Television officially arrived in Cincinnati 75 years ago today at 12:30 p.m. Feb. 9, 1948, when WLWT-TV began broadcasting — more than a year before Taft Broadcasting's WKRC-TV and Scripps' WCPO-TV.
Starting today, WLWT-TV will launch a year-long 75th anniversary celebration of its incredible legacy, which will include a TV special later this month featuring some old TV clips and a ribbon-cutting on the new WLWT Hall of Fame.
WLWT-TV was the 20th television station in the US. It was no surprise that Cincinnati's Crosley Broadcasting put the city's first TV station on the air because Crosley was one of the nation's major broadcasting leaders.
Crosley built the first and only 500,000-watt AM signal on the air for WLW-AM in 1934; conducted video experiments in Carew Tower in 1939 (put on hold during World War II); and built the Voice of America relay station on Tylersville Road in Butler County in 1942-43.
WLWT-TV actually beat the other Cincinnati media companies to television by two years.
In early 1947, Crosley began broadcasting on experimental W8XCT. By the official launch of WLWT-TV a year later, Crosley already had televised Cincinnati's first Reds game, college football and basketball games, variety shows, a weather show, religious service, boxing, bowling, wrestling, ice skating, swim meet, a Harlem Globetrotters professional basketball game at Music Hall (10 years before the NBA Cincinnati Royals came to town) and a commercial (for Wiedemann Beer).
Thanks to its powerful WLW-AM, the "Nation's Station," which reached more than half of the 50 states at night, Crosley Broadcasting had a stable of stars to spread over both TV and radio.
For the first 25 years, WLWT-TV dominated the local TV airwaves with Ruth Lyons' 50-50 Club, the Paul Dixon Show, Bob Braun Show and Midwestern Hayride, a weekly country music show which aired nationally as an NBC "summer replacement" for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows in the 1950s.
Singer Janette Davis, a performer on experimental W8XCT, was the first of many Cincinnati stars to appear on national TV, moving to New York for CBS' Arthur Godfrey and His Friends (1949-57). Lyons' show was so popular that it aired weekdays on NBC from Oct. 1, 1951 to Sept. 5, 1952.
WLWT-TV's early stars included announcer-humorist Jean Shepherd (who wrote A Christmas Story); Bill Nimmo (later announcer for Johnny Carson's Who Do You Trust?); newsman Peter Grant; dancer-producer Len Goorian; comedian Bob Shreve; and singers Betty Clooney (sister to Nick and Rosemary), Marian Spelman, Bonnie Lou and Ruby Wright. Variety show host Nick Clooney and country singer Kenny Price came along in the 1960s.
The off-camera talent included several eventual Hollywood producers: Douglas Cramer (Dynasty, Hotel, The Love Boat), Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) and Earl Hamner Jr. (The Waltons).
In the early 1970s, WLWT-TV launched the syndicated Johnny Bench Show, a variety program starring the Reds All-Star catcher. Twenty years later, WLWT-TV in 1991 premiered the Jerry Springer daytime talk show, which aired nationwide the next year.
Channel 5 also gave Bob Trumpy, Bill Hemmer, Joe Morgan, Steve Horstmeyer, Pat Barry, Clyde Gray, Rob Reider, Nancy James and Thom Brennaman their TV starts. WLWT-TV's news alumni include CBS reporter Lee Cowan and CNN's Gene Randall and Toria Tolley Hammill.
WLWT current owners have a lot to chose from for their new Hall of Fame.
In the first years, when only a few hundred people owned TV sets, viewers were asked to call or write the company's Crosley Square headquarters at Ninth and Elm streets Downtown (now Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy) so they could be sent weekly program lineups. WLWT continued the practice through June 1949.
The year of experimental operation allowed engineers to figure out what worked — and what didn't. The station successfully broadcast the first Reds game, against the Phillies at Crosley Field, on Sept. 21, 1947, just days after remote equipment arrived.
But things didn't go that well when Crosley engineers telecast the first football game a few weeks later, the UC Bearcats vs. Dayton Flyers at Nippert Stadium on Oct. 11, 1947. Only having two cameras, they naively placed them on opposite sides of the 50-yard line — so when a guy started running down the field, and they switched to the other camera, he was running the other direction on TV.
By the Feb. 9 debut in 1948, they had worked out the major problems for the live debut broadcast of Luncheon at the Sinton from the Sinton Hotel on Fourth Street at 12:30 p.m.
Six days later, on Feb. 15, WLWT officially moved into its new ''Mount Olympus'' TV studios at 2222 Chickasaw St., University Heights, under the station's TV tower. Peter Grant proclaimed to viewers: ''Today is T-Day in Cincinnati! Television's here!'' Two months later, on April 9, WLWT-TV televised the first Opening Day, a station tradition until Channel 5's owners gave up Reds TV rights after the 1995 season.
The innovations continued throughout the 1950s. The first local weather radar unit was installed at Mount Olympus in 1955. WLWT-TV first introduced local color programming in 1957 for Lyons' 50-50 Club, which attracted a "who's who" of singers, entertainers, comedians, Hollywood stars, political leaders and sports stars.
WLWT-TV's aggressive use and promotion of local color programming — and NBC's "Living Color" shows — earned Cincinnati the nickname "Colortown U.S.A." by 1962.
In the mid-1960s, while other local stations were airing syndicated daytime shows starring Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas, Channel 5 was broadcasting five hours of live entertainment programming every weekday, plus an hour of news, and sometimes a Reds night game.
Local daytime programming continued on WLWT-TV for 36 years, until the station canceled the regionally syndicated Bob Braun Show in 1984, as the station shifted most of its resources into news.
While TV has endured and thrived for 75 years, "Mount Olympus" did not. Lyons did not like the inconvenient University Heights location, and television programming soon returned to Crosley Square Downtown. WCET-TV, the nation's first licensed educational TV station, moved into the hilltop facility in 1959 and broadcast there until the Crosley Telecommuncations Center on Central Parkway across from Music Hall opened in 1976. "Mount Olympus" was torn down in 2007.
Channel 5 remained in Crosley Square until 1999, when it moved to its current location, 1700 Young Street, Mount Auburn, and became the city's first all-digital TV station. For the past 18 months, WLWT-TV folks have been digitizing "our entire station archives of old videotape," says Pete Salkowski, creative services director.
"We literally rounded up every old tape in the building and digitized it. We can now search and import anything in our archives quickly and easily to be presented and shared as needed. I have discovered some long-lost clips in there I've never seen before," he says.
WLWT-TV's historic anniversary celebration Thursday will "kick off a year-long celebration where viewers can look forward to remembering and sharing in 75 years of WLWT history. Our 75th anniversary special will be airing on WLWT later this month, and streaming on our Very Local app. Throughout the year both on-air and across our digital and social platforms, we'll be sharing the clips and highlights that will bring back a lot of memories for everyone across the Tri-State," he says.
"In the coming months we will cut the ribbon on the WLWT Hall of Fame and celebrate the inaugural class that helped build our historic 75-year legacy," he says.
For more WLWT-TV history read my past stories for WVXU: 70 Reasons to Celebrate WLWT-TV's 70th Birthday from 2018; Remembering Bob Braun and the 'Bob Braun Show'from 2019; and Paul Dixon's 'Chicken Wedding' Aired 50 Years Ago Today from 2019.
