I was thinking back on when I first started getting into old films. I was fairly young, late 20s. I was on vacation in Myrtle Beach in the early 80s, stuck in a motel room on a rainy Sunday morning and started flipping through the dial. After spotting Vincent Price, I stopped on WTBS out of Atlanta, one of the first so-called, "Super-Stations," that beamed their signal by satellite to cable TV outlets. I thought it might have been one of his horror films I saw as a kid in the movies but after watching for a minute or so, realized it was, 'Song of Bernadette,' a wonderful film that also stared Jenifer Jones. When I was very young the movie had its television premier and my mother, being a Catholic, made a huge deal out of it because of its religious overtones. Being a one TV household, I had no choice but to watch it. Even at the age of 6, the movie must have left an impression on me because as I watched it 25 years later, I still remembered a lot of the story and enjoyed it immensely.

The seed had been planted and after that, I became a semi-regular viewer of WTBS' Sunday Morning Movie that came on at 10:30. They showed a lot of great, old, classic films that must have cost Ted Turner a bundle to get the broadcast rights to. (This was long before he acquired the MGM catalog.)

I read years later that one of the reasons he started WTBS was to have an outlet for the classic, older films which he felt were being neglected and needed to be seen. Today, there's nothing I enjoy more than spending an evening with Spencer Tracy in the dusty town of Black Rock (another WTBS, old-school-film introduction for me.)

So again- Thanks Ted!