Go article on the history of TOH. Mentions all of the crew and number of homeowners.

Way to much to copy. It is 5 pages. But here are a few highlights.

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/this_old_house/

“hen, on the evening of February 20, 1979, WGBH introduced Bostonians to This Old House, a show that would invent a new TV genre. “The words ‘do it yourself’ hadn’t been put together in those days,” says Russell Morash, the program’s creator. “People did not have power tools, did not do their own repairs. They hired people.” Morash, together with WGBH’s Henry Becton, had a knack for distilling latent cultural interests into wildly popular television shows, including The French Chef and The Victory Garden. Premiering just as the country was sliding into a major housing crisis, This Old House (which WGBH spent a mere $50,000 to launch) would show viewers that they didn’t need to buy new homes to be happy. All they needed was a little Yankee ingenuity.

The real estate crunch that had cemented the show’s relevance eventually passed. But viewers’ appetite for DIY tips, not to mention their fascination with other people’s homes, has proved enduring. With nearly 4 million viewers per episode, This Old House has become one of the highest-rated shows of its kind and has won 16 Emmys to date. It spawned a magazine (which now boasts a readership of 5.7 million), a website (that generates 16 million page views a month), and two spinoffs, Ask This Old House and The New Yankee Workshop. Today the various arms of the This Old House brand reach 52 million Americans every month.

As originally conceived, though, the half-hour program that would grow into that multimedia empire promised to be little more than a quaint, televised equivalent of a Realtor’s open house. Initially titled House Calls, each episode would show off a completed home renovation (think MTV Cribs for the PBS set). Morash recruited a Globe journalist named Estelle Bond Guralnick to star in the pilot, which was filmed at a Brookline Victorian she had recently written about. The pilot never aired, though, and the whole experiment might have been shelved had it not been for a certain star quality the producers saw in the Victorian’s young builder, who had escorted Guralnick around his project. His name was Bob Vila.”

“Henry Becton (former WGBH president): I sat down and reviewed the pilot with Russ. I thought it was okay; I didn’t think it was great.

Russell Morash (series creator): I said, “I think you have to show the process.” It’s too easy to say, “And then I put down this blue tile.” When I see something like what Vila had done with his place, I think, How can I put down my own blue tile? Because I’ll never have the money to do it unless I do it myself.

Becton: Boy, when Vila looked at you through that camera, there was something that really connected. Russ and I thought, Maybe we should try to convince him.

Estelle Bond Guralnick (home design contributor, Boston Globe): Russ just felt awful. He called me and said, “They like Bob Vila.” I was very busy, and life went on.

Bob Vila (former host, pictured right): They called me up and said, “Come over and take a look at this house in Dorchester. We’ve got everything ready to go.” They had gotten underwriting—I think it was Montgomery Ward—and they had gotten Norm [Abram], who was Morash’s carpenter. This just seemed like a lark.

Morash: Norm had built my barn, and I was so impressed with him I asked if he would be interested in helping out. He was a young unmarried guy, and he said sure.

Norm Abram (master carpenter, pictured right): I just took the job for some work in a winter of no work. I thought I’d be in the background of a couple of scenes carrying around ladders.

Morash: We had to do extensive work on the gas mains, and I said, “I don’t know anybody who plumbs in the city of Boston.” I mean, I was a suburban guy. I knew as much about Boston as I knew about Marrakesh. The gas company said, “Well, we have this firm over in Roslindale called the Trethewey Brothers.” I said, “The what?”

Richard Trethewey (heating and plumbing specialist, pictured right): It’s a British name.

Morash: My father came to me and said, “I can’t believe you’re going to put a carpenter or a plumber in front of the camera. What do you expect to learn from these people?” I said, “Dad, I’m not asking them to quote Shakespeare. I want them to tell me, in their own way, how to lay an oak floor, what tools to use, what goes on in their mind.””

“Dean Gallant (Belmont home-owner, 1993 season): We had the common misconception that if the show selected you, they would pay for everything.

Terry Maitland (Acton home-owner, 1994 season): There are two huge benefits to working with the show. One is that it’s going to be done in six months, which is extraordinary. The other good thing is all the goodies. All the donations. “

“Chris Wolfe (producer, Ask This Old House): We once got a letter from a man that said something like “I’m writing to you because I need some help with a project. I’m trying to make a hole in a wall, and I have a pair of tweezers, a toothbrush, and a spoon.” He went on to say that he was in a federal prison.”

“Igoe: The Silva brothers are known for some of their antics, their practical jokes.

David Vos (director): They’re all wiseguys. They could have been great standup comedians or phenomenal builders. They went with both.

Maitland: Charlie Silva has a dummy that he keeps in his truck. It was a filming day, and this new [production assistant] from ‘GBH was walking around kind of starry-eyed. So Charlie had this dummy up on the roof, and he let out a huge scream and dropped it. Everyone was in on it, they started running over, Oh my God, oh my God.

Irving: The hallmark of that particular joke was that the PA was standing there with her little clipboard. Over the edge falls this dummy, and she looks up, sees it all happen, and makes a note. We were just like, there’s an unflappable PA.”

“Dan Beliveau (Charlestown home-owner, 2000 season): You can’t name any of the products [on camera]. I kept making mistakes. I might say “Toto toilets” or the brand name of the bamboo flooring. They’d say, “Cut, cut. Can you just not do that?”

Morash: Owens Corning prints its logo on its rolls of fiberglass, and I told our crew to always install it upside down so when you come into a room we’re not seeing it. The Owens Corning guys said, “How come you always turn it around?” I said, “Because, you know, we’re not supposed to show labels. It’s public television—I’ll go to Leavenworth if I get caught doing this.” It took them about three years to figure it out, but they started printing it in such a way that no matter how it was hung you were going to be able to read the name.”

I like these comments by and about Vila. I never saw him on a TOH. But have seen him on his own show later.

“In 1989 the issue of endorsements became a major problem for This Old House. Bob Vila had begun appearing in ads for a small chain called Rickel Home Centers, a competitor with Home Depot, which was an underwriter. Home Depot complained to the producers, and Vila soon left the show. “I am at heart a capitalist,” he later told the Wall Street Journal. “The years I hosted on PBS I compare to the years I volunteered for the Peace Corps.”

Morash: [Vila] was getting in the face of our efforts to underwrite the show. I said, “Bob, you’ve got to lay off that.” He said, “I can’t do that.”

Vila: In the beginning, they paid me 200 bucks an episode. After 10 years, I think they’d gotten up to $800. There wasn’t any money there. There was money to be had in terms of endorsements and stuff.

Becton: There was no question that we were going to part ways [with Vila], but I don’t remember being worried about that.

Morash: In the early days of the show, as I said again and again, the host asks the questions that the homeowner has. If the host appears to know the answer, it changes the chemistry completely. As Vila matured, he became the expert. What kind of cuckoo land was that?

Tom Silva (general contractor): With Bob, you were more just saying yes or no. He liked to control the scene.

Vila: I didn’t appreciate the way I was being dealt with, so we just kind of went our separate ways. It was the best thing for me, because within a year I was back on the air with the syndicated show Bob Vila’s Home Again and became spokesman for Sears Craftsman tools and did lots of things in the ensuing years that never would have happened. “