KHJ, the mother of all Los Angeles television. AM radio station 930 licensed April 13, 1922 to RKO Radio Pictures. Hard on its heels was KFI AM 640, licensed April 16, 1922 to Packard car salesman Earle C. Anthony. I fondly remember how KFI would take its unsold commercial time and endlessly pitch its unsold Packard Clippers, what a car!
Anyway Earle also wound up with one of those new TV assignments and KFI-TV was started in October 1948. Three years later, radio competitor RKO offered him an astonishing price for his TV property. And the old horse trader, knowing he had bested his opponent, could not resist taking the $2,500,000. That's how Channel 9 became KHJ-TV.
RKO was also an early adaptor in FM, founding KRTH (now 101.1) in 1941. Meanwhile, Earle seeing his Packard business evaporate, jumped into FM broadcasting by starting KOST (103.5) in 1957.
Cadillac car dealer Don Lee was also a West Coast television pioneer, licensed to transmit experimental television as station W6XS, Gardena, in 1931! The FCC granted a construction permit (1945) and commercial license (1950) to KTSL (Thomas S. Lee), for TV channel 2. The General Tire and Rubber Company purchased this along with other Don Lee properties from the estate, and immediatly divested TV 2 to the CBS Network to become KNXT (KNX AM 1070 was the CBS owned radio outlet) and then finally KCBS. CBS was already a minority owner in station KTTV operated by the Los Angeles Times but wanted a station of its own, and pulled the CBS network programs from KTTV, starting with the 1951 fall season.
General Tire and Rubber Company later absorbed RKO Radio Pictures (including KHJ) to form the RKO General company. But General Tire ran afoul of the FCC and was forced to divest itself of its broadcast stations. KRTH went to Infinity in 1994, while KHJ television was taken by the Walt Disney Company with callsign change to KCAL. But before the ink (and paint) could dry on the deal, the cartoon maker bought out the entire ABC network, which included local station KABC. Since common ownership of 2 TV stations (KCAL and KABC) in 1 market (Los Angeles DMA) was not allowed by the FCC in those days, channel 9 was released to Young Broadcasting of New York City. Thus Mike Piazza was not the first Los Angeles player to get traded to the Big Apple by a TV network (FOX).
Three-letter callsigns are rare because the FCC does not issue them to broadcasters anymore for any reason. KHJ AM went through an ill advised call change, then tried to bring back its audience as KKHJ when purchased by Liberman Broadcasting in 1990. Around that time TV62 started broadcasting from Burbank and stole the former callsign of crosstown rival, NBC owned station KNBC (xKRCA). It was Liberman that purchased the new KRCA this year. (Note that NBC-RCA-GE-Panasonic is yet another story all by itself.) Thus the history of TV channels 2, 4, 7, 9, 11 and 62 have all been touched by way of AM 930, the radio station that made pictures.
Back
to horse trading and car sales, CBS TV2 is now the property of
Viacom along with UPN. Currently the FCC allows common ownership
of more than one TV station in a market, and for a diverse market
like Los Angeles, two of these can be VHF channels (2-13). So
Viacom purchased KCAL with the idea of putting its UPN service
here, but with the merger of UPN-WB to create CW, it will be
networkless. And KCOP 13 will become My
Network, owned by Fox television, same as KTTV.
