The 401 MEDIA
BY LAUREN CLEM
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: The museum features technology from both television and radio; the museum is in a former bank building on Woonsocket’ s historic Main Street; one of the museum’ s many tape machines; a poster from a former labor dispute in Boston; Paul Beck demonstrates how to use a vintage camera.
PHOTOGRAPHY: LAUREN CLEM; COURTESY OF WOONSOCKET MUSEUM OF BROADCAST TECHNOLOGY.
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On Air
Woonsocket’ s Museum of Broadcast Technology offers a glimpse into a‘ golden age’ of TV and radio broadcasting.
NTER THROUGH THE FACADE of the Renaissance Revival building across from Woonsocket City Hall, and you’ ll think you’ ve wandered onto the set of a 1950s television studio.
Scattered about the room, film cameras stand as tributes to the technology’ s evolution. Tape machines play recordings of long-gone television shows, while upstairs, a green screen completes the effect of a mock 1952 news studio. Even the logos on the cameras betray their ages, the letters spelled out in bright midcentury hues.
While it might seem like a portal to another time, the Museum of Broadcast Technology is the passion project of a group of retired broadcast professionals. The collection encompasses both TV and radio equipment and preserves the half-century of history referred to by some as the“ golden age of broadcasting,” when analog cameras and tape recorders ruled the airwaves.
“ The video production industry itself has changed so much in the past ten years,” says Paul Beck, president and curator of the museum.“ Today, a single person with a laptop and an iPhone is the equivalent of what people used to pay $ 15,000 a day for.”
Like many in the industry, Beck caught the TV bug young. As a high schooler, he volunteered at the Catholic Television Center, a studio run by the Archdiocese of Boston, eventually taking a full-time job there. He later worked for WHDH-TV( Boston’ s former Channel Five) and at Emerson College, where he served as director of engineering for WERS and oversaw equipment in the college’ s mass communications, film and journalism departments.
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