3-Jan-16 – The Loop and Chicago riverfront as they were in the 1960s are glimpsed in three television spots added to archives at River North’s Museum of Broadcast Communications last year.

(Above) This 1967 ad for king-size Winston cigarettes, filmed on a Wendella boat on the Chicago River, included a Marina City east tower fly-by. While going back and forth on the main branch, actors sing a jingle, “It’s not how long you make it, it’s how you make it long.”

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“All you have to do is just tap out the numbers, it’s much faster.”

(Above) This ad for Illinois Bell Telephone was filmed in 1963 in an apartment at a very young Marina City. It is for the phone company’s newfangled touch-tone telephone. The man on the sofa is Chicago actor Ron Masak, who played Sheriff Mort Metzger for 11 years on Murder, She Wrote.

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And this (above) is Randolph & State Streets in the Loop in 1967, with the Oriental Theater at right, which was a movie theater until 1981. This spot for Pacific Telephone reminded the country that Chicago’s area code is 312. It includes shots of Marina City, Wacker Drive, and the lakefront.

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Museum needs $40k to recover lost videos

The Museum of Broadcast Communications is currently trying to raise $40,000 to recover thousands of television episodes it had digitized but lost in a server malfunction.

“Massive traffic crashed our site and for several years we thought our historic digitized content had been lost forever,” reads a fundraising letter from museum founder Bruce DuMont. “But recently we learned that this valuable content can be recovered and restored for online access.”

The museum says at one time they offered more than 8,000 television shows, free to the public on the website museum.tv.