Original call signs

[tvlurker]

I think the legal ID ends before the '/'.

But the bottom line is that you can do what you can get away with.

In a world where "...as close to the hour as feasible, at a natural break in program offerings." can mean 13 minutes before the hour and separated by five minutes of commercials, promos, and weather forecasts is considered OK, I would imagine swapping "Plattsburgh" and "North Pole" isn't going to raise many eyebrows!

True, especially since "North Pole, NY" no longer exists.

 

[BobRoss]

In a world where "...as close to the hour as feasible, at a natural break in program offerings." can mean 13 minutes before the hour and separated by five minutes of commercials, promos, and weather forecasts is considered OK...

And it annoys the bejesus out of me. Clear Channel is probably one of the worst offenders, burying the ID in the middle of a stopset at :50-something past the hour. Even more ironic if the station in question does have a top-of-hour jingle anyway, yet they don't ID there. As if the ID is something ugly that should be hidden? It's call letters plus a city, big deal. Air it where it belongs. There's no reason a commercial music station should ever ID more than 3 minutes away from the hour, one way or another. It's rare that any station plays really long songs, and even rarer that they run over the top of the hour in such a manner you can't get the ID on between :57 and :03.

 

[compubit]

Here's how I recall one station in Houston handling the TOH:

K-O-D-A Houston Sunny 99.1 Weather

(Text size indicates relative volume level...)

You have to be listening very carefully for the KODA - it's soft and fast...

 

[jiminCT]

Just adding to the list....I think WTVH in Syracuse used to be WHEN ..

Also..Watertown's PBS channel is now WPBS....used to be WNPE. The Norwood relay remains the same at WNPI.


Additionally WWTI in Watertown was WFYF when it came on the air.

 

[Bob1370]

"WBUF Channel 17 in Buffalo.....was never a DuMont station.......CBS ...for a time......then purchased by NBC.............It went off the air in Sept of 1958 and was dark until March of the next year when it became the educational WNED."

Actually CBS was with WBEN-TV (now WIVB) from sign-on in 1948 and never had any other affiliate. Buffalo's affiliate lineup was in big flux for the first 10 years of TV in the Queen City. WBEN was always a CBS affiliate first and foremost (although its sister AM was an NBC radio station until the late 1940s) although it also carried NBC, ABC and DuMont shows. Buffalo got its first additional TV stations in 1953 when the original WBUF-TV went on the air on Channel 17 and another station, WBES, showed up on Channel 59. WBUF hung in there until 1958. WBES lasted just a few months as the city's DuMont affiliate, done in by the impending arrival of WGR-TV on Channel 2. WGR got the full ABC schedule at its 1954 signon and took a lot of NBC shows as well, WBEN became even more exclusively CBS than before, with WBUF getting the shows from all networks that WBEN and WGR didn't want. By 1955 the great NBC experiment on WBUF began. They built a new transmitter tower and studio center at 2077 Elmwood in north Buffalo and poured all sorts of money into making it competitive with WBEN on Channel 4 (now all-CBS) and WGR (all ABC). It flopped...and when the 11 year battle for the Channel 7 license finally ended and Clinton Churchill's WKBW came out the winner in 1958, there went WBUF's last chance. NBC shut down in the fall of 1958, gave away the license and a lot of its studio gear to the local educational TV group (which set up shop at the Lafayette Hotel), sold the 800 foot tower in back of the Elmwood Avenue complex to WGR-TV and sold the building itself to WBEN. The network alignment we know now, was finally locked in place on November 30, 1958 when WKBW-TV signed on as an ABC affiliate on Channel 7, and WGR-TV flipped from ABC to NBC the same day. WBEN-TV may have changed callsigns in 1977 when the Buffalo News sold it off, but it has been primarily a CBS affiliate from the moment it signed on in May of 1948 (just weeks after CBS started feeding its WCBS-TV prime time schedule to stations outside the New York market) and still is today.

 

[oldschooler1]

"WBUF Channel 17 in Buffalo.....was never a DuMont station.......CBS ...for a time......then purchased by NBC.............It went off the air in Sept of 1958 and was dark until March of the next year when it became the educational WNED."

Actually CBS was with WBEN-TV (now WIVB) from sign-on in 1948 and never had any other affiliate. Buffalo's affiliate lineup was in big flux for the first 10 years of TV in the Queen City. WBEN was always a CBS affiliate first and foremost (although its sister AM was an NBC radio station until the late 1940s) although it also carried NBC, ABC and DuMont shows. Buffalo got its first additional TV stations in 1953 when the original WBUF-TV went on the air on Channel 17 and another station, WBES, showed up on Channel 59. WBUF hung in there until 1958. WBES lasted just a few months as the city's DuMont affiliate, done in by the impending arrival of WGR-TV on Channel 2. WGR got the full ABC schedule at its 1954 signon and took a lot of NBC shows as well, WBEN became even more exclusively CBS than before, with WBUF getting the shows from all networks that WBEN and WGR didn't want. By 1955 the great NBC experiment on WBUF began. They built a new transmitter tower and studio center at 2077 Elmwood in north Buffalo and poured all sorts of money into making it competitive with WBEN on Channel 4 (now all-CBS) and WGR (all ABC). It flopped...and when the 11 year battle for the Channel 7 license finally ended and Clinton Churchill's WKBW came out the winner in 1958, there went WBUF's last chance. NBC shut down in the fall of 1958, gave away the license and a lot of its studio gear to the local educational TV group (which set up shop at the Lafayette Hotel), sold the 800 foot tower in back of the Elmwood Avenue complex to WGR-TV and sold the building itself to WBEN. The network alignment we know now, was finally locked in place on November 30, 1958 when WKBW-TV signed on as an ABC affiliate on Channel 7, and WGR-TV flipped from ABC to NBC the same day. WBEN-TV may have changed callsigns in 1977 when the Buffalo News sold it off, but it has been primarily a CBS affiliate from the moment it signed on in May of 1948 (just weeks after CBS started feeding its WCBS-TV prime time schedule to stations outside the New York market) and still is today.

I never heard of WBES! It would be col to find a TV listing of the day, to see their programming. And wasn't WBUF in local color -- wasn't that part of the NBC experiment?