{"id":4711,"title":"Making Waves - Lanesville TV","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/lanesville-tv","version":"286e4d3e23cc67f903c52bbfeceefebe333e3a54c3d2d453967f71e629473a2f","modified":"2026-09-16T10:54:04.224165+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Parry D. Teasdale"}],"authorKeys":["Teasdale, Parry D."],"subjects":["Groups"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Ulster","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Geddy Sveikauskas","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"Spring 1993","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Woodstock, New York","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0874","url":null},{"label":"Group dates","value":"1969 -","url":null},{"label":"Group location","value":"New York City, New York","url":null},{"label":"Group","value":"Lanesville TV (aka Video Freex)","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Lanesville TV.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/lanesville-tv.","publication":"Parry D. Teasdale. Making Waves - Lanesville TV. Ulster. Geddy Sveikauskas. Spring 1993.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4711.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0874","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":37038},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":582}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"\u0022I eat possum an\u0027 I eat squirrel, but dint eat yer dog.\u0022 Dean was shaking my hand but he didn\u0027t seem to notice and he wouldn\u0027t let go. He had a funny way of breathing in that sounded like an air brake on an 18-wheeler. He was done speaking. There was only the sound of that breathing. My arm hurt. Until that moment it had not occurred to me that anyone or anything had eaten our dog. Did he want me to absolve him? I invited him in. \u0022You got any vo\u0027ka?\u0022 \u0022Just beer,\u0022 I said. The new owner at the Lanesville General Store called it \u0022hippie beer,\u0022 low-cost sixpacks, which was all we could afford. It gave him a way of expressing his disapproval. But he had to do business with us. We comprised a significant portion of the population of Lanesville. Dean, who was no hippie, did not disapprove of us that I knew of, only our taste in alcohol. He shook his head and turned off into the darkness. As an afterthought, he let go of my hand. We met Dean the first day we moved to Lanesville. He and Maud drove across our front lawn in her garbage truck. They waved as they went. We figured it was a local custom, like not eating your neighbors\u0027 dog. We called ourselves Videofreex. Officially, it was a corporation as well as our collective name. It had become a generic term as well, with the pejorative sense of freak undermined by the prevailing subculture, such that any enthusiast or aficionado, regardless of the subject - sex, drugs, rock \u0027n\u0027 roll, food, video - was non-judgmentally classified as a freak. Low-cost videotape recorders, VTRS, the precursors of today\u0027s ubiquitous VCR, were introduced as educational tools in the mid-1960s. In 1968, Sony began marketing a relatively small, battery-operated VTR with a lightweight black-and white camera. Other companies followed suit. Though cumbersome and technically unrefined by current standards, these small machines held revolutionary promise. The means to produce television programs had previously resided only with the networks, or, in some rare instances, with other large institutions. Use of the medium was controlled by the networks and their affiliates not only because they owned the transmitters and the licenses to operate them but because only they had the resources- the money and the equipment and technical support - needed to produce programs. Now, suddenly, here were the tools of television production in the hands of people who were not beholden to the networks in any way. This new technology fit neatly with the revolutionary ethic of the time in that it didn\u0027t matter so much what was being produced so long as it was not what they produced nor would it ever find its way under their control. The origins of Videofreex were not quite so pure as that. David and I had met at, of all significant events, the Woodstock Festival, and had initially tried to peddle our tapes of what happened there to 60 Minutes, which would have none of them. Then, by happenstance, we\u0027d hooked up with an executive at CBS, and had produced an unsuccessful pilot for the network using our tools, not theirs. By that time, we\u0027d grown to a group of about ten people, depending on when and whom you counted, under the collective name Videofreex. Our workspace was a loft in an industrial section of downtown Manhattan which a cop told me one day was called SoHo for \u0022south of Houston Street\u0022 We were happy to blur our provenance and thus assume our rightful role among the elite if not the vanguard of the counterculture and anti-war movements. But it wasn\u0027t long after SoHo got its name that we realized it had become too expensive for us to maintain our space there. With the promise of a major grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in hand, we went house-hunting. No luck in Sullivan County. Stockbridge, Massachusetts, proved, even then, too upscale for us, though we were shown the original Alice\u0027s Restaurant. Woodstock, too, seemed too pricey. Real-estate agents acted as if they weren\u0027t quite sure what we wanted or they were sure and had no intention of inflicting the likes of us on their clients, especially in light of our preposterous claims to need space for a TV studio. And then we came to Lanesville. Hardpressed to call itself a hamlet, Lanesville lies on the only flat stretch of Route 214 as it rushes up the Stony Clove Valley from Phoenicia to Tannersville and Hunter. The rump of Hunter Mountain, where it forms one side of Diamond Notch, dominates the geography. And like the Stony Clove Creek, which empties into the Esopus, the people who live along this valley tend to gravitate downhill to Phoenicia rather than through the precipitous notch above Devil\u0027s Tombstone and over to Hunter. Although Lanesville lies within the boundaries of Hunter Township in Greene County, Hunter has a different area code; it can be unreachable in winter and services from the town were sparse, with longtime residents claiming they never saw town officials except at election time and then the reception on both sides wasn\u0027t particularly warm. But the jobs were in Hunter at the ski slope and all the spin-off businesses, and the school was there, too. And the tug between the areas gave Lanesville two of its many personalities. Skiing was, indirectly, why we ended up at Maple Tree Farm. The place was owned by Sam and Miriam Ginsberg. They bought it in the 1950s and ran it as a boarding house during the summers, closing it up for the winter after Yom Kippur and returning to Brooklyn. But when Sam retired as a union carpenter, he and Miriam moved full-time to their three-story, 17-bedroom house with its two kitchens and derelict outbuildings. To make ends meet during the winter, they\u0027d rented to a ski club from Long Island. The money was good, but the debauchery they\u0027d witnessed during ski weekends had soured them on the prospect of another year with the club. Sam, a short voluble man with the demeanor of a gruff Santa, was excited by the prospect of a group of revolutionaries replacing the apolitical skiers. Miriam, skeptical, overcame her reservations with the thought that we would be paying rent year-round. So Sam and Miriam moved to a small house they owned nearby, and, at the end of June 1971 all ten of us moved in. The FBI wasn\u0027t far behind. \u0022There\u0027s a guy out in the driveway taking pictures,\u0022 said Annie one summer afternoon. She was looking out the kitchen window at a tall, thin stranger in the business suit. He snapped photos of our license plates and hurried off before anyone could reach him. A short time later, a green van, the same color as those used by the phone company but absent any markings, pulls up next to the telephone pole across Route 214 from the house. Davidson grabbed his still camera and casually walked to a spot on the front lawn where he could shoot some photos of his own through a photo lens. Then he walked down the slope that led to the road and casually circled the truck. He came back to report a man was sitting inside with headphones on. It was a beautiful summer that year. The mountainsides were as lush as I\u0027ve ever seen them. We enjoyed the scenery when we could between runs to the city to keep up our contacts there, or when we were off the road from our travels around the state making videotapes and instructing people how to use this new technology with an almost evangelical zeal. We had little time nor much inclination to feel paranoid. What we did feel as winter began to set in was isolated. Aside from our regular contact with Sam and Miriam, who themselves were outsiders, we had only the slightest interaction with what passed for the community. Maud and Dean came to pick up the garbage, seldom said much, and never again resorted to using the lawn as a highway. The logger down the road headed up the mountain each morning, pulled logs down in the afternoon, and never said a word to us. A few shy kids hung around the back door on occasion, but they didn\u0027t say much and generally resisted offers of food or a tour of the small studio and the control room we\u0027d set up on the first floor. At that time, distribution was the missing piece of the communications puzzle for the alternative culture. More and more organizations, institutions and individuals owned their own VTRS, but cable TV was just beginning to provide limited access channels for independently or locally produced programs, and the networks remained impenetrable and arrogant, sure that nothing would ever challenge their stranglehold over the American consciousness. Because of that attitude and because the Federal Communications Commission offered no alternative to the prohibitively expensive proposition of broadcasting over a regular TV frequency at high power (although the FCC had authorized an experimental, low-power educational TV system just over the mountain from us, something we did not learn until years later), there seemed to be no way for us to show our neighbors what we were doing. Our tapes had been played for small gatherings around the world, and artists and independent producers from all over were coming to use the technically advanced facilities at Maple Tree Farm. We frequently retained copies of their work, which caused our tape library to burgeon, though only we and our guests from the video world had occasion to use it. Otherwise, we were cut off at Maple Tree Farm from what was happening on conventional broadcast TV. Lanesville was too sparsely populated to attract a cable TV company. Yet the TV reception there in the decade before home-satellite dishes sprouted like shrubs along Route 214 was no different than in so many Catskills communities - like watching ghosts in a snowstorm. I can\u0027t remember exactly why Joseph Paul called me. Maybe he\u0027d read about Videofreex or heard of us by word of mouth. He was sure I\u0027d heard about him and his partner, both of whom had been busted by federal agents for operating unlicensed radio stations in Yonkers. I hadn\u0027t learned of his exploits, but I was interested. Could he, I asked, possibly help us figure out how to broadcast from Maple Tree Farm? We had some of what we needed, but we lacked experience putting our signal out over the air. He giggled and said he\u0027d come up that weekend. By late winter Joseph Paul had built us our first antenna, and Chuck and I had figured out that a surplus cable-TV amplifier would work as a transmitter. On March 19, 1972, Channel 3, Lanesville TV, began broadcasting. After the initial tests, we drove along the highway and recorded reactions of some Lanesvillians to the prospect of having their own TV station. Jerry Doyle, owner of one of the two bars in town, had the test pattern on over the bar. He pronounced it \u0022something new and something extounding.\u0022 Bruce, one of Maud\u0027s kids, kicked the snowbank by the side of the road. \u0022Okay,\u0022 he said, laconically, \u0022I guess.\u0022 Doyle told us our first broadcast reached as far away as friends of his in Kingston. Broadcast transmissions in the VHF band can play funny tricks, skipping off the atmosphere and ending up far from where you intend them to be seen. I find it hard to believe we went beyond the confines of the Stony Clove Valley that night. And if it did happen that our signal escaped to a wider world, the feat was never repeated. More often, people as close as Sam and Miriam reported difficulties with reception, and a portion of each show was usually devoted to fine-tuning our jury-rigged, persnickety transmission system. We always kept an open phone line and flashed the number to call on the screen frequently during the show. We encouraged people to call, and on occasion, especially in the early days when our broadcasts were still a novelty, callers often phoned to discuss what we put on. One time Maud called to say she wanted to watch All in the Family from the Haven TV station she received through the antenna in her front yard. We were interfering with Archie Bunker, she said. No one called to request we continue that night, so we pulled the plug and had dinner. The wi","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":37038,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}