WKYH-TV signs off for the night, 1985 · 5:00pm May 8th, 2017
A rare clip of today's CBS network station for southeastern Kentucky recorded during its final days as NBC affiliate WKYH-TV. Months before, Kentucky Central Television, then-licensee of Lexington's WKYT-TV 27, had purchased WKYH from Hazard businessman William Gorman, who was also mayor of Hazard from 1978 until his passing in 2010. By the end of 1985, Channel 57 had a new, more powerful transmitter, a new network (CBS) and new call letters, WYMT, which are the current ones.
The sign-off is preceded by the final few seconds of WKYH-TV's evening newscast, presumable an encore run of he 11:00 edition at 1 AM when NBC's Saturday Night Live ended. The sign-off is voiced by WKYH-TV announcer/weatherman/sportscaster Joey Kessler and consists of aerial views of WKYH-TV's transmitter tower and the surrounding mountains. The shaky signal seen in the clip is proof positive that the transmitter needed to be replaced as soon as possible. The video concludes with a U.S. Army SSB film utilizing historic Army imagery.
This video comes from YouTube broadcaster donmussell12, who has posted on his channel several other videos from WKYH-TV 57 from Labor Day weekend 1985. Among them are a couple amusing ones featuring Joey Kessler doing the weather.
- J. Alan Wall, http://www.tv-signoffs.com
On previous posts, I have talked about the fact that small WKYH-TV in Hazard, Kentucky did not get listed in TV Guide at all until the station was 10 years old. Serving the isolated, impoverished coal-mining mountain country of southeastern Kentucky, WKYH operated on an impossible UHF channel of 57 (see my comments earlier this week about Lexington's WTVQ) and probably used second-hand equipment it bought from larger stations for many years, as the following clip on YouTube attests: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSYx_zcxWNE. Scroll down the page to find a rare comment* by a former employee ("oldsoundguy") who recalls a Conrac tuner being used to grab the NBC feed from the stations in Bristol, Virginia/Tennessee or Lexington. Of course NBC was not about to make a major investment in constructing network lines over unforgiving territory for a small station like that, so owner Bill Gorman had no other way of getting the feed other than reliance on translator relays.
It was 40 years ago next month that this small miracle occurred, that commercial television came to one of America's poorest, most culturally isolated regions. You can imagine the gamut of reactions, from joy at finally getting a daily taste at what the rest of the world was like, to old-time preachers blasting the intrusion of that tool of Satan into homes to corrupt people's morals and make them "worldly."
All of this is to clearly indicate that Appalachia at the time was a generation behind other parts of the U.S., and economics had a lot to do with it. People eking a living out of the coal mines and farming the hard, rocky soil had barely enough money for necessities, let alone luxuries like electronic gadgets. Loretta Lynn's "Coal Miner's Daughter" (song and movie) tells that story more pointedly than anything I know. When TV came, it sought to serve the people who would watch (initially probably the better-to-do, whose poorer relatives likely watched when paying a visit), and old-time music and old-time religion filled the bill for many years, hence the occupation of the full two-hour "PTL Club" at 4 p.m. in this listing and "700 Club" at 9 a.m.
A former employee created a hodgepodge tribute page on his site to the former station: http://wobz9.com/REMEMBERWKYH.html. Of course, things changed considerably in 1985 when the owners of WKYT in Lexington bought WKYH, changed the call letters to WYMT, changed networks to CBS, and upgraded the equipment. Still, WKYH is a rare specimen of television operating in an unusual environment, one rivaled only by parts of the Rockies such as Idaho and Montana or perhaps Alaska, in the U.S. at least.
I actually have a listing of the station from 1974, from an edition of the Louisville Courier-Journal my grandparents picked up while on vacation. When I have time and find the clipping, I'll post it as a special.
- Mike Stroud, Radio Discussions.
*That comment has since been deleted.
I do remember watching that video Mr. Stroud was talking about in the second quote and remarking that the first record played in the ID (a rendition of the MAGNIFICENT SEVEN theme using some of the more stereotypical of Southern musical instruments) sounded quite a lot like Scootaloo in the CMC's song from an episode of MLP:FIM called The Show Stoppers; I then went on to say that both her voice - and the station itself - had improved quite a lot since then. Need I remind you that the S1 Scootaloo sound of the aforementioned record also stems from Mr. Mussell's observation that "they did not use the center alignment spindle for 45 RPM records".
