TVNewsCheck is looking for exterior beauty shots of your TV station. In a recent article, Picture This: Beauty Shots of Your TV Station, we requested current pictures, old photos and any unique or interesting stories that you’d like to share. We received a few so far and hope they keep coming. You can contact me […]
TVNewsCheck is looking for exterior beauty shots of your TV station. In a recent article, Picture This: Beauty Shots of Your TV Station, we requested current pictures, old photos and any unique or interesting stories that you’d like to share.
We received a few so far and hope they keep coming. You can contact me at 817-578-6324 or [email protected].
In 1953, WTWV was just a dream of Frank Spain’s, an engineer from Mississippi State University, who wanted to build a TV station in his hometown of Tupelo, Miss.
Spain was working as a technical director at the time at WTEN Syracuse, N.Y., and had helped build TV stations in Washington and New York for NBC.
Spain applied for a license and began the formidable job of constructing a television station for Tupelo in his garage in Syracuse.
At the time, constructing your own television station was unheard of. Commercial television equipment was extremely expensive, but Spain was determined and dedicated.
The antenna, transmitter and cameras were designed and built from scratch, and throughout the construction period, his garage, backyard and home basement in Syracuse literally became an electronics assembly facility.
In 1956, Spain got his license officially approved with the then-named call letters of WTWV.
All the equipment constructed over the previous three years was gathered and shipped to Tupelo and the job of assembling and building a workable television station began.
The equipment’s new home was an abandoned school just north of Tupelo, which remains the station’s operations headquarters to this day.
Initially, Spain hoped his good relations with NBC would get his station an affiliation with the network. But the network believed the station’s rural location made it a less than ideal choice, but told him that he if he could figure out a way to obtain a network signal, he could carry it.
Spain set up a network of relays to deliver the NBC signal from Memphis, which brought the bootleg NBC programming to Tupelo and the area around Northern Mississippi.
In 1957, WTWV went on the air with its first live pictures to viewers in Northern Mississippi.
WTWV produced numerous firsts. WTWV was the first commercial television station in the state to devote its entire daily morning schedule to “educational programming” coordinated with the area’s public school system.
WTWV was the first television station in Mississippi to broadcast a live basketball game and it was the first station to broadcast a live telethon for an entire broadcasting day — raising money to fight cerebral palsy.
The change from black and white to color was easily accomplished due to Spain’s involvement with the development of color television for NBC several years earlier.
In the mid-1960s, WTWV was approached by ABC to be an affiliate, offering to pay the station the customary affiliation rates. Spain took the offer to NBC.
This prompted NBC to make WTWV an official NBC affiliate, one of only three in the state at the time.
In 1979, WTWV changed its call letters to WTVA in honor of Tupelo’s recognition as the first Tennessee Valley Authority city in the southeast to purchase power from the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Frank Spain continued to serve as CEO of WTVA until his death in 2006. His widow, Jane, took over until the station was sold in 2014 to Heartland Media.
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