Ivy Broadcasting (Woody Erdman's company) was in business as early as 1956, when they launched and began operating an Ithaca, NY AM radio station once known as WTKO and now operating as WNYY. There's material in the online records that dates Ivy Broadcasting's statewide network, bought from Rural Radio Network, in operation as early as 1959, if not earlier. They apparently began carrtiing Syracuse University football over their network starting with the 1959 season.
The records of the federal courts show Ivy later sued AT&T over poor and disrupted service in feeding game broadcasts to their Ithaca network center for retransmission during the 1959 through 1962 seasons. That case was still making its way through the courts in the late 1960s, around the time Erdman sold the FM stations to Pat Robertson for his CBN radio operation. He'd use the money to take WTKO from a 1000 watt daytimer to a fulltimer (initially with a 6 AM-2 AM broadcast day, eventually 24/7) by the summer of 1972, building a new transmitter and four tower directional array south of town.
Don't know if they ever resolved the case with AT&T or got anything out of it, but Ivy Broadcasting was certainly doing a radio business covering the whole upstate region by the start of the 1959 football season. Woody Erdman ran it for about 10 years but in the end, decided having a fulltime AM in his home market was worth more than whatever future potential an FM network would have down the road. Took him from 1968 to 1972 to jump all the regulatory hurdles, both FCC and local, and get the thing built. (I was in the area, in college, during that time working crosstown at WVBR and later up the road at WHEN.) It's debatable whether he made the right choice, since WTKO as the area's first AM fulltimer did well for many years but FM clearly took off soon after he dumped the stations he had.
