WJDW-TV 44 and some interesting trivia

[Scott Fybush <scott@fybush.com>]

I don't expect there are more than half a dozen people on the list (if that 
many) who will recognize the calls in the
subject line! "WJDW" was the original CP call for what's now WGBX, granted 
as a commercial station back in the
late fifties to one J.D. Wrather, hence the calls. I don't have any 
information at all on what Mr. Wrather planned to
use as a transmitter site or what he would have programmed; in any event, 
56 and 38 got on the air first and WJDW
never did. I don't even know whether Wrather donated the CP to WGBH or 
whether it had been returned and WGBH
applied "fresh" for 44. (In fact, the whole early history of WGBX is 
something of a mystery to me, except insofar as it
fits in with the general trend in the mid-sixties for the "big" educational 
TV stations to start second services - WQEX
Pittsburgh, WXXW Chicago, WETX Washington, KTCI St. Paul, etc - many of 
which ran in black and white at low
power and with limited hours from very old transmitters. WQEX, in 
particular, ran for many years from an incredibly
antiquated transmitter that had belonged first to WDTV/KDKA-TV and then to 
WQED...)

In any case, I *do* know a little something else now about Mr. Wrather: in 
doing research for my upcoming book about
New York City FM, I find that a J.D. Wrather Jr. purchased WBFM (101.9) for 
$4.175 million in 1957. That price seems
to have included not just the station but also the entirety of the Muzak 
Corporation!  ($4 million would otherwise have been
a ridiculous price for an FM station in that era; the same year, WBAI 99.5 
was sold by Theodore Deglin to paper
manufacturer Louis Schweitzer for $34,000! Schweitzer, of course, would 
simply donate the station to Pacifica three
years later. And WBFM itself would be worth only $400,000 in December 1963, 
when it was sold to WPIX by "Muzak
Corp., a division of Wrather Corp.")

And it turns out Wrather was quite the character - a Texas oilman turned TV 
impresario, among many other things. He
even owned the Queen Mary and the Disneyland Hotel!

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/W/htmlW/wratherjack/wratherjack.htm

So...anybody know anything at all about what the heck Jack Wrather had in 
mind for channel 44 in Boston?

s