In a particularly grim chapter of early television history, Edie Adams testified that the surviving film archive of the short-lived DuMont Television Network was treated as nearly worthless. According to Adams, so little value was assigned to the recordings that the collection was loaded into three trucks and dumped into Upper New York Bay. The account was tied to the broader destruction of early television history: kinescopes and videotapes were discarded, reused, or allowed to disappear because networks often regarded programming as disposable rather than as cultural records. After realizing that Ernie Kovacs's work was vanishing, Adams used proceeds from his insurance policy and her own earnings to buy rights to as much surviving footage as possible. Her preservation efforts eventually helped keep the Kovacs and Adams collections alive; in 2015, the Library of Congress acquired more than 1,200 kinescopes, videotapes, and home movies from their son Joshua Mills. The bay-dumping story is not presented as a supernatural legend but as a documented, deeply strange example of television's archival negligence.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1950s
The DuMont Television Archive That Was Reportedly Dumped Into Upper New York Bay
Edie Adams, Ernie Kovacs, and the DuMont Television Network / 1950s
In a particularly grim chapter of early television history, Edie Adams testified that the surviving film archive of the short-lived DuMont Television Network was treated as nearly worthless. According to Adams, so little value was assigned to the recordings that the collection was loaded into three trucks and dumped into Upper New York Bay. The account was tied to the broader destruction of early television history: kinescopes and videotapes were discarded, reused, or allowed to disappear because networks often regarded programming as disposable rather than as cultural records. After realizing that Ernie Kovacs's work was vanishing, Adams used proceeds from his insurance policy and her own earnings to buy rights to as much surviving footage as possible. Her preservation efforts eventually helped keep the Kovacs and Adams collections alive; in 2015, the Library of Congress acquired more than 1,200 kinescopes, videotapes, and home movies from their son Joshua Mills. The bay-dumping story is not presented as a supernatural legend but as a documented, deeply strange example of television's archival negligence.
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