WGBH-TV Starts Regular Telecasts on Channel Two

WGBH-TV will begin regularly scheduled broadcasts at 5:30 p.m. today over Channel Two.

New England's only educational television station is the 12th in the country to start operations and can reach an estimated 1,250,000 homes in the Boston area, according to Parker Wheatley, general manager of the station. For the past two months the station has been conducting closed-circuit test programs.

The news program of Louis M. Lyons, Curator of the Nieman Fellowships, is one of two regularly scheduled telecasts which involve a member of the University. His program, long a feature of WGBH-FM, will be simultaneously televised Mondays through Fridays starting at 6:30 p.m.

Raymond A. Bauer, research associate in the Russian Research Center, will conduct the other program, entitled "Shaping the Soviet Mind," on Tuesday evenings. He will discuss, with guests, mass communications in Russia.

Both the Law School and the Dramatic Club will probably start regular series next fall over the station, supported primarily by the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, of which the University is a member. Arthur E. Sutherland, professor of Law, and John H. Poppy '57, President of HDC, both indicated last night that they were making plans for these telecasts.

Until next fall the station will be on the air Mondays through Fridays from 5:30 p.m. to about 9 p.m. with a "modest schedule of programs," according to Wheatley. "Many will be experimental, and reaction to them will be important in planning and development for the 1955-56 academic year," he said.

With the exception of one 45-minute period, from 7:15 to 8, all the programs will be televised live, Wheatley added. This one period will feature films from the Educational Television and Radio Center in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The station has direct cables to the Kresge Auditorium and field house of M.I.T. as well as to the Boston Fine Arts Museum. "Use of these facilities will be made after we get settled," Wheatley said.