KCND

KCND was the name of a small independent television station in Pembina, North Dakota, which first signed on in 1959. 

KCND was purchased by Winnipeg, Manitoba businessman Izzy Asper in 1974 and relocated to Winnipeg. 

The station signed off as KCND for the final time on September 1, 1975 and signed back on as CKND later that same day.

OK, that's the very short, official history of KCND. But MY history of the station runs a bit more like this...

- Chiller Thrillers! Mom and me, Saturday night, stay up to midnight, scared silly and loving it, chomping away at homemade buttered popcorn; we couldn't get enough of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, or the old Hammer films with Christopher Lee & Peter Cushing, all thanks to scratchy old films KCND ran.

- Saturday & Sunday afternoon movies! All the classics from Errol Flynn's Robin Hood to Abbott & Costello Meets Frankenstein (I have never laughed harder before or since...); we didn't need cable or Turner Classic Movies - we had KCND programmers who got ahold of bad copies of great films and we the audience were all the beneficiaries.

- Christmas Concerts! All area schools would be invited to come and present mini-concerts on "Live TV", as a community service to the viewers at Christmas time.

- I met my first best friend! Thanks to KCND, I met a great friend when her Dad moved their family from Indiana to take an announcer job in Pembina where we met at a church youth group.

KCND Trivia: A modern pop band (once known as The Lucy Show), one of whose members lived in our area and grew up listening to KCND, eventually wrote a song directly relating to KCND, an homeage to their beloved Saturday night horror film series. It is aptly named, Channel 12 Chiller Thriller (KCND 10:30)!

KCND Revisited

As long-time readers know, I have written about KCND-TV before a few times. Some time ago, I was contacted by a former employee of KCND, with this note:

I arrived in late Jan 1961 and left just before Christmas 1961. [KCND had only been on the air awhile, going live on November 7, 1960...] I've always worked in electronics, broadcasting...

Dennis Lunsford

NOTE: The photos here were provided by Dennis, taken by him or of him, during his time at KCND






This photo is called "What electrical code?!" - a typical in-joke by an engineer, but funny nonetheless! Hey, you do what you gotta do...

It was still early days in the television broadcasting business and people sometimes had to improvise.





Here we see Dennis with colleague Brian Cox. We can only imagine their conversation, as they gaze at the tiny monitors...

"Dennis, doesn't Dick's tie look lovely with that shirt?"

"Why yes, Brian, it does!"






As you can see in this photo, it was taken so soon after building the new KCND studios, it still didn't have a sign up!

Post-History: KNRR, Channel 12 is still licensed to Pembina, North Dakota (Paul B Walker, SC, ibid.) But is for all intents & purposes, Canadian.

Indeed it is. What really happened with KCND/CKND's "move" across the border was this: Izzy Asper won a new license for channel 9 in Winnipeg from the CRTC in 1974. He bought the assets (programming and physical plant) of independent KCND channel 12 in Pembina ND from Gordon McLendon after convincing McLendon that the startup of a new indie in Winnipeg itself would suck away KCND's cross-border audience.

And then Asper garnered a ton of publicity by "moving" KCND across the border, signing off the Pembina license and turning on his new CKND 9 in Winnipeg at the same time. The old Pembina transmitter was moved to Minnedosa, MB to be a satellite signal for CKND. CKND even took over KCND's old channel 12 spot on Winnipeg cable.

But channel 12 remained allotted to Pembina, and returned to the air in the mid-80s as KNRR with Fox.

KCND-TV: How it Came to Be

This excerpt is from a long article about the early years of TV along the border in our area.  There was a race who got their transmitting tower up first (Pembina won by a day...), and some called KCND a "bargain basement" station.  Maybe so, but they did the best they could with the budget they had, and for many kids growing up then - myself included - we will be forever indebted to Channel 12 Pembina for the hundreds of amazing old Hollywood films they showed on Saturday and Sunday afternoons (not to mention Saturday night's "Chiller Thriller"!!)

We got to know classic comedies starring Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, the Three Stooges, as well as the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Durante, and W.C. Fields.  Then there were the great dramas starring Tyrone Power, John Wayne, Errol Flynn, Betty David, Kathryn Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, Basil Rathbone, Mae West, Jean Harlow, Burt Lancaster, Peter Lorre, Claude Rains, James Cagney, Charlie Chaplin, William Powell, Robert Mitchum, Joseph Cotton, Orson Wells, etc.  So many names and faces, one cannot remember them all yet they were and are all unforgettable.  All thanks to one tiny TV station in Pembina...

In 1956, a group of investors associated with a Grand Forks radio station won permission from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to construct a new Channel 12 TV station in the tiny border town of Pembina, N.D. 

Their goal, however, wasn’t to serve Pembina and the sparsely populated surrounding area. It was to serve Winnipeg audiences, 100 kilometres to the north, and hopefully make some money satisfying Canadians’ insatiable appetite for American TV programming. 

The station was slow to get to air, though. It wasn’t until early 1959 — nearly three years after they were awarded the licence — that the serious work of building studios and erecting a tower got under way. Now with a second Winnipeg station under construction at Polo Park, it became urgent for the Pembina operation to finally get up and running. 

Thus began a mad race between the owners of Channel 7 and Channel 12 — which would become better known as CJAY-TV and KCND-TV later in the year — to beat the other station to air. 

“The idea of KCND was to come into the (Winnipeg) market as the second station, but in the interim the licence was granted to CJAY, so they were building at the same time,” former KCND-CKND employee Dorothy Lien told the Winnipeg Free Press in 1989. 

“It was a great race between the stations to see who would get their tower up [first],” she recalled. “I remember driving down to Pembina in September of 1960 to watch our antenna being mounted, and then driving back to Ste. Agathe to see that they were at the stage of getting theirs up, too.” 

The race was as close as one got to a photo finish in the broadcasting industry.
On Sunday, Nov. 6, 1960, Winnipeggers noticed a test signal coming in from Pembina on Channel 12. On Monday, Nov. 7, the half-finished station went on air at 6 p.m. with a limited program selection, owing to the fact that the station was literally not yet connected to the ABC and NBC networks from which it would obtain most of its programming. 

Given that the only other option in Winnipeg was to watch the CBC station, viewers weren’t exactly choosy. 

Five days later, at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 12, 1960, CJAY-TV Channel 7 signed on from a brand-new studio next to Polo Park Shopping Centre. 

Though CJAY had lost the race to air, it still had a decided advantage over its cross-border rival. 

“We had very low power and very poor microwave [linking the station to the networks],” Lien told the Winnipeg Free Press in 1989. “We really didn’t make an impact for about six years. People didn’t have the antennas to bring in Channel 12.” 

KCND had been modeled after KVOS-TV, a small outlet in Bellingham, Wash., just across the border from Vancouver, which discovered that there was big money to be made in buying programs at low Bellingham rates and selling advertising at high Vancouver-Victoria rates. 

The practice was controversial, given that KVOS was at times selling advertising on programs for which a B.C. broadcaster had supposedly purchased “exclusive” rights; but it also made KVOS one of North America’s most profitable TV stations for a time.
But there was a critical difference between KVOS and KCND. 

KVOS’s transmitter was only 70 kilometres from central Vancouver and just 45 kilometres from Victoria, close enough to put a strong and clear “Grade-A” signal into those communities, as it still does today. 

KCND’s transmitter was 100 kilometres from central Winnipeg. Its “Grade-A” signal only went as far north as Niverville, beyond which ground clutter and weather tended to interfere with reception. 

Given that there were no cable systems in Winnipeg at the time, it was an oversight on the part of the station’s owners that threatened to bankrupt the station. 

“Our signal was never as strong in Winnipeg as our engineers thought it would be,” lamented Boyd Christenson, an early KCND announcer and program host who was interviewed by the Winnipeg Free Press in the mid ’80s. 

“We weren’t getting the dollars we needed out of Winnipeg to sustain the station,” Christenson said, describing the station’s financially troubled early years. 

The station’s fortunes dramatically improved after the arrival of cable TV in Winnipeg in the late ’60s. 

KCND’s survival in the early years was no doubt driven by the fascination that many Manitobans had for the glamour of Kennedy-era America and a yearning for something different on their screens, which led to a cult following in Winnipeg. 

“KCND was strictly bargain basement,” former Winnipeg resident Greg Klymkiw wrote in a June 2010 article for the Electric Sheep web site. “Though to kids, tired of fiddlers from Newfoundland and joyful Canucks winning useless pen and pencil sets on stupid Canadian TV, KCND was… AMERICA!” 

“I kind of fell in love with KCND-TV Channel 12,” a commentator named Rob wrote to The View from Seven in November 2010. “For some reason the channel 12 logo was very cool!” 

“My dad’s bedroom TV had only local stations, but he got channel 12 by installing an interior Channel 12 Antenna… sometime in ’71 or ’72 but we weren’t allowed to use his TV. My younger brother used to sneak in there and watch reruns of ‘Lost in Space’ at 6 PM while my dad was working evenings,” Rob wrote. 

“Sometimes my dad called us to his bedroom to watch ‘Chiller Thriller’ at 10:30 PM Saturday night,” he added, referring to the station’s popular Saturday night horror movies.

A Little Independent TV Station

A reader contacted me this week about my posts on KCND-TV. I've gotten several responses about those posts; evidently that little independent station touched many people's lives...

Hello, I came across your blog while searching for KCND-TV again. It was me who edited and/or put in some information about the switchover from KCND to CKND, especially regarding the signal going off on Sunday August 31, 1975. I remember the day when the screen went black - I was 14 years old then. I think it may have been me who sent in a KCND logo but Im not sure.

This is probably an unusual request but would you have any North Dakota newspaper articles on computer you would be willing to email me about this. I found some neat articles at the Newspaperarchive website that I was able to download and save. Two, since you might be interested, are in an attachment.

Indeed, I am, and many thanks for sharing with us.

By the way, if anyone reading this knows of any existing video of KCND broadcasts, I'd love to get ahold of some clips!

KCND's Legacy

Although this happened last year, I only recently came across this on an online forum about KCND/CKND/KNRR's ultimate demise...To provide a complete picture of the once-local station's 'life', I include it here (it has a happy outcome...)

KCND-TV Channel 12

Boyd Christenson. Dick Vincent. Richard Andrews. What do all these people have in common? They worked as announcers and newscasters at KCND-TV Channel 12 Pembina.

I came across a new Wikipedia entry on KCND today, and they had the old logos included. Boy, did THAT bring back memories!

KCND's Past in Photos

More photos from KCND's past have been found...
[Click to enlarge]

I was going through my files of St. Vincent and Pembina photos and documents that are in 'rough draft', i.e., I haven't done additional research and posted them yet. I found the above behind-the-scenes images from KCND's early days in the 1960's.

It's fun to see what it looked like behind-the-scenes at Channel 12 during its hey day.  I get a big kick out of reading the notes with the photographs of how the equipment featured in them are state-of-the-art for that time (as I'm sure they were) - we've come such a long way since then! (I don't recognize any of the staff in these particular photos.  If anyone reading this does, let me know and I'll update this post.)

I am ashamed to have to admit this, but I didn't have any notes attached that provides credit for these images. I am guessing that they may be from a scrapbook either put together by the Pembina Historical Society, or from a private collection (maybe connected to the 1997 Pembina Bicentennial celebration). If anyone out there knows, please contact me.

[I apologize that the images aren't more clear, but they are photocopies of the originals, the best I have...]

The Ghost of KCND Lives On...?

A recent article discusses the fate of the physical remnants of what was once KCND-TV, Channel 12...

The saga continues...

KCND Fan

I grew up during the 60's and 70's, right when there was a revival of interest in films like Frankenstein, Dracula, and the 50's sci-fi like "Them". Every week I would watch the "Chiller Thriller" movie from Pembina, North Dakota, Saturday at 10:30pm. Anticipating the weekly dose of classic horror was heaven to kids like me; in other words, kids who weren't the popular or athletic kids in school.

A fellow fan of KCND's old horror show pays tribute to a man recently passing from us...

Junction Drive Inn

These are photographs from the Larson Family Collection. Before there was an Interstate Drive-In (just west of the old KCND-TV building in Pembina), the Larson family started their drive-in business on the Minnesota side, at the (St. Vincent) Junction.

It was a much smaller affair, but much loved in its time. So much so, they had to build a larger one. It was right around the time that I-29 was being built, and the Larson family wisely thought it might be a great location for the new Drive-In. My older sisters Sharon and Betty Short were among the many young ladies who worked there in high school as waitresses...