Last week, we looked at WBEN (now WIVB) which stands as the granddaddy of Buffalo TV, having been around since 1948. Back then, half of the broadcast day was mostly a test pattern waiting for the shows to begin. And some of those didn’t start until around 5 in the afternoon.
 
Both WGR (1954) and especially WKBW (1958) were latecomers to the television dance, but once they arrived, nothing was ever quite the same in the Queen City – or for those of us watching them across the border. And of course, both had long established radio stations to fall back on. 
 
Here’s a look back at the early days of their cathode-ray tube existence, and at the radio stations that came first.  
 
WGR-AM won the Billboard Station of the Year Award several times, but before it was Top 40, it aired your typical Golden Days of Radio line-up, as featured in this ad from 1950.
 

 
Over the course of its existence, 550 had several affiliations ranging from the so-called NBC Blue Network to Mutual.
 
From 1943:

 This one came just two years later.

 
By 1958, TV had taken over primetime and radio was playing music. WGR launched this unusually labour-intensive promotion to make sure everyone in Buffalo could hear the station.
 

 When they weren’t going door-to-door, they hitched their promo wagon to their stars.
 

Before the transistor changed radios forever, few of them were portable and they were all run on tubes. The station tried to turn that to its advantage.
 

 
Meanwhile, at the other end of the dial WKBW – which was founded in 1926 as a religious outlet and whose call letters originally stood for “Well Known Bible Witness” – was still years away from its pioneering Futuresonic Radio Top 40 days. Unlike their competition, they were signed with powerhouse Columbia, aka CBS.
 


 
KB had a great 50,000 watt signal which, sadly, was not aimed towards Canada. So it was often tough to get on this side of the border. But its personalities were legendary, among them, morning man Stan Roberts.
 

 
By the late 70s, FM was eating 1520’s lunch and it was clear the end was near. Still, long time DJ Sandy Beach was aware of who the competition was.

And they worked hard to keep up with the times, as this ad from 1976 shows.
 

 
A year earlier, they literally tried to “con” their audience. 
 

 
Over on the TV side, WGR had a strange history. It was once an ABC affiliate, with NBC programming seen on a moribund network-owned Channel 17. When the latter went bankrupt and the Peacock left town, the stronger signal got the prized network, and began to go head-to-head with CBS on Channel 4.
 

 
And if you thought home shopping over your TV set was a new idea, you never saw this ad way back in July 1961.
 

 
While court shows are all the rage now, Channel 2 featured a very different type of “court” in 1958.
 

Meanwhile, Channel 7 was stuck with an ABC affiliation and very low ratings. It took years for them to climb out of it and part of the answer came when a radio newsman turned to the camera in May 1964.


As the famous Weinstein crew grew, WKBW tried to innovate, especially with a newfangled device they used on election night in 1969.

But perhaps the station’s finest moment came in the face of one of the worst emergencies in Buffalo history – a weather event they still talk about today
 

 
Most here remember WKBW for its infamous kids’ shows, like Rocketship 7 and Commander Tom. None of the other Buffalo stations even came close when it came to these legendary children’s shows and a huge part of the audience was based right here in Southern Ontario.
 

 
Sadly, no local TV station bothers anymore with the “Clowns,” the “Uncles,” the “Captains” or the “Commanders.” Times have changed but the memories of those amazing days still haven’t signed off for most of us.  
 
Next week: Invention Attention - Broadcast Technology You Probably Never Saw