The town channel we stopped noticing.
There is a particular kind of local institution that becomes invisible by doing its job well for a very long time. Not disliked. Not controversial. Just — there. Always there, the way the water works or the leaf pickup or the pond at the municipal complex is always there.
EBTV may be the clearest example East Brunswick has.
Ask around and most residents can tell you it exists. They know it carries council meetings. They know it’s on channel 26 now, and some remember when it was channel 3. What almost nobody has done is stop and add up what the station has actually been doing since the 1970s.
So we did.
The numbers, which are not small
EBTV’s public video archive now holds more than 6,000 videos — full episodes, full games, full meetings, full ceremonies.
The oldest thing in it dates to March 1978: a fire safety demonstration filmed at the East Brunswick Public Library. A month later, on April 27, 1978, the station broadcast something it labeled EB LIVE #1 and described, in its own notes, as an experiment — residents calling in to ask questions of township officials, live, on cable. That was the idea from the beginning. Point a camera at the town and let the town talk back.
The station says it has been serving East Brunswick since 1977. Its own newsletter, in 2006, announced it was celebrating a 30th anniversary, which would put the start at 1976. Both dates are in writing. Somewhere in a filing cabinet is the answer, and honestly, either one is remarkable.
EBTV has been a department of the East Brunswick Public Library throughout, and it still reaches more than 75 percent of township homes.
What it’s doing this week
None of this is past tense.
EBTV still televises Township Council and Board of Education meetings gavel to gavel, which remains one of the easiest ways for residents to follow their local government. It covers East Brunswick High School athletics across more than a dozen sports — football, basketball, wrestling, soccer, ice hockey, field hockey, gymnastics, volleyball, lacrosse, softball and baseball — plus graduation ceremonies. It produces interview and community programming: The Buzz About EB, East Brunswick Stories, business spotlights and ribbon cuttings, Restaurant Week features, arts and library shows, senior and wellness programs, summer concerts, and a podcast with the Human Relations Council. It runs a 24-hour community bulletin board that any local nonprofit can use for free. All of it streams in high definition on the station’s website and lands on YouTube.
About 200 original programs a year — a figure the station has been quietly using since at least 2007.
Thirty-nine years of Thursdays
The spine of the whole thing is a program called This Week in East Brunswick.
It premiered in 1981. It ended on February 20, 2020, three weeks before the world closed. In between, it ran 1,855 episodes. For thirty-seven consecutive years — 1983 through 2019 — it aired somewhere between 31 and 51 shows annually, which is another way of saying it came out most weeks, every year, for the better part of four decades.
More than 1,600 of those episodes are online right now.
Read a single episode rundown and you understand what that adds up to. Here is the full lineup for the show that aired May 7, 1987: the library’s 20th birthday, a jump-a-thon at Central School, an arts update, a school segment, a piece by Pegi Ballister-Howells on espalier trees, a consumer segment on real estate brokers, and the council meeting.
None of that was important. That is exactly the point. A jump-a-thon at Central School was not news in 1987. It may now be the only surviving footage of a spring afternoon that a few hundred East Brunswick families lived through.
Yes, there was a channel 8
Longtime residents who insist East Brunswick’s town channel used to be channel 8 are right, and there is a tape to prove it. Sitting in EBTV’s archive is a program titled Cable Channel 8 Special Edition, dated August 5, 1987.
The station’s teen program in that era was called 8Teen — a name that is hard to read any other way. Episodes survive from 1988 through 1990.
By 2000 the station was on channel 3, which is why its old website lived at ebtv3.org for years. Today it’s channel 26 on Comcast, plus 37 and 38 on Fios. Three channel numbers, one continuous operation.
Look great, feel great
Somewhere in the middle of all this, East Brunswick had its own exercise show.
Look Great, Feel Great!, hosted by Lenore Kulek, ran for hundreds of episodes. Forty-four of them are online, numbered #333 through #493, dated from April 1995 through November 2010 — which means, if you’re doing the math, that 332 episodes came before the earliest one currently posted.
The episode titles alone are a time machine. Aerobics to the Oldies. The Baton Workout. Shake a Stick. Sittercise. Bands and Broadway. Aerobics Thru Line Dancing. Later on, gamely keeping up: Zumba and More.
If you lived here, you probably saw it. If you saw it, you probably remember her. And here is the part worth sitting with: outside of EBTV’s tapes, there is almost no public record that the show ever happened. A woman led this town through a workout for years, and the only reason any of it still exists is that a municipal television station kept its masters and, three decades later, decided to digitize them.
Three new episodes went up in the last month.
What it accidentally became
Nobody set out to build a historical archive. They set out to cover a jump-a-thon.
But scroll the archive and the accident becomes obvious. There is roughly seven minutes of silent aerial footage of Route 18 from around 1982 — no narration, just the road as it was. It has been viewed more than 1,200 times. People are out there looking for what this town used to look like.
There is a 1982 series called Our Varied Past with episodes on Riva Avenue and on agriculture in East Brunswick, back when that was a live subject. There is complete, unedited coverage of the April 1982 public hearings on the Wheelabrator Frye garbage plant, a fight this town was having with itself in real time. There is a 1989 episode in which two former mayors, Charles Sullivan and Aleck Borman, sit down together. There are live bands playing at the library in 1978, and Isaac Asimov, who came to speak here in 1982.
There is, according to the station’s own notes, footage of buffalo on Old Stage Road.
Some of this has been preserved with help from a grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission, a division of the Department of State. Which is a formal way of saying the state agrees: this is history now.
The people who kept the tapes
New Jersey has a lot of municipal stations — the Jersey Access Group counted roughly 55 member organizations back in 2010 — so East Brunswick is not unique in having one. What it has is an unusually extensive one. EBTV predates Piscataway’s community station by about eight years, and the result is an unusually deep local television archive.
That kind of continuity only happens because people keep showing up, year after year, to do the work.
Dave Ambrosy was hired by the township in December 1980 — into the library’s maintenance department. He got curious about the TV studio down the hall, applied for a production assistant job, learned camera and editing, and stayed. He became station manager in 2013 and retired at the end of 2022, after more than 42 years. Cindy O’Connor ran the station through the 2000s and wrote its newsletter herself, signing off posts by inviting residents to call her directly if they wanted to be a volunteer reporter. Plenty did.
One last detail
While going through the archive, we noticed something nobody at the station has ever announced.
EBTV is posting its old episodes on their anniversaries.
On September 8 of this year, three episodes of This Week in East Brunswick went online: one from September 8, 2016, one from September 8, 2011, one from September 8, 2005. Episode #56, originally broadcast July 28, 1983, was posted on July 28. Episode #228, from May 7, 1987, went up on May 7.
Week after week, old episodes are being matched to the calendar and released on the date they first aired. There is no press release about this. It isn’t mentioned on the website. It is just a small, patient courtesy being extended to a town that mostly hasn’t noticed.
Which may be the whole story. Sometimes the things a place does best are the things its residents stop seeing, precisely because they have always been there.
East Brunswick has been filming itself for almost fifty years — and it is still filming today. It might be worth watching.
