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Television · Fort Wayne’s first station · Channel 33
On the record
Founded: 21 November 1953, Fort Wayne, strong. The History Center’s WANE-TV videotape collection description, the station histories and the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame biography of Hilliard Gates all agree: WKJG-TV began broadcasting 21 November 1953, Fort Wayne’s first television station, as an NBC affiliate on UHF channel 33. Gates’s sign-on is quoted with its time: at 7:45 p.m. he said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. You are watching history being made. These are the first words and pictures to emanate from WKJG-TV, Fort Wayne’s first television station.” No FCC history card was retrieved, so the date is documented, not proven.
Founder / owner: William Kunkel, owner of The Journal Gazette. The call letters are the combination: WK for William Kunkel and JG for the Journal Gazette. Spelling flagged: older mirrored accounts spell the surname “Kunkle”; the current station and Gates records spell it “Kunkel,” which is carried here. Kunkel’s WKJG radio (AM 1380, on air 15 November 1947, and FM 97.3) is a separate, earlier firm — this entry is the 1953 television station only. Hilliard Gates, who had supervised WKJG radio’s construction, was the TV station’s general manager, vice-president and sports director, its first face on air, and left in the late 1970s — station manager Helen Meyer testified to a discharge on 1 November 1977 over a $50-a-month car allowance; Gates said he was asked to leave in 1979 — did sports at WOWO and WANE-TV until retiring in 1990, and is carried by the Journalism Hall of Fame biography as a WKJG consultant to May 1993.
What it did: Fort Wayne’s first local television service — NBC network programmes plus heavily live local production in the 1950s (live children’s, cooking, farm and commercial production, “Cartoon Express with Engineer John” to 1971, and Gates’s daily “Gatesway to Sports”). Its West State Street tower was the aerial viewers aimed at — the advantage its first competitor spent years trying to undo (entry 41).
Course (ownership): sold in 1957 to the Truth Publishing Company of Elkhart (the Dille family; the stations later under the Communicana / Federated Media banner). The TV station was sold separately in 1971. For a period it was owned by Terre Haute industrialist Tony Hulman, and after Hulman’s death (1977) and Joseph R. Cloutier’s, by a trust company, the Corporation for General Trade as a station-history sequence; the exact Hulman acquisition year is not established on sources in hand. That company sold on 13 January 2003 for $20 million to New Vision Television. On 26 May 2003 the station changed its call letters to WISE-TV for its 50th anniversary. In March 2005 it was sold again, to Granite Broadcasting for $44.2 million. In the final form of the 2014–2015 Granite break-up, SagamoreHill Broadcasting acquired the WISE licence (completed 2 November 2015), Quincy Media operated it alongside WPTA, and Quincy then acquired WISE outright for $952,884 (announced 21 May 2018, completed 1 August 2018).
Fate: still operating — renamed, affiliation changed, documented. On 1 August 2016, under Quincy, WISE’s NBC affiliation moved to WPTA’s second subchannel and WISE took The CW (CW Plus) in exchange, ending a 1953–2016 NBC run. On 2 August 2021 Gray Television completed its acquisition of Quincy Media, so WISE-TV is now a Gray Media station, channel 33, The CW Plus affiliate, in a duopoly with WPTA (entry 42).
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- § 05 — business
Sources: History Center, Collection 89.9.1, WANE-TV Videotapes description — https://fwhistorycenter.org/virtual-exhibits/vex16/00F48451-00D2-4FE6-ACBF-563911331074.htm ; Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, Hilliard Gates biography (Kerry Hubartt, 2018) — https://www.ijhf.org/members/2018/hilliard-gates ; WISE-TV station history — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE-TV ; Fybush, Tower Site of the Week, WKJG 1380 — https://www.fybush.com/sites/2011/site-111021.html ; News-Sentinel, Doug LeDuc, “Everything was new on television” — http://egen.fortwayne.com/ns/projects/history/2000/1950/atom8.php ; Gray Television closing release, 2 Aug 2021 — https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/08/02/2273228/0/en/Gray-Television-Closes-Quincy-Acquisition.html . Sources as cited in the profile.