DENVER — The birth of Channel 9 – which occurred at 2:15 p.m. on Oct. 12, 1952 – doesn’t exactly seem glamorous 70 years later.
For 15 minutes, a test pattern and its accompanying tone played on area televisions.
Then at 2:30 p.m. came the first show broadcast on what was then known as KBTV, a game show called Quiz Kids, followed by Super Circus, which featured the kind of daring feats one might normally find under a big-top tent.
Everything was in black and white.
By the time the station signed off at 11:30 that night, it had broadcast eight hours of programs, from the ABC and CBS networks, not including another test pattern that went on the air for an hour in the late afternoon.
It’s a mystery how many people were watching.
Although it was estimated at the time that televisions were in 40,000 homes in the Denver area, there was no way to tell how many of them were turned on and tuned in.
Those who did tune in that first day did not see any local news – or weather. The only news featured was a 15-minute national report from ABC’s Walter Winchell.
It wasn’t until the second day that Channel 9 took its first steps into reporting news with a 10-minute report on weeknights by Bill Michelsen, which was followed by five minutes of weather by meteorologist Vince Monforte.
The effort to get there was years in the making.
In 1948, the Federal Communications Commission had called a timeout in the awarding of new TV station licenses. Up to that point, they were awarded so quickly that signal conflicts arose in some places. The “freeze” was aimed at sorting that out, and it lasted until 1952.
By then, a group of Denver businessmen, led by W.D. Pyle and Tom Ekrem, had formed the Denver Television Corp. and won approval for a new station when the federal government started issuing licenses again.
Although it’s been known as KUSA since 1984, the station was originally known as KBTV – the “K” denoting the station’s location west of the Mississippi River, and “BTV” standing for “better television.”
When Channel 9 went on the air, it became the first station to get up and running with a license issued after the FCC delay – and Denver became the first town in the country with two TV stations. KFEL Channel 2, now known as KWGN, had begun broadcasting about three months earlier, on July 18.
Testing on the station’s temporary 12,000-watt transmitter, which was done in the days before Channel 9 launched, showed its signal could be seen as far away as Cheyenne – 100 miles from Denver.
Even on that first day, the station announced increases in its power in the following months – and plans to be transmitting at 240,000 watts by June 1953.
Contact 9Wants to Know investigator Kevin Vaughan with tips about this or any story: kevin.vaughan@9news.com or 303-871-1862.
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