KICU-TV was a television station on channel 43 in

Visalia, California Visalia ( ) is a city in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley of California. The population was 141,384 as per the 2020 census. Visalia is the fifth-largest city in the San Joaquin Valley, the 42nd most populous in California, and 192nd in ...

, United States. It operated from December 1961 until October 1968. The transmitter was located east of

Badger Badgers are short-legged omnivores in the family Mustelidae (which also includes the otters, wolverines, martens, minks, polecats, weasels, and ferrets). Badgers are a polyphyletic rather than a natural taxonomic grouping, being united b ...

at Eshom Point.

History

KICU-TV began broadcasting on December 26, 1961. It was owned by Sierra Broadcasting, Inc., of

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

, which was headed by Norwood Patterson and co-owned with Fresno's

KBIF KBIF (900 AM) is a radio station broadcasting a World Ethnic format to the Fresno, California, United States, area. The station is currently owned by Cordell Overgaard, through licensee Overgaard Broadcasting LLC. KBIF broadcasts in the Hmon ...

radio after Patterson acquired it in early 1962. Patterson had previously acquired the Eshom Point transmitter site, which had been used by another failed television station in the area, KVVG-TV (channel 27). The station initially broadcast for four and a half hours a day, with movies as the prime attraction; it would also air programs that Fresno's NBC and CBS affiliates did not clear. Patterson's father owned the KSAN stations in

, including dormant

KSAN-TV KSAN-TV (channel 3) is a television station in San Angelo, Texas, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by Mission Broadcasting, which maintains local marketing agreement, joint sales and shared services agreements with Nexstar Media ...

channel 32; when S. H. Patterson went to sell channel 32, he was required to activate the facility and did so by simulcasting his son's Visalia channel. KSAN-TV simulcasted KICU-TV for two years until the sale of the San Francisco channel to

Metromedia Metromedia (also often MetroMedia) was an American media company that owned radio and television stations in the United States from 1956 to 1986 and controlled Orion Pictures from 1988 to 1997. Metromedia was established in 1956 after the DuMo ...

closed in March 1968. The station also aired instructional programming for local schools, as no educational television station existed in the Central Valley at the time. While the station increased its effective radiated power to 2.13 million watts, claiming to be the most powerful station west of the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it f ...

at the time of the upgrade in 1966, channel 43 was unable to succeed for much longer. KICU-TV closed on October 18, 1968, when Patterson announced that it would go off the air for six to eight months while moving to a site in the Sierra east of Fresno and conducting an upgrade to begin color telecasts. No such move ever materialized; two men attempted to burglarize the Eshom Point transmitter site six months later, and

Tulare County Tulare County ( ) is a county located in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 473,117. The county seat is Visalia. The county is named for Tulare Lake, once the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes. ...

also sued Sierra Broadcasting for back taxes after channel 43 stopped telecasting. Further financial troubles were later revealed; for

tax withholding Tax withholding, also known as tax retention, Pay-as-You-Go, Pay-as-You-Earn, Tax deduction at source or a ''Prélèvement à la source'', is income tax paid to the government by the payer of the income rather than by the recipient of the income ...

violations at his broadcast stations for which he owed the federal government $141,000 in taxes and penalties, owner Patterson was convicted on 16 charges in 1971 and, after two attempted appeals, served a 10-month jail sentence beginning in 1973. The

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdiction ...

deleted the license in 1975 for failure to respond to commission letters. With KICU-TV dark, several proposals were made to use channel 43 for an educational television station. The proposals, made by Tulare County, came in the context of efforts to set up a cooperative system on channel 18 in Fresno. In December 1973, Tulare County filed an application for a new channel 43. A later version contemplated the use of facilities offered by

Harry Pappas Pappas Telecasting Companies was a diversely organized broadcasting company headquartered in Visalia, California, United States. Founded in 1971, it was one of the largest privately held broadcasting companies in the country, with its stations r ...

and his

KMPH-TV KMPH-TV (channel 26) is a television station licensed to Visalia, California, United States, serving the Fresno area as an affiliate of the Fox network. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside Sanger-licensed CW affiliate KFRE-TV (ch ...

; it was dropped when Fresno County agreed to involve the others more in its channel 18 bid.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kicu Visalia ICU Defunct television stations in the United States ICU-TV Visalia, California Television channels and stations established in 1961 Television channels and stations disestablished in 1968 1961 establishments in California 1968 disestablishments in California