From Washington, D.C. (and NBC's longtime O&O there), it's time to play Hollywood Squares!!! · 11:34pm May 12th, 2016
Let's play Hollywood Squares with NBC's longtime O&O in the Washington, D.C. Market, WRC-TV!!!! Date of first playing: 14 April 1978. This is from a Beta tape Sacramento, California resident Jesse Skeen found and transferred to DVD, and then put on the trading circuit where it was unsuspectingly found by the video's OP. As it was a Scotch blank with sticky-shed, he had to run it with the VCR cover off and use his hands to guide the tape, and had to stop and clean the heads a couple times; the DVD was edited in a matter that succeeds in heavily obscuring this fact.
The Radio Corporation of America, the then-parent company of NBC, signed on experimental TV station W3XNB in 1939. On June 27, 1947, the station received a commercial station license and signed on the air as WNBW (standing for "NBC Washington"). Channel 4 is the second-oldest licensed television station in Washington, after WTTG (channel 5), which signed on six months earlier in January 1947. WNBW was also the second of the five original NBC-owned television stations to sign-on, behind New York City and ahead of Chicago, Cleveland and Los Angeles. The station was operated alongside WRC radio (980 AM, frequency now occupied by WTEM; and 93.9 FM, now WKYS). On October 18, 1954, the television station's callsign changed to the present WRC-TV to match its radio sisters. The new calls reflected NBC's ownership at the time by RCA. It has retained its "-TV" suffix to this day, more than two decades after the radio stations were sold off.
At the time of its sign-on, channel 4 was one of two wholly network-owned stations in Washington, the other being DuMont's WTTG. DuMont was shut down in 1956, and for the next 30 years WRC-TV was Washington's only network owned-and-operated station. That distinction ended when WTTG was sold to the News Corporation and became a charter station for the Fox network in 1986; it has since been accompanied by WDCA (channel 20) as UPN was owned by the station's owner Viacom until 2001 when Viacom traded the station to Fox (it is currently affiliated with the MyNetworkTV programming service). Today, WRC is one of three network-owned stations in the nation's capital, alongside the Fox Television Stations-owned duopoly of WTTG and WDCA.
NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS FOR WRC-TV
In 1955, while in college and serving as a puppeteer on a WRC-TV program, Jim Henson was asked to create a puppet show for the station. The series he created, Sam and Friends, was the first series to feature the Muppets, and launched the Jim Henson Company.
The second presidential debate between candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon was broadcast from the station's studios on October 7, 1960. David Brinkley's Washington segment of the Huntley-Brinkley Report originated at WRC-TV between 1956 and 1970, as did Washington reports or commentaries by Brinkley or John Chancellor on NBC Nightly News in the 1970s.
The earliest color videotape in existence is a recording of the dedication of NBC/WRC's Washington studios on May 22, 1958. As Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke at the event, introduced by Brinkley, it was also the first time a president had been videotaped in color.
Meet the Press, the longest-running program in U.S. broadcast television history, which debuted on November 6, 1947, and It's Academic, which premiered in 1961 and which the Guinness Book of World Records says is the longest-running game show in television history, both originate from the studios of WRC-TV.
