The year 1954 was the high-water mark of what has been called "the Golden Age of Television."

It boasted original live drama, the crusading journalist Edward R. Murrow, the Army-McCarthy hearings, "The Honeymooners" -- legendary shows and moments that lent the emerging medium energy, intelligence and creativity.

Post-Gazette photos Terri and Brett Hardt of Allison Park watch themselves on a television monitor during a WQED open house in 1964. Visitors lined up in the rain to tour the station headquarters at 4337 Fifth Ave., which was approaching its 10th anniversary and gearing up for its annual fund drive, with a goal of $250,000. Click photo for larger image. Related articles Broadcast pioneer Josie Carey was there from the start WQED makes birthday plans WQED at 50: A Timeline

That mood was felt in Western Pennsylvania when, at 8 p.m. on April 1, 1954, an experimental television station flickered to life.

The Metropolitan Pittsburgh Educational Television Station -- WQED, Channel 13 -- was a product of the civic pride the city was feeling as it banished smoke and slums, calling its progress the "Renaissance."

Appearing on the program was Pittsburgh Mayor David L. Lawrence, leader of the Renaissance and a prime mover behind WQED.

It was Lawrence who announced the organization of WQED on Jan. 14, 1953. While there were other TV stations around the country dedicated to educational and cultural programming, WQED was the first community-owned one.

The station's other parent was Leland Hazard, counsel for PPG Industries and the station's first president.

Its studio was an Oakland building once owned by PPG at 4337 Fifth Ave., across the street from Heinz Chapel.

The Rev. Robert J. Lamont, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, offered a televised prayer, asking that "through its facilities, the best things in life may be shared with the community."

Hazard then began a WQED tradition that lives on today: accepting a donor's check. Emerson Radio and Phonograph Co. gave $10,000 for educational efforts.

Six months later, another tradition began. It was the on-air fund drive. The station mounted a marathon 52-hour telethon, "the longest in TV history" up to that point.

While offering classes via TV to students in Pittsburgh and 10 surrounding counties, WQED also was charged with providing "cultural" programs as well.

The station aired those shows starting at 5 p.m., "timed for the lull between school's ending and the beginning of the evening," as one newspaper put it.

That hour was "The Children's Corner," devised by two of WQED's original employees, Josie Carey and Fred Rogers.

Twice a week in that first year, Carey -- who started in local TV on "Ask the Girls" with one of Pittsburgh's original TV stars, Florence Sando, on the commercial station WDTV -- was the host of "The Attic," where discarded furniture came alive under the puppetry of Rogers.

"Nobody really knew what they were doing," she said. "We had a very long room for the studio with the organ at one end and the set at the other.

"Fred would have to run down to play the organ, then run back up to the set. That's why he started to wear sneakers."

Other programs featured woodworking instruction, animals from the Pittsburgh Zoo, the Carnegie Tech Kiltie Band and a quiz show, "The Greeks Had a Word For It." That one was Carey's idea.

To mark the station's first year on the air, Shakespearean scholar Frank Baxter from the University of Southern California was televised lecturing Carnegie Tech drama students on how to interpret the Bard.

Must-see WQED

WQED did capture the nation's attention. Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post were among the major publications to profile the station's early days. Life's coverage included a photo of Hazard by Margaret Bourke-White, the magazine's legendary photographer.

	Preparing for a day of shooting on "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" in 1971, producer-director Sam Silberman, above left, and Fred Rogers make adjustments to King Friday's castle in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe Click photo for larger image.

"We got 'discovered' all the time," remembers Carey.

Although the need to raise funds has preoccupied WQED from its beginning, the enterprise survived the many changes that occurred in the first 50 years.

By 1964, more than half a million students in the region were using WQED-WQEX as an instructional tool, and, in 1968, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" became available on public broadcasting stations nationwide. That same year, the long-running "Black Horizons" debuted.

Plans were under way in the second half of the decade to build a new home at 4802 Fifth Ave., which in April 1970 opened its doors for public viewing and attracted 8,000 visitors, blocking traffic in Oakland throughout the day. A Post-Gazette story proclaimed that the facility was "crammed with an array of the most sophisticated equipment in over 62,000 square feet of space," and it had room for growth, too.

The '70s became a time of expansion elsewhere, with the addition of a publication called Renaissance that evolved into Pittsburgh magazine and the launch of radio station WQED-FM. In 1975, financed by Gulf Oil Corp., WQED began production of a dozen National Geographic specials. The first, "The Incredible Machine," drew a record audience for PBS entertainment.

Fall from glory

During its glory days in the 1980s, WQED was a major force in public TV. The station was among the top four doing blockbuster national productions; its credits included the prestigious series "National Geographic," "WonderWorks," "Planet Earth" and "The Infinite Voyage." These programs and others won WQED a sterling reputation and scores of national Emmys.

On a chilly Sunday in 1963, more than 5,000 people jammed WQED's Fifth Avenue building to tour the station. Click photo for larger image.

They also brought a bonanza of corporate underwriting from such funders as Gulf Oil, IBM and Exxon. Generous overhead built into those contracts allowed the station to turn out high-quality, high-cost programs with little thought to the bottom line.

In the late 1980s, everything changed. Everything, that is, except the station's free-spending ways.

Pittsburgh's corporate titans were leaving town, federal funding for public TV diminished, cable television was eating into its niche and major underwriting was drying up. But WQED executives were slow to react and resistant to public scrutiny.

Station employees blamed president Lloyd Kaiser and executive vice president Tom Skinner for unchecked production costs and a top-heavy management team. When the numbers could no longer be ignored, several rounds of layoffs ensued, although none of WQED's 10 vice presidents was among them.

WQED ended 1990 with the lowest net worth of any of the top seven public TV stations that did national show s. Its total revenues were a third the amount of WGBH Boston's, yet Kaiser's salary was $100,000 more than that of his WGBH counterpart.

Local support was waning as well. Of the top four producing stations, WQED had the most pledge days (63), the least local support (14 percent) and the lowest viewership rating (38). Then it was revealed that station bookkeeping had disguised the executives' full salaries. In the face of public anger, the leaders took a pay cut -- even as they quietly cashed in station-supplied insurance policies that made up the difference.

These revelations cost WQED dearly.

The station plunged into the red, and more layoffs followed. In 1993, the organization had a $4.8 million deficit, a $5.6 million debt and a badly battered public image. Kaiser retired, Skinner resigned, and a new community watchdog group began questioning WQED's operations. The board of directors, criticized for being asleep at the switch, put itself out of business and re-formed as a smaller body with new rules.

By the time George Miles came on board as president in 1994, WQED had nowhere to go but up.

The big 5-0

As WQED marks its 50th year, it faces many of the same challenges as some of its viewers: paying for overindulgence of the past, trying to fit into a changing, technologically sophisticated world and finding a way to survive, if not thrive.

Richard DeMore; John R. Finfrock, a civics teacher at Forest Hills High School; and Susan Holden raised $1,300 for WQED through a 1955 student fund drive. Click photo for larger image.

Public TV used to be the only game in town for educational, cultural and arts programs and documentaries. "Now, in the digital cable-satellite universe, there are all kinds of other pretenders to that throne," says TV expert Robert Thompson at Syracuse University.

The line between TV and computer monitors is blurring, the digital universe is looming, and a device generically called TiVo (which captures and stores programming and allows viewers to speed through commercials) is starting to change the way Americans watch television. Cable, satellite dishes, VCRs and DVD players were new once, too.

Miles, WQED president and CEO, says the parent company is well-positioned to meet the challenges of the future. Reworking a James Carville campaign slogan, he says, "It's the content, stupid." And it's the delivery of that content over TV, radio, the Internet, print, VHS or DVD.

In the past decade, Miles, 62, has put his own management team in place and whittled the station's debt from $13.5 million to roughly $7.5 million (including $4.5 million the station owes its own endowments, $1 million in accounts payable and less than $1 million due to PBS). He oversaw a change in name, to WQED Multimedia, to reflect the TV and radio stations, Web site and print division that includes Pittsburgh magazine, cookbooks and other publications. Last year, WQED converted its bland conference room into the Elsie Hilliard Hillman Conference Center, which can be leased to outsiders.

And Miles increasingly preaches the gospel of "local."

Although critics might quibble with the content of some of today's shows, the station has come a long way since 1991, when the Post-Gazette reported that less than 2 percent of WQED's regularly scheduled programs were local. The national average was 7 percent.

At the time, WQED had just two half-hour local shows a week: "The Editors," done in conjunction with the Post-Gazette, and "Black Horizons."

The station launched a half-hour show called "On Q" in January 2000, spun off its Friday forum segment three years later and renamed it "Off Q." It continues to provide a home for "Black Horizons," Eleanor Schano's "LifeQuest" and cooking marathons that have been copied or repackaged for distribution nationally under the title "America's Home Cooking."

In fact, at a Pirates spring game in Florida this month, a fellow Pittsburgher introduced herself to Miles and mentioned that she watched Chris Fennimore's cooking shows down there. Miles told her the programs are exported around the country, and she asked, "Do we get credit for that?"

Miles says, "That meant, to me, she had a sense of ownership, she had a sense of pride" about WQED.

Keep it local

WQED can be a national player without being a national producer, as in the old days.

"We're not thinking about being a big national producer like [Boston's] WGBH, but we're thinking of ourselves as being a great local, local resource. I didn't realize, quite frankly, this would have happened to us" had someone asked nine years ago, Miles says. However, if some of those shows -- doo-wop specials or Rick Sebak's scrapbook documentaries about the Strip District or Oakland -- end up on PBS, all the better.

Onetime WQED producer T.J. Lubinsky launched the wildly popular "American Soundtrack" series with his 1999 "Doo Wop 50: Five Decades of Vocal Group Harmony" special. "American Soundtrack" is the most successful series of fund-raising specials in public TV history, generating more than $80 million to date.

When Sebak joined WQED in 1987, much of the focus was still on national programs. "So little attention was paid to what I did -- local programming -- it was like a little independent republic. ... We just quietly went about our business and made a lot of programs and, in the process, started the Pittsburgh History Series."

In the next 15 years, the hourglass would flip, and local programming would be on top.

This year, Sebak will have a foot in both worlds. He is preparing "A Program About Unusual Buildings and Other Roadside Stuff" for national airing in July and will have a local show (topic to be determined) near year's end.

"I still love working at WQED. I don't know if that's part of my upbringing," says Sebak, a Pittsburgh native.

"I think most Pittsburghers think of us as a very large church" that depends on members to donate money. "We're all in this together. We rely on everybody else to give us support so we can keep doing this."

Chris Moore, host of "Black Horizons" since August 1980, when Euzell "Bubby" Hairston and Sala Udin nearly came to blows on his first show, says WQED offers local voices and faces in a way that no cable network can. Or wants to.

He said no cable network would do a show like a recent program on Westinghouse High School. "They wouldn't do 'Wylie Avenue Days.' They wouldn't do 'Hip Hop Pittsburgh.' These are the documentaries Minette Seate and I have done over the years. They wouldn't do barbershops," the basis for another "Black Horizons" special.

Moore and senior producer Seate's collaboration on "The House: A Black Horizons Special," about Westinghouse, was as much history lesson as valentine to a neighborhood school. Such work allows QED to "hold a mirror up to the local community and say, 'This is you.' ... We examine the tough problems and do fond valentines."

Like Moore, who can be heard on KDKA Radio, anchor Stacy Smith moves back and forth between commercial and noncommercial TV.

In fact, Smith leaves KDKA at 6:58 p.m. and arrives at WQED -- traffic and snow permitting -- by 7:20 p.m., to host "On Q" weekdays at 7:30 p.m.

The show often delves into topics that Smith says "generally won't find the light of day on any commercial television station, just because they're interesting topics but they're not necessarily news topics."

He singles out how correspondent Tonia Caruso covered a teenager with cerebral palsy who used a computerized voice aid to perform the national anthem, and cites stories on the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's trip to Rome. Smith made that journey on behalf of both KDKA and WQED.

On April 7, WQED will devote its prime-time programming to the trip. Its schedule that night: At 7:30 p.m., "Special Edition of On Q: A Conversation with Maestro Gilbert Levine," with Smith; 8 p.m., "From Pittsburgh to the Vatican," a documentary that will provide a rare look inside the Chapel of the Holy Spirit designed by Pittsburgh architect Louis D. Astorino; 9 p.m., "A Celebration of Faiths: The Papal Concert of Reconciliation," the Jan. 17 concert (simulcast on WQED-FM); and, 10:30 p.m., "On Q at the Vatican," a compilation of "On Q" stories.

This spring, WQED tackles one of its most ambitious projects in years: a dramatized documentary that shows how a young George Washington ignited a battle for control of North America called the French and Indian War. It will be called "The War That Made America."

With a $14.7 million budget, the station will produce four hourlong segments (being shot in high-definition video) for airing in fall 2005, plus a Web site, advertising and promotion materials, companion book and educational materials.

Not-so-sweet 16 sale

When the Miles chapter of WQED is written, a lengthy passage will be devoted to efforts to sell WQEX. So far, it's the never-ending story that includes a controversy over whether Channel 16 should be sold at all.

	A sign on Fifth Avenue marks the location of WQED's first television studio in the medium's nascent days in the early 1950s. Click photo for larger image.

The proposed sale drew opponents from the start. Two public meetings in 1996 attracted roughly 110 people, including one observer who said, "I kind of have the feeling people are discussing cures at a funeral." An organized group known as Save Pittsburgh Public Television emerged to use letters, petitions, e-mails, media interviews and free legal representation from the Georgetown University Law Center to keep WQEX an educational station.

That same year, the FCC turned down WQED's first request to change Channel 16's license to a commercial one, which might have fetched $50 million. Then came Plan B, a three-way deal involving Cornerstone TeleVision and Paxson Communications. The FCC approved that deal but Cornerstone pulled out because of strings attached by the FCC.

Then came Plan C, another petition to the FCC to change the license and sell the station to Pittsburgh native Diane Sutter. WQED got permission to convert Channel 16's license from noncommercial/educational to commercial, but a $20 million deal with Sutter's Shooting Star Broadcasting fell apart.

Since November 1997, one programming lineup has aired on both stations, and public interest in the fate of WQEX seems to have waned or outright disappeared. That could change, in light of last week's actions by WQED's board of directors, which approved an undisclosed plan.

During the portion of its meeting that was closed to the public, the directors gave the green light to proceed with a lease or sale of Channel 16. Miles said details of the deal would be forthcoming.

Miles is recently back to work after treatment for prostate cancer caught at a very early stage. Retirement is not on the immediate horizon.

"I love this place. The good news about going away to Florida to recover and reflect on my own life [is that] I realized a couple of things. I got one of the greatest jobs in America at WQED. I love this place. I'm energized by this place. As long as the board wants me here, I want to be here. This place keeps me young."