"WKBW's FM CP was 105.7. Never happened. If it was Churchill or CapCities that turned in the CP, it was a fateful decision. The rest, as they say, is history."
It was Clinton Churchill's CP. They took it out in the 1950s, before the FM band was re-drawn in the wake of the start of stereo broadcasting in 1961. They dropped it for all intents and purposes before the end of the 1950s although it stayed on the FCC's books longer because CPs never had expiration dates back in those times. They do now. That channel's gone, re-allocated to the Kitchener/Waterloo area in Ontario, and won't ever be built in Buffalo, by Entercom or by anyone else.
Churchill had a good reason for neglecting it, though.
He got distracted with another little project next door to the 1430 Main St. radio center, which he needed all the spare cash he could get to finish...namely WKBW-TV. And that wasn't their only big project at the time.
Clinton Sr. and Clinton Jr. spent all of 1956 and 1957 battling back competitors to get the CP for Channel 7 from the FCC, and most of 1958 getting it built, affiliated with ABC and put on the air. Their other all-consuming project at the same time was establishing a beachhead for personality hit radio in not one, but two large markets. They were-formatting KB Radio into a CHR market leader...while they were doing the same thing across the country with another property they'd just bought, KYA in San Francisco. The Churchills had their hands full. Wasn't much time or money left for even thinking about an FM.
It was worth it, though, to make some sacrifices to focus on the projects they had going.. It may have cost a million or two to build it, but Channel 7 made up most of the $14 million the Churchills collected for selling off KB radio and TV to Lowell Thomas, Tom Murphy and Dan Burke, aka Capital Cities Broadcasting Company, in 1961. That and Albany's WTEN, in turn, would be the nucleus of the behemoth that expanded east to Providence, south to Philly, Ralleigh-Durham and off to Houston and points west in the 70s, then gobbled ABC in 1986 only to sell out for $16 billion to the Mouse ten years later. (The Churchills actually held on to KYA for years after they sold out in their home city; Clinton Jr. ran KYA for years before clearing a tidy profit when he finally did sell out around the end of the 1960s.) But that's the rest of the story...if they'd built that FM they might not have had the bucks in hand to build the TV and turn it around to CapCities for a big profit, or make a major impact on Bay Area radio throughout the 60s, and a lot of broadcast history might be different today...
