MEANWHILE, AT WCVB, our equipment was finally in place. During the time we were waiting (or should I say battling) for the license, we had produced a fair amount of programming that we were now broadcasting. One of those programs was a kid’s show called Jabberwocky, which was an animation series and one of the first of its kind. Our initial programming schedule had a lot of syndicated programming that we had bought from Metromedia.
As the station GM, I had a lot of early-on decisions to make and I was convinced that WCVB-TV should have one of the best newscasts around. Initially we filled our newsroom with people who had been at WHDH-TV and who already had a great deal of experience working in a news operation. Don Gillis did sports and we made Jack Hynes and John Henning co-anchors of news. I did not want to establish a radically new vision in the newsroom at first, because I wanted to have as smooth a transition as possible.
In our early days, Larry Picard was building our news team. I soon realized that his vision and my vision were not one in the same, and I knew then that I was going to have to make a change, which was tough since Larry was an original BBI person. I moved him out of news and over to another job, and he never got over it. He ended up leaving BBI and walked away with a good deal of money from the sale of his stock. I then hired Jim Thissel to run the WCVB news team. He was well respected in the news business in Boston and he and I worked closely together to build our news team. I always felt that news made your reputation and set the tone for the station. When we first started we did news from six to six thirty and eleven to eleven thirty.
Job applications were coming into the station in the thousands. All kinds of new and enthusiastic faces were showing up all over the place. Our team was pulling together and soon we were not only just a family, we were a proud group of hard working people soon to be making television history. We just didn’t know it at the time.
My first real challenge was to find an affiliation with a network. WHDH-TV had been a CBS affiliate and we would have liked to have kept the CBS affiliation. However, CBS had jumped ship because they were scared of the massive amount of local broadcasting that we had promised the FCC. They no doubt envisioned us preempting a big part of their network schedule in favor of our local programming.
That left us with ABC, if ABC wanted us, and we thought they did. We soon found out that ABC was also afraid of the threat of any massive preempting we might do, and they didn’t seem to want any part of us. We learned that ABC was considering the purchase of one of the other stations in Boston, and bypassing WCVB-TV. I couldn’t let this happen.