Ed Rothhaar was a professor at San Bernardino Valley College who specialized in broadcasting and communications. He was also the longtime host of I Remember Television, which was seen for more than three decades on Public Television. (The show taped episodes for 22 years and then reran for a decade or so.) Before that, he was responsible for I Remember Radio, another long-running series with much the same premise. Ed would haul some old kinescope — or in the case of radio, tape — out of some archive or other and give it a new audience. He hosted with scholarly precision and resurrected some great treasures which might otherwise have gone unseen or unheard.
I used to see Ed at meetings of the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters, a group to which we both belonged. He was professorial but approachable, ever eager to talk about old TV or old radio or even about new TV or new radio. He didn't have a lot of good things to say about new radio as I recall but noted how even the bad usages of the form were good usages on a certain level. And when I told him I liked a show of his I'd recently seen on KVCR here in Southern California, he was always quick to admit that he was just the host and that darn near all the credit should go to the people who made and appeared in the program he'd run. That was true…but we might not have ever seen that program if not for Ed. He died on Monday of heart failure at the age of 74.