KATV

KATV (channel 7) is a television station in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States, affiliated with ABC and owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group. The station's studios are located at the former Worthen Bank Building on East 4th and Main Streets in downtown Little Rock, and its transmitter is located at the Shinall Mountain antenna farm, near the city's Chenal Valley neighborhood.

History

Griffin-Leake ownership

On December 9, 1952, the Central South Sales Co. (owned by John T. Griffin and James C. Leake) applied for a construction permit to build a new channel 7 TV station in Pine Bluff; it was later joined by competing applications from the Pine Bluff Television Co. (owned by Dallas construction executive Burnett Estes) on December 27, 1952, and the Arkansas Television Company, owned by construction and real estate executive Gaylord Shaw, and unrelated to the company of the same name that founded KTHV hannel 11 on January 28, 1953. Shaw's application—filed as business colleague Estes withdrew his, with duplicate engineering data included in both applications—was accused of being a "strike" bid, purposely intended to delay the grant of the channel 7 permit. On June 18, 1953, the FCC granted the construction permit to Central South and dismissed Shaw's application on the "strike" grounds.

The station first signed on the air on December 19, 1953. It was the second station in central Arkansas behind KRTV, channel 17 in Little Rock, which had gone on the air on April 4. Originally licensed to Pine Bluff, the station was a CBS affiliate with a secondary ABC affiliation. It became a full ABC affiliate in 1955 after KTHV (channel 11) signed on and took the CBS affiliation due to KTHS (now KAAY) having a long time relation with CBS Radio; during the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. KATV was founded by John Toole "J.T." Griffin and James C. "Jimmy" Leake (who also founded sister station KTUL in Tulsa and original sister station KWTV in Oklahoma City, the company founded by the former of the two founders would later become the present-day Griffin Communications).

KATV is Little Rock's oldest continually operating television station, beating NBC affiliate KARK-TV (channel 4) by almost five months. On-air personalities at KATV during its early years of operation included the station's first announcer, Don Curran; the first news director, Bill Hadley; and news announcer, Oscar Alagood. News cameramen included Bob Donaldson and Lou Oberste. Donaldson would later lead the film department at the University of Arkansas Medical School for many years, and Oberste would work at the Arkansas Department of Tourism. Less than a year after its debut, KATV moved its operations from Pine Bluff to studio facilities located on North Beech Street, near Kavanaugh in the Pulaski Heights section of Little Rock that were formerly occupied by KRTV, a failed UHF station that had been the first television station to sign on in the state of Arkansas. The studios were damaged in a fire that occurred on October 31, 1957.

KATV subsequently moved to a two-story building at 310 West 3rd Street; the first floor had been occupied by a furniture store, while the second floor served as studio facilities for a local radio station and also housed the offices of an insurance agency. The television station called the building home for about seven years; during this period, in 1959, Robert Doubleday became one of the youngest television station managers in the country at the age of 26. Under Doubleday, KATV became a major competitor in the Little Rock market. (Doubleday remained as KATV's manager until 1968, when he was promoted to president of KATV and KTUL. Doubleday was replaced in his former position by general sales manager Thomas Goodgame, who would later move to Tulsa as general manager and would eventually become president of Westinghouse Broadcasting.)

The fact that KATV now operated out of Little Rock instead of city of license Pine Bluff led to a major fight in federal court with the Federal Communications Commission and Pine Bluff area citizens, the station lost; until recently, KATV had maintained a major presence in Jefferson County. KATV originally transmitted its signal from a tower near Jefferson, until a taller tower was built farther north in Redfield in 1965.

Sole ownership by Leake

In November 1963, the Griffin-Leake interests reached an agreement to buy out the respective 25% interests in KWTV held by former Oklahoma Governor Roy J. Turner and Luther Dulaney – which had expanded their interest in the Oklahoma City station in August 1962, after RKO General sold its stake in KWTV to address ownership issues related to RKO's multi-layered purchase-swap transaction involving WRC-TV and WRC-AM-FM (now WTEM and WKYS) in Washington, D.C., WNAC-TV (now defunct; former channel allocation now occupied by WHDH), WNAC-AM (now WRKO) and WRKO-FM (now WBZ-FM) in Boston, the WRCV television and radio stations (now KYW-TV and KYW M in Philadelphia, and the Washington-based WGMS radio stations (now WWRC and WTOP-FM) – for an initial payment of $200,000 and title rights to the equipment used by KWTV, KTUL and KATV. Turner and Dulaney would then sell the equipment, valued at $2.3 million, to First National Bank of Oklahoma City executives C. A. Voss and James Kite for $3 million. In turn, the three Griffin-Leake stations would be folded into a single corporate umbrella under KATV parent licensee KATV Inc. (subsequently rechristened as Griffin-Leake TV), which would enter into a ten-year equipment leasing agreement with Voss and Kite for a total of $4.5 million (or $37,500 per month). Griffin and the Leakes would own approximately all of the common voting stock and collectively own 84% of nonvoting common shares in KATV Inc. post-merger, with 10% of the remaining nonvoting interest held by Edgar Bell (who would remain executive vice president and general manager at KWTV).

KATV has used the Circle 7 logo since 1965, a logo that had traditionally been associated at the time with ABC owned-and-operated stations, and was one of the network's first affiliates to have used the logo (as designed by G. Dean Smith in 1962). KATV's use of the Circle 7 logo predates even the variant Circle 7 used by Allbritton flagship station WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C. from 1977 until it switched to the standard version in 2001. However, unlike WJLA and most of the O&Os, prior to the Sinclair purchase KATV paired the ABC logo with the Circle 7 sparingly, usually in on-screen logo bugs in which the Circle 7 covers the standard ABC bug. KATV also first placed the Circle 7 inside a square in the 1990s; WJLA now uses this version as well, though neither station uses it consistently (KATV stopped placing the Circle 7 logo inside the square in September 2008). The station moved its operations to the Worthen Bank Building in downtown Little Rock in October 1970, after Worthen vacated the building and moved into a newly constructed building in the downtown district. The station gained some national attention in 1969 when they had to air ''Turn-On'', which among viewers, "jam edthe station's switchboard" with complaints.

In April 1969, Griffin-Leake TV announced that it would break up its holdings into two separate companies. Leake – who had moved from being a 3.5% minority partner in KATV to half-owner as a result of the earlier investor divestitures – retained ownership of KATV, KTUL, Ponca City, Oklahoma-based cable television operator Cable TV Co. and a controlling 80% interest in the construction permit for Fajardo, Puerto Rico television station WSTE (now WORO-DT), while Griffin retained ownership of KWTV under the licensee Century Communications Co. (Griffin's company would eventually return to Arkansas in September 1985, when it purchased NBC affiliate KPOM-TV ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV.html"_;"title="KFTA-TV.html"_;"title="ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV">ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV">KFTA-TV.html"_;"title="ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV">ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TVin_ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV.html"_;"title="KFTA-TV.html"_;"title="ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV">ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV">KFTA-TV.html"_;"title="ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV">ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TVin_Fort_Smith,_Arkansas">Fort_Smith_from_the_Ozark_Broadcasting_Company;_Griffin_would_sell_KPOM_and_the_ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV.html"_;"title="KFTA-TV.html"_;"title="ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV">ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV">KFTA-TV.html"_;"title="ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TV">ow_Fox_affiliate_KFTA-TVin_Fort_Smith,_Arkansas">Fort_Smith_from_the_Ozark_Broadcasting_Company;_Griffin_would_sell_KPOM_and_the_Rogers,_Arkansas">Rogers_Rogers_may_refer_to:
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