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Red Letter Day: Thanksgiving 1948

C

crainbebo

This is the day when KRSC-TV, now KING-TV in Seattle begins broadcasting as the first television station north of San Francisco and west of the Mississippi.
The first program was a football game with some techinical difficulties but makes a milestone in Seattle TV. But, a handful of viewers with one inch screens on June 3, 1929 saw a heart, a diamond, a question mark, and several letters and numbers in Seattle. The person who televised this broadcast was KOMO Radio enginner Francis J. Brott. The 1948 football program was the wide-audience TV broadcast, the 1929 test broadcast was the first TV broadcast in Seattle history, wide or handful audience.

-crainbebo
 
Probably all four, as was the rule in one-station markets
at the time. IIRC, KING was an ABC affiliate and KOMO an
NBC one until the late '50s, when Leonard Goldenson got
the Fisher family (owners of KOMO) to switch, moving ABC
from Ch. 5 to Ch. 4.
 
Yes. It aired all four networks at first. From 1948 to 1953, KING-TV was a CBS affiliate, before KTNT 11 (now KSTW 11) signed on in 1953, taking over the CBS affiliation until KIRO-TV signed on in 1958. From 1953-1959, it was an ABC affiliate, when ABC was the last-place network. It swapped affiliations with KOMO-TV in 1959 and became an NBC affiliate, whille KOMO took ABC.

-crainbebo
 
Also on November 24, 1948, WAVE-TV, Channel 5 (now Ch. 3) in Louisville began regular programming. A primary NBC affiliate like its sister AM station, WAVE-TV also took some DuMont and CBS programs until March 27, 1950 when WHAS-TV, Channel 9 (now Ch. 11) signed on as a primary CBS affiliate. WAVE-TV's first day featured a live broadcast of what is still held as the nation's oldest high school football rivalry game, Louisville Male High vs. Louisville duPont Manual High.

(For a short time in the spring and summer of 1953, ABC and DuMont were carried in the Louisville market by WKLO-TV, Channel 21, which quickly bit the dust due to the disadvantages UHF stations then had due to lack of equipped sets, power-hog transmitters and the FCC's channel intermixture policies.)

Both WAVE and WHAS showed selected ABC and DuMont programs until the end of DuMont in the spring of 1956. The two stations shared ABC programming until September 16, 1961 when WLKY-TV, Channel 32, arrived as a full-time ABC affiliate. By 1961, the combination of far better UHF transmission and receiving equipment, superior marketing and a much stronger ABC network led to immediate success for WLKY. On September 1, 1990, WLKY and WHAS swapped network affiliations.
 
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