The courtship of NBC by the Hearld-Traveler

[Kevin Vahey]

Amazing that I could remember the name Nathan David after all these
years. He was the one that assembled everyone involved with BBI.

At the bitter end even the FCC wanted to reopen the case but the
Supreme Court was most likely fed up that the case had dragged for 15
years and at the time was the longest matter in Federal civil court
history which now belongs to the Exxon Alaska oil spill.

I remember the last day well as I was in Winter Haven, FL as WHDH-TV
did one final Sox game and it was bittersweet. I had chosen to go to
WBZ-TV to keep shooting baseball which I soon came to regret but I was
a mere lad of 22. It was the last time Ned Martin and Ken Coleman
would ever work together. Our director Roger Shea wound up going to
Atlanta where he was involved with the Braves on local channel 17
which soon would explode.

One can 'what if' to death how things would have played out had
WHDH-TV survived. Most likely the Record-American would have been the
newspaper that died instead of the H-T.
One could surmise that Hearst may have ended up with Channel 5 anyways
and perhaps the paper as well if a waiver could be granted.

It never should have happened.

>From the Globe July 1991
Nathan H. David, a communications lawyer who assembled the investors
who won the license to WCVB-TV (Ch. 5) and sold the station 10 years
later for $220 million, died of a pulmonary ailment May 22 at his
vacation home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 77 and lived in Incline,
Nev.  Mr. David was a lawyer with the Boston firm of Brown & Rudnick
in 1962 when he spied a brief item in the newspapers on the Federal
Communications Commission's invitation for bids on the temporary Ch. 5
license then held by the Herald Traveler Corp., publisher of the
Boston Herald Traveler.