motor and let the plane come down until we lost the signal. We found out from that, that the tower had to be about five-hundred feet to get the signal to come in from Lubbock. 00:01:19:00 Habbinga – So did you build a five-hundred foot tower? 00:01:19:20 Pipkin – No. 00:01:21:00 Habbinga – What happened with that? 00:01:21:22 Pipkin – Well we just didn’t… We ran out of money. You know it was so expensive at that time to try to get backers to help put it in. You know they’d get started and then they’d back out. We didn’t have the tower until the cable television put in this one down here on Green Acres Point and it’s about six-hundred feet high I believe. 00:01:47:15 Habbinga – When was that? 00:01:49:20 Pipkin – That would’ve been in the Sixties I guess. 00:01:59:18 Habbinga – Okay, channel 12 was the station you were going to put up. 00:02:02:05 Pipkin – Yeah, but after that, then another company, another enterprise came in and financed and put in channel 12 tower down here on Sycamore and Tenth and it’s about a hundred and ninety foot tower, and that’s where they, they operated channel 12 down there for some time. I’ve forgotten the name of the call letters, but it wasn’t our call letters. 00:02:36:10 Habbinga – Yours were KNEH? 00:02:37:28 Pipkin – Yeah. 00:02:38:16 Habbinga – Did ya’ll choose those, the callsign? 00:02:42:25 Pipkin – No, they just issued them to us. Of course we kept it for quite a while, and finally the building permit ran out on it. We had to turn it back. It was just due to finances we just… a little town here and you couldn’t… there just wasn’t enough advertising to support it. We tried and it just didn’t work. But we did try to get Dub’s station to come into here because we felt like that was the link; you know to get in here. And he was willing to let us have some programming, in here. We thought, well that would help, but we didn’t have that five-hundred foot tower.
Part 3 – Mechanical Television 00:03:40:20 Pipkin – (Holding up a platter that was part of a mechanical television) Okay, this is the first TV that I ever witnessed. This was in nineteen and thirty-two. Here in Clovis, some fella, some enterprising fella, bought one of these and at that time they were broadcasting out of Kansas City on twenty-meters, fourteen-thousand, I believe it was fourteen-thousand one-twenty-five or something like that. It’s called W9USA. They broadcast these scanning pictures. Of course the way this works, this has got two-hundred and fifty-six little holes in a platter that goes in about two inches. And this thing turns, supposed to turn at eighteen-hundred RPM and that synchronizes it against the synchronizing rate of TV. This was the first scanner that they ever had. 00:05:02:00 Pipkin – (Now holding up a magnifying lens) This, of course, was a, the little image there was only about one inch square, so you had to put this magnifying glass in front of it to bring it up to about two inches or two and a half inches were you could see actually what was going on. At that time they were just cartoons, or little movable objects was about all that you could see, but you know, in 1932 we thought that was the greatest thing in the world to see pictures over the air. 00:16:49:00 Habbinga – Where did you get the parts from that mechanical TV? 00:16:54:17 Pipkin – Well the fella that had it here in Clovis, he sold it to me. I don’t have any idea what I paid for it, but he used it, demonstrated it and of course tried to sell a few of them and they didn’t sell very good because people didn’t understand how to operate them, and you know it wasn’t much of a picture, but to me it was something that would be interesting to keep down the years. 00:17:22:25 Habbinga – Is this something you purchased back when it worked? 00:17:24:15 Pipkin – Yeah, it was working. 00:17:26:14 Habbinga – So he had a transmitter too? 00:17:27:25 Pipkin – No, I didn’t have a transmitter. 00:17:30:00 Habbinga - But he did, the man you bought it from. 00:17:31:00 Pipkin – No the transmitter was out of Kansas City. 00:17:33:16 Habbinga – Oh, that’s right. W9USA. 00:17:35:20 Pipkin – and they were broadcasting it on fourteen one-twenty-five (14.125 MHz) or something like that. The twenty-Meter band. And of course it would come in here pretty consistent. Not real strong, but it would come in twenty-meters was pretty active at that time and we’d get it from… well from the middle of the afternoon is generally when we would see it. When that fella sold out, or whatever, I bought it from him and kept it, lost part of it. I’ve lost the motor, that little synchronous motor that goes with it, but I did salvage the scanner and I don’t think there’s very many of these left. There’s one in San Diego, they tell me. The one that they have in San Diego is probably a pretty complete unit. It’s in one of the museums out there. I’ve not seen it, but someone was telling me about it 00:18:50:11 Habbinga – You said that you went to a school in California for TV? 00:18:53:07 Pipkin – Yeah, they had this, oh it was for prospective buyers of TV stations, they had about a two-weeks refresher course on how to install equipment. 00:19:06:00 Habbinga – So these were for people who actually… 00:19:08:02 Pipkin – RCA 00:19:09:16 Habbinga – RCA did this, and it was for TV installers? 00:19:14:20 Pipkin – They were just selling equipment and we were interested in an RCA that they had here, well it was one that they had down in El Paso, and it was a used one and they wanted us, they were trying to get us to buy it and we were invited to go to the school there in Los Angeles.
Part 4 – First Television 00:05:045:00 Pipkin – We ordered one of those Mathis, that was one of the first TV sets I that had ever heard of. I ordered one just to find out how it worked. We got it in here and got it to working pretty good. Had it out at the farm. I had a pretty good tower out there so I put up an antenna as high as I could get it there, but the only thing we could pickup at that time was what they called skip. It’s when skip signals would bounce in. For some unaccountable reason, don’t know why, but we always picked up the Rose Bowl Parade on January One, and we did that for about two years in a row. Every January the First we’d pick up that Rose Bowl Parade. 00:06:39:00 Habbinga – That was coming from California? 00:06:40:05 Pipkin – No, it was coming out of Dallas. 00:06:42:11 Habbinga – Okay, on WFAA? 00:06:44:24 Pipkin – Probably so. I know we’d pick it up from the East. And of course we thought that was pretty great, you know, to see the Rose Bowl. 00:08:14:22 Pipkin – The television that we worked on at that time, we tried to get it to going we just couldn’t finance it well enough to go ahead and make a station out of it. We proceeded to try to bring in these other stations from Amarillo and Lubbock. It takes a tall tower, of course Mid-West Video down here put in this cable company and that helped a whole lot. That brought TV into Clovis. As far as the TV station, Amarillo, KVII, I think is the one that bought the equipment from the second owner of the license here in Clovis and they moved it down to Portales and it’s down there now. I think it’s on about an eight-hundred foot tower. Pretty tall tower and it covers most all of Roosevelt County and most of Curry County too. That’s what they used to cover this area and it is a repeater, in other words rebroadcasts KVII out of Amarillo. Not too many people seem to watch it, but they keep it going. There hasn’t been a great deal of competition here in Clovis for TV. You know, Clovis is only about thirty-thousand people. Most of them have cable or satellite. Satellite is becoming very popular here because the other is getting real expensive monthly, and it works real good too. 00:11:08:12 Habbinga – Do you remember picking up the KDUB signal for the first time? Do you remember what programming they had? 00:11:15:27 Pipkin – At that time Dub when he first started out down there, I didn’t know Dub real well, well I knew him personally. He had a lot of programming down there. A lot of it was on tape. That was the only programming that they had at that time. 00:11:49:02 Habbinga – In 1957 he was one of the first stations to get tape. He told us that the first thirty-five were set aside for CBS, the network, and that he got the third one of regular production. 00:12:08:00 Pipkin – Dub was the first one that was able to put in a recorder, a TV recorder, and he bought two of them, and they were about two-hundred thousand dollars apiece. You know, that was quite an expense, at that time, to put in a recorder. He did a lot of that recording and rebroadcasting. Dub was quite a pioneer. He was quite an operator. I’d have to give him credit. He could do things that no one else could do, really. I don’t know how he did it, but he had the backing of several influential people and people with some money, you know. Dub wasn’t afraid to try it. He’s sure get in there and get his feet wet. 00:13:28:28 Habbinga – Before KDUB started, Rogers met with owners of electronics shops to get their input. Were you a part of any of those meetings? 00:13:36:29 Pipkin – Well, I talked to Dub quite a bit before he got this on the air. 00:13:40:19 Habbinga – You may have known him because you both had applications for TV. 00:13:45:15 Pipkin – Yeah, I had asked Dub for some help on filling out the application, and he was real good to help. Of course he would like to see Clovis get a TV station because then we could operate it as a satellite for him. Of course it was so expensive to put up a tower and all that, we just didn’t get it done. And then Mid-West Video came in with their cable and that pretty well put the quaditas on us. (quaditas is probably a word native to the Clovis area). It was interesting to see what was going on, you know. |
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