Television — Three Stations on West State Street

Television came to Fort Wayne on November 21, 1953, and the first face it wore was Hilliard Gates's. WKJG-TV, channel 33, signed on that evening as an NBC affiliate — Kunkel's station, its call letters binding newspaper and broadcaster in one name — with Gates, its general manager and sports director, saying the first words. Gates ran the station and called its sports into the late 1970s — station manager Helen Meyer testified he was discharged on 1 November 1977 over a $50-a-month car allowance, though Gates said he was asked to leave in 1979 — then did sports at WOWO and WANE-TV until retiring in 1990, and his profile is in the People record; what belongs here is the market he opened. WKJG-TV had close to a year's head start. The second station signed on September 26, 1954, as WINT, licensed to Waterloo and transmitting from near Auburn — a geography that nearly killed it, since viewers would not turn their antennas from WKJG's West State Street tower; its purchase by Indiana Broadcasting in 1956, its renaming as WANE-TV, and its own move to West State Street are in the Business record. The third station, WPTA, channel 21, signed on September 28, 1957, as the ABC affiliate, with a staff of twenty-four, on West State Street within two weeks of WANE's arrival in the same neighborhood. By the end of the 1950s Fort Wayne's television lived on one street: three stations, three networks, towers a few blocks apart, in a city the FCC had judged barely able to support them.

What the stations made, beyond the network schedules, was a shared civic memory. The local product was live and homemade — children's shows, farm and cooking programs, wrestling, and talk: WANE's Ann Colone Show, the mid-afternoon program whose host's profile is in the People record (her 1958 joining date, settled in the second-pass record, belongs to her biography, not to the station's 1954 sign-on). The stations' defining civic work was weather and disaster: the Palm Sunday tornadoes of 1965 and the Blizzard of 1978 are chapters of the market's own history of itself, Television in Fort Wayne 1953 to 2018, written by former congressman Mark Souder with anchors Melissa Long and Heather Herron — the two women whose evening-news era, 1984 to 2018, the book takes as its closing frame, and whose profiles are in the People record. The consolidation era changed the market's arithmetic: when WISE-TV's newsroom was merged into WPTA's as Indiana's NewsCenter in the 2000s, WANE became the market's dominant news station for a time, and the 2016 affiliation swap that moved NBC to a WPTA subchannel ended WKJG/WISE's sixty-three-year NBC run. The analog era closed on June 12, 2009. The three-newsroom market that survives — WANE, WPTA/21Alive, and the Fox operation — is mapped in the Current chapter.

Sources: WISE-TV, WANE-TV, and WPTA reference histories (sign-on dates; the 1956 WANE purchase and West State move; Indiana's NewsCenter consolidation and WANE's Nielsen standing); News-Sentinel, "Everything was new on television" (1950s history: the antenna problem; staff of twenty-four); M.T. Publishing, Television in Fort Wayne 1953 to 2018, by Mark Souder with Melissa Long and Heather Herron (the Gates inauguration; the weather chapters; the 1984–2018 anchor era); the Business chapter for the three stations' firm records; the People chapter for Gates and Colone.