Looking for contact to retrieve an old show

[Chuck Reti]

Going off-tech-topics to make an inquiry regarding an old show.

In 1967, a pilot program series called the Public Broadcasting Laboratory was funded by the Ford Foundation. The first show in this series was aired live in November of that year. The shows were the precursor to what later became PBS. They featured the first nationwide “interconnect” of (participating) Non-commercial/Educational TV stations.
1967 was a tumultuous year, with many cities experiencing unrest and rioting.
July 23 is the 50th anniversary of the uprising/rebellion/riot here in Detroit. Local media and institutions are offering many retrospectives.
The first of the PBL shows, anchored by commentator Edward P. Morgan, discussed this urban unrest, with live feeds from some of the affected locations.
In Detroit, WTVS, using the remote truck facilities and crew of Wayne State University Television, set up at the inner-city Church of the Black Madonna, which had been in the midst of the event. Its pastor, Rev. Cleage, was known as a “firebrand” who was passionate in his criticisms of the conditions that led to what happened in Detroit.
I was (a very new hire) on the WSU-TV engineering staff that did this remote, and remember this experience well. As some verbal fireworks ensued among some of the show's participants, the congregation in the church was obviously not too pleased that their pastor was, at times, being disrespected, and for a brief time, we, a bunch of white guys in the upstairs choir room, were honestly getting a little worried (however all was quite well in the end).
One technical aspect of this that I do remember was that the NOC was sending all feed points an audio tone on one of the telco lines, to use as a kind of gunlock clock.
The tone (don’t remember the freq, could have been 3150) fed a magic box they provided that multiplied it up to 31.5kHz. Our monochrome sync gen had a 31.5 input for this purpose, so we would be in time with everyone else. During pre-feed there were also some tweaks to this, maybe for H-phasing. Our outgoing feed was telco microwave (thanks to Michigan Bell).

I have brought up this show to the local PBS station, WTVS, where I work part-time, that it might be a valuable, interesting element to include in any forthcoming programs tied to the Detroit anniversary, and offered to help research in finding if it’s available I discovered that some years ago, PBS donated the PBL show recordings to the Library of Congress, and that sometime in 2016, the LOC did an auditorium “clip show” presentation of selects from the PBL series. So, I am looking to those on this list for assistance to find out whom to contact at LOC to accomplish this, if it’s at all doable.
Comments on the list might be interesting, but you may email me any specifics off-list at  cwreti at gmail.com <mailto:cwreti at gmail.com>
Thanks for your time.

Chuck Reti
Detroit MI
WV8A
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