As An NBC Affiliate
As the only television station being built from the ground up by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, WBZ-TV began operations on June 9, 1948 and immediately joined the NBC Television Network, owing to WBZ radio (1030 AM)'s long affiliation with NBC Radio. The station was first housed inside the Hotel Bradford, which also housed WBZ radio; its current home was not completed at the time, although master control and its self-supporting tower over the building were in use at sign-on. WBZ-TV and WBZ radio would not move into the new "Westinghouse Broadcasting Center" until June 17, 1948, when the building was finished.
The station was knocked off the air on August 31, 1954, when Hurricane Carol destroyed its transmitter tower. A temporary transmitter was installed on a nearby tower and later on the original tower of WNAC-TV (channel 7, now WHDH). In 1957, WBZ-TV began broadcasting from a 1200-foot (366 m) tower in Needham. The tower site is now known as the CBS Digital Television Broadcasting Facility, and is used by several Boston-area television stations, including WGBH-TV (channel 2) and WCVB-TV (channel 5).
Channel 4 nearly lost its NBC affiliation in 1955 when Westinghouse balked at NBC's initial offer to trade sister stations KYW radio and WPTZ television (now KYW-TV) in Philadelphia in exchange for the network's radio and television combination in Cleveland, Ohio. In response, NBC threatened to yank its programming from both WBZ-TV and WPTZ unless Westinghouse agreed to the trade. The swap was made in 1956, but Westinghouse immediately complained to the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Justice Department about NBC's extortion. In 1965, the FCC ordered the swap reversed without NBC realizing any profit on the deal.
WBZ-TV (sometimes informally referred to as "BZ" both on- and off-air) was a pioneer in Boston television. In 1948, it began live broadcasts of Boston's two Major League Baseball teams, the Red Sox and the Braves, broadcasts that at first were split with WNAC. It was also the first Boston station to have daily newscasts, starting with the station's very first night on the air.
In the mid-1960s, it adopted the Eyewitness News format that had been pioneered at KYW-TV.
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—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
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—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)