The Swift Home Service Club
Swift Home Service Club was one of the first daytime television shows, hosted by Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg, and which aired Monday through Friday at 1pm ET.
Broadcast history
The show launched on NBC Television in May 1947, Mondays through Fridays at 1pm ET, featuring homemaker tips and interviews. This show started shortly after a previous show hosted by McCrary and Falkenburg, Bristol-Myers Tele-Varieties which debuted on the NBC network on January 5, 1947, and aired Sunday evenings from 8:15pm to 8:30pm ET.
Preservation status
This show has one of the oldest live television episodes preserved, with a kinescope of a 1947 transmission in the collection of the Library of Congress. This program is also credited as one of the first television programs with a sustaining sponsor: Swift and Company, the meat and food products company. The series lasted only one season.
According to Library of Congress and concurrent press sources, the program debuted in May 1947 at 1pm ET. There is a 3-minute segment of a live broadcast captured on early kinescope in the Library of Congress archives as part of the Hubert Chain collection from October 31, 1947, one of the earliest surviving recordings of live television. This program, one of several concurrent programs on NBC telecast from NYC's WNBT-TV, may be the first NBC network daytime show, shown in only two markets originally.
References
- Library of Congress catalogue
- New York Times obituary for Tex McCrary (2003)
- NBC Archives
- Museum of Broadcasting reference library