KCPQ
KCPQ is a television station licensed to Tacoma, Washington, United States, serving the Seattle area. It is owned and operated by the Fox network through its Fox Television Stations division alongside KZJO, which broadcasts MyNetworkTV. The two stations share studios on Westlake Avenue in Seattle's Westlake neighborhood; KCPQ's main transmitter is located on Gold Mountain in Bremerton.
The station signed on in August 1953 as KMO-TV, the television outgrowth of Tacoma radio station KMO. It was briefly an NBC network affiliate until another Seattle station signed on; the next year, KMO radio and television were sold to separate owners. The Seattle broadcaster J. Elroy McCaw bought channel 13, changed the call sign to KTVW, and ran it as an independent station. While KTVW produced a number of local programs, McCaw, a famously parsimonious owner, never converted the station to broadcast in color, and its syndicated programming inventory was considered meager. McCaw died in August 1969; three years later, his estate sold the station to the Blaidon Mutual Investors Corporation. While Blaidon tried several new programs and began color telecasting, the station continued to underperform financially. Two attempts to sell KTVW to out-of-state buyers failed because of its high liabilities. After a walkout by employees in January and the appointment of a receiver in July, KTVW was ordered closed on December 12, 1974.
The Clover Park School District in Lakewood purchased KTVW at bankruptcy auction in 1975. The station returned to the air on a non-commercial basis as KCPQ in January 1976, serving as an effective replacement for Clover Park's UHF station, KPEC-TV. Changes to the structure of school financing in Washington and the refusal of voters to approve bonds to rebuild Clover Park High School forced the school district to sell KCPQ back into commercial use. After being off the air for most of 1980 to relocate its transmitter, KCPQ returned under new owner Kelly Broadcasting, who rebuilt it as a more competitive independent station. During Kelly's 19-year ownership of KCPQ, the station became a Fox affiliate, relocated its studios from Lakewood to Seattle, and established its present local news department.
KCPQ was sold to Tribune Broadcasting in 1999 as part of Kelly's exit from the broadcasting industry. As Tribune expanded the station's news output, it also had to fend off overtures by Fox, which had sought to own KCPQ on several occasions since the 1990s and at one point threatened to buy another station to broadcast Fox programming. Tribune was purchased by Nexstar Media Group in 2019; Nexstar then traded KCPQ to Fox as part of an exchange of Fox affiliates in three cities.
History
As KMO-TV/KTVW
In December 1952, the Federal Communications Commission simultaneously granted applications to broadcast on very high frequency channels 11 and 13 in Tacoma; channel 13 was awarded to radio station KMO. The station began broadcasting as KMO-TV on August 2, 1953, from studios in Tacoma and a transmitter near Ruston.KMO-TV briefly carried NBC programs until Seattle's KOMO-TV began broadcasting on December 11. After that, KMO-TV's output primarily consisted of local and syndicated programs. Within a year of starting the TV station, owner Carl E. Haymond—who had built KMO radio in 1926—sought to exit the broadcasting business, having already sold stakes in radio stations in California and Arizona. He first attempted to sell KMO radio and television together to the owners of Seattle radio station KAYO for $350,000 ; the unusually low purchase price was attributed to the station's lack of network affiliation and its financial losses. The FCC indicated the necessity of a hearing to approve the sale due to the then-impermissible overlap of the Seattle and Tacoma radio stations' coverage areas; the deal was then scrapped several weeks later. In July, Haymond sold KMO-TV for $300,000 to J. Elroy McCaw, a Seattle-based radio station owner.
With KMO-TV separated from KMO radio, the television station changed its call sign to KTVW in October 1954 and announced plans to open auxiliary offices in Seattle. The station also began airing Seattle Americans minor-league hockey, which was connected to KTVW in several ways. For two months, KTVW's general manager served as the team's president; when he resigned for a television job in Los Angeles, McCaw became the team's sole owner. At this time, the Americans were the only professional hockey club to televise all their home games. Between 1955 and 1958, the station operated Seattle studios at 230 8th Avenue North; at one point, while the station relocated its Tacoma facility, all of channel 13's live shows temporarily originated from Seattle.
McCaw tried to make several moves to improve channel 13's positioning in the late 1950s. In an unusual arrangement, the station briefly aired the CBS network news in late 1957 when Tacoma's then-CBS affiliate, KTNT-TV, dropped the CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards to make way for an expanded local news program. CBS, which wanted the newscast to continue to air in the Seattle market until KIRO-TV could sign on as the market's CBS station, arranged for the network hookup to bring the program to KTVW on an interim basis. In 1957, McCaw filed to move the transmitter from Tacoma to Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, which would have come with an upgrade to the maximum 316,000 watts; local residents objected to the erection of another TV tower in the area and to McCaw's proposal to create a "tower park" that would have required the demolition of 75 to 80 homes. This proposal had stalled by 1958, when it was reported that the owners of Los Angeles station KCOP-TV, including Bing Crosby, were negotiating to buy KTVW and another independent station McCaw owned, Denver's KTVR. Ultimately, the station increased its effective radiated power from the Ruston transmitter from 100,000 to 214,000 watts in 1960.
McCaw was regarded as frugal. Of his Denver station, it was remarked by Edwin James of Broadcasting that "McCaw's saving ways had been reflected in the station's programming"; in the 1950s, he owned WINS in New York and was an aggressive cost-cutter there. Local programs from KTVW during its 20-year run included a movie block hosted by Stu Martin; the afternoon children's show Penny and Her Pals, hosted by LeMoyne Hreha; and, for one year, coverage of the Seafair hydroplane races. In 1967, when an engineer's strike kept most of the other Seattle stations from broadcasting the event, KTVW stepped in to fill the void on short notice. In 1967, channel 13 began airing a six-hour stock market show, the first such program to broadcast on a VHF station. It originated, unlike KTVW's other programming, from Seattle in studios in the Northern Life Tower. These shows, along with most of channel 13's local programming, were temporarily suspended at the end of March 1970 as part of cutbacks it attributed to "the economic slowdown". The cutbacks left Bob Corcoran, a talk show host, as KTVW's sole on-air personality. KTVW was left airing, in the words of the television editor of The Seattle Times, "scratchy old movies and... Neanderthal reruns from the violence-action era of television". The business news programming briefly left the air that April before closing for good at the end of October 1970 along with the Northern Life Tower studio in Seattle.
In early 1969, plans were floated to convert KTVW to color, move the transmitter to Port Orchard, and relocate the studios to Seattle. The television editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer hailed the proposed changes as heralding the end of "the funny station way over at the end of your television dial... with the fuzzy picture and the funny, fuzzy programs and the fuzzy, old, awful movies". However, any hopes of an upgrade were dashed when McCaw died of a stroke that August. His indebted businesses struggled after his death; creditors made more than $12 million in claims, after which the bank declared his estate insolvent, requiring the family to sell off his various holdings, including the family mansion and yachts.
Blaidon ownership, financial woes, and the end of KTVW
After nearly three years, on March 27, 1972, McCaw's estate sold KTVW to the Seattle-based Blaidon Mutual Investors Corporation, named for co-owners Blaine Sampson and Don Wolfstone, for $1.1 million. During the sale process, the stock market program—which had returned in 1971 after it reorganized under a new production company—stopped airing after channel 13 asked for more money for its air time in contract negotiations.Wolfstone recognized that the station needed help if it were to become viable, telling a writer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that "there's not much of a worse in the country". Blaidon tried to turn KTVW around by boosting the station's signal strength, acquiring first-run syndicated programming, and installing color-capable broadcast equipment. Channel 13 premiered its new programming lineup with The Tony Visco Show, its flagship effort. This talk/entertainment show was hosted by Tony Visco, a Las Vegas lounge entertainer and singer, attempted to recreate a Tonight Show-style program. Don Wolfstone—the "Don" in "Blaidon"—brought in a Los Angeles producer/director to develop the show, which featured a live band on-set, and had hopes of flying in show-business guests from Los Angeles and later syndicating the program nationwide. After two months on-air, rising production costs forced Blaidon to relocate the program from a Tacoma restaurant to the station's studios; channel 13 canceled The Tony Visco Show before the year ended. Another new program launched under Blaidon was an afternoon cartoon show hosted by local actor Mike Lynch, playing a "superhero" character for whom viewers were asked to suggest a name; the winning entry was "Flash Blaidon". Despite KTVW's improved programming and ratings that at times were competitive with KTNT-TV, national advertisers failed to materialize. The News Tribune described the station, in retrospect, as "a down-at-the-heels purveyor of old movies and used-car commercials".
At the end of 1973, Blaidon filed to sell channel 13 to the Christian Broadcasting Network of Portsmouth, Virginia; the filing alone signaled trouble, given that at the time, the FCC barred selling a station in less than three years of ownership unless the buyer demonstrated it was facing financial hardship. The station's remaining live programming, such as Flash Blaidon, was canceled. Over the course of 1974, KTVW's financial position deteriorated. On January 15, 40 employees staged a walk-out, forcing the station to go off the air, complaining about not having been paid in nearly four weeks. After they were paid by cashier's check, channel 13 resumed operations the next day, but employees remained skeptical of Blaidon's financial condition. By the end of January, Blaidon had pleaded with the FCC to expedite approval of the CBN transfer; Wolfstone expected the Internal Revenue Service to lock up his Seattle office for failing to pay withholding taxes in the second half of 1973.
The FCC approved the CBN transaction, but the buyer had second thoughts about the $5.1 million purchase price of channel 13 and asked for several time extensions to consummate the purchase. In July, MCA Television, among KTVW's largest creditors, successfully petitioned for the appointment of a receiver to manage the station's affairs. Despite a brief improvement in financial position when the receiver separated KTVW from Blaidon, the CBN sale fell apart over its refusal to assume all of the television station's liabilities. The bankruptcy court approved a second offer from the Suburban Broadcasting Company, which owned WSNL in Patchogue, New York, but this deal collapsed, as Suburban also refused to assume the station's liabilities. On December 12, 1974, at 5:10 p.m., KTVW was airing a rerun of Batman when Bruce Clements, a court-appointed trustee in charge of its affairs, ordered the station to go off the air at 5:30 upon that program completing its airing.
By the end of January 1975, the bankruptcy court was entertaining two "very firm offers" for the station. In 1976, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Blaidon, alleging that they had sold stock to non-Washington residents without SEC approval and issued misleading financial reports to prospective investors in the company.