Shirley Dinsdale of KTLA and her puppet sidekick Judy Splinters
Emmy Moments: Shirley Dinsdale
This year the Emmy Awards turn seventy-five! Get in the spirit with the first in our series of time-defying flashbacks.
Only five Emmys were handed out at the First Annual Emmy Awards, held at the Hollywood Athletic Club in 1949. Twenty-year-old Shirley Dinsdale of KTLA and her puppet sidekick Judy Splinters received the first Emmy ever — for Most Outstanding Television Personality. The ceremony was telecast in the Los Angeles area on KTSL, a Don Lee station.
The four others honored with first-time Emmy gold were: KTLA's Pantomime Quiz Time for Most Popular Televison Program; The Necklace, seen on KTLA's Your Show Time series, for Best Film Made for Television; KTLA for the Station Award; and Charles Mesak, of Don Lee Television, for his invention of the phasefader, which could fade a black-on-white title card to white-on-black.
A special award went to Louis McManus, an engineer at Culver City's Cascade Pictures, for his original design of the statuette. He received a plaque, not an Emmy.
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #1, 2023.
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